Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Writing For People or For Google

~ recent comment.. deserves to be a post.

My method is to write for people and then go in and add text decoration to make it readable and scannable.

I add internal links (ranking factor) where appropriate, make short paragraphs, and of course the proper H tags.

Then share it and conduct outreach.

When in doubt I always go with the hybrid approach:

Write for people, tweak for SEO.

 

What to write? 100% SEO driven.

One of the pieces of how to content that my boss wanted me to write was a how to guide on how to tie different types of knots. It took 2 hours of research to put that one to rest.

As soon as I saw animated knots dot com, the 10,000 YouTube videos and watched about 50 of them... I knew it was a waste. There was no way my company was going to spend any amount of money to create something bigger or better than what was already out there.

Budgets & Resources Matter

So, there are cases where SEO must come first. The research, for sure.

Spinners

I work for a company whose owner is addicted to spinners. They are written 100% for Google bot. They are ingeniously created and any human being that reads them will laugh.

I took a website recently that had 300,000 pages indexed. I deleted every single spinner on site (250,000 descriptions) and so far there’s been no change... it’s been almost 3 months!

My Theory is that it is under an algorithmic penalty and as soon as the core quality update hits again the site will improve dramatically.

[The only thing that Google did was, from an organizational chart point of view, move penguin and panda into the core algorithm.

They didn’t actually change anything. They literally dragged and dropped it under the heirarchybof Core Algorithm.

They did this because now they won’t have to say that any updates are penguin or panda. This makes it more difficult to deduce what they changed. So now they just say it was a core algorithmic update.

So, what I mean by this is that when there is a panda update which will hopefully come in the next two months, the site will improve].

Follow the rules

We test what works A/B Testing on multiple websites that have greater than a half a million pages and ranks for more than 100,000 keyword phrases in top 100 results.

We run these tests all the time and they always come back the exact same way.

First place: Manual written descriptions

Second Place: spinners with Functions

Third Place: Spinners or Nothing.

Spinners using functions are still very good because of the dynamic information being loaded on the page it changes often enough with good info. (Ratings, reviews, savings, deals, and product specifications, SKUS)

And then lastly spinners which until the last few months no one in the company knew that spinners and “ no description text” created the exact same result.

3 months later... same results.

If human beings read the spinners, it doesn’t read perfectly. We get complaints occasionally from customers saying that We hire people from overseas Who learned English from The Nigerian prince sending spam emails offering fortunes of gold.

When in doubt go with what Google says, I made the company that I work for, to date, more than $50 million more than they were going to make just in the last two years by following the rules.

My bosses hate me and the owner wants to fire me but left to his own devices he would have to fire half the company again like he did 7 years ago due to penalties by Google. There is no love there is no pat on the back there is no thank you. Because I don’t let him Break the rules, he resents me.

Sometimes making somebody follow the rules and follow best practices is the toughest job there is.

He threatenEd my job one time because I would not purchase a link from a horrible spam-filled website.

When you do the right thing there might not be any praise.... or visible benefit, like Game of Thrones, you get your head chopped off or worse, your balls.

But when it comes to writing write for people throw in some internal links, make it readable and scannable.

Happy new year my brothers!

submitted by /u/lonewolf-chicago
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/abjt99/writing_for_people_or_for_google/>

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