Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Everyone,

What is the best practice for authorship in 2018 and going forward?

I am moving my entire blog over to a new wordpress theme so it's easier to read and navigate in an attempt to make it look better on the mobile and give better UX / CRO and implicit user feedback signals to google.

On the old blog I would say who the author is in the URL, H1 and in the content.  This includes an image of the author with an image alt with their name, qualifications and blurb.

I've now set up each author as a 'user' for the new blog and their image and name comes up because I've marked those blogs as authored by that particular user in Wordpress.

What should I do as far as the SEO elements are concerned? I have read Eric Enge's blog about authorship being dead here and also that authorship should be marked up in schema correctly - which I've done.  Also I've read around how it provides indirect signals even though it's no longer a direct ranking factor.

Should I tell wordpress to ignore the authorship SEO element by unticking the boxes relating to publishing authorship or let wordpress just do it's thing?  Should I keep the images and alt tags and H1 in there or take them out and let the wordpress system take over the authorship SEO elements? It's going to look funny to have author (in wordpress theme) and then author details again just below?

So what is the best practice for authorship in 2018 and going forward?

Am I making too big a deal of it and can just let wordpress sort it out.  Something it seems to do very well?

Thanks in advance,

Ed.

Good question.  You just have to keep plugging away.  Don't be tempted to spam or troll them yourself by creating fake profiles and complaining with them because google can see it's you and you'll get their backs up.

So be honest and whiter than white and keep going.  If they say, for example, it's not one type of spam then go under another type.  That's ok to do and I've had success this way too. You need to play down the 'business rivalry' part of it too.  I know they've done an act intended to unfairly compete but you need to keep to the point of spam and improving the maps and the GMB listings.

So your problem is that the GMB and map listings are inaccurate and google has promised to keep them accurate by listening to customer feedback. So put the ball in their court, I have found that if you treat it like this, in a rational and reasonable tone and focussing on the issue (not business rivalry but spam) then you'll succeed.

Let me know how you get on. I'd be happy to continue to advise you because I want GMB and the maps spam free in the same way every decent business person does.  That's another good card to play.  Appeal to their better nature by saying that you've been abused by google and its a google product and its inaccurate and harming you and other users with spam.

You can get them taken down by reporting them to google using the functions on their listings.  You need to be logged in and in your Maps or GMB.  The spam and fake people will often have exact match entries like 'New York Plumber' and they will be attached to random addresses that are not taken by other businesses with just a phone number.

You just pick a 'spam type' from the list and then fill in a little form.  The more details the better and you need to keep at it and possibly mark them a few times for different things so that google knows that they are spam and doesn't overlook them.

I've had dozens taken down like this in my city.  Also you can speak directly to google if you can find the right phone number and someone will sort it for you if it's more serious (like someone impersonating you) I have had reviews taken down like this, in one on one conversations with google employees in call centres.

Google are getting better at listening to genuine concerns and I think that all the complaining you hear from people abut how it's 'impossible to get reviews taken down' or 'impossible to get map spam removed' are just lazy or not doing it correctly. Or they have an agenda.  So if it's a genuine thing then you should be ok.

Sometimes they go over night, other times it takes a week but you can keep up to date because they email you whether your suggestions and complaints have been actioned or not.

If you want to outsource, delegate or abdicate link building (don't worry we all secretly want to have nothing to do with it because it's hard) then hire a PR.  That's going to get you MILES further than any of this stuff.  That's what we did and now we've been featured in the news all over the place and on tons of really high quality sites.

Linkbuilding is now synonymous with PR.  It's not done from basements and dark rooms at 4am and you can't do it with shady tools. If you want a tool then use an outreach tool to automate your relationship building with the sites you want to feature on.  Or just hire someone to 'do PR' not to 'build links' because the people i've hired to 'build links' have been using as much black and grey as white hat techniques.  Everyone wants to cheat and if you do then you are fighting against Google.  Or here in the UK we say 'biting the hand that feeds you'.

If you can get a good relationship with one of these link-building specialist agencies and have the confidence and insight to know when they've sold you a pup - and ask them to fix it for free - then you can get somewhere.  But its expensive andeasier just to set a strategy, hire someone and execute.

NOT  is the answer.

Directory submissions are the WORST way to spend your time and resources.  They just don't work. And I'm not being 'holier than thou' because I actually tried them out last year (because I test everything and have a fairly small site so thought it might work) but it didn't.  There was no benefit and the directories I used were all paid with links to internal pages.  It took me a couple of days (+ about $500) and after a month I ended up having to disavow most of them and then the others kicked me off after 6 months wanting more money!  It's a total joke.  Run by total jokers.

Even automating it is a very bad waste of time.  **If you're a local business and are actually talking about 'citations' then that's a different thing altogether. ** But directories died years ago.  Many of them aren't even in the index or google has algorithmically discounted them because they have literally too many links spread too thinly so each link carries a tiny proportion of juice.  And the ones that are in the index come back with very high toxic score in SEM Rush and AHrefs with the exception of one called Joe Ant.  That one is showing green lights.  So I didn'd disavow but i've not seen one single referral from them.

I also noticed an ENORMOUS increase in spam following my little test.  I get hundreds of submissions to my forms and site and even people calling.  I've also seen a significant increase in strange black-hat links added to my list.  This is not 'negative seo' but the scrapers and black hat people crawl the directories to find people still dumb enough to pay them (like me!!!) and see them as easy targets for other dreadful SEO products.

Avoid. Avoid. Avoid.

Thanks Christy!

Glad i'm becoming a useful part of the group.  It's tough questions every day. I love that.

There's just too many things it could be and I'd also be scratching my head.  Maybe I'm getting paranoid listening to conspiracy theorists but sometimes things seem to be intentionally obscured so there is always ambiguity about the workings of the system.

It's enough to drive you insane but whenever in doubt just turn to thinking up a great new topic and writing a great new article that people will want to read and engage with and that might earn some decent backlinks.  I swear if I spent as much time doing that as I do trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm then I'd be lots happier and more successful

There was a person last night from a major price comparison site here in the UK with a very good reputation.  She told me that they had been engaging in successful black hat tactics until very recently. Like April 17th 2018 or around the time of 'Fred'

She said she was terrified to move because it felt like a house of cards about to collapse.  I just didn't know what to tell her. It's the same here.  What is your clients view of it?  Do they accept responsibility for the shaky foundations? Have you discussed the position they're in?  I'd get them to agree a strategy and make sure it involves the risk of losing rankings in the name of clearing the decks for future development and nail the financial risks associated with a drop in traffic.

Yikes.

Check this out.  It's a poll on Barry Schwartz' site.  They have some more grey and black hat peeps over there (especially in the comments) and they are saying that huge numbers of dodgy backlinks aren't affecting them at all.  I really believe backlinks are becoming less and less important unless they are really powerful and relevant ones.  It's almost like Google is ignoring this whole swathe of bad sites and the algorithm just doesn't take a blind bit of notice.  But when a real person does a quality survey then this type of thing:

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Hidden text or links
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
• Abusing rich snippets markup
• Sending automated queries to Google

is going to get you a penalty. (I pasted them straight over from google)

Hey EGOL,

thanks so much.  I really enjoy the community.  And answering the questions helps me learn more because there's never a right answer and it encourages me to be creative and think about my own site.  Also I want the T-shirt lol!!

I just came back from the SEM rush conference in London and was doing a Q&A for in-house users of their product.  It's amazing how much has changed really recently.  I'd be genuinely afraid that if I stopped engaging I'd miss something!  We have 32,000 users to our site now.  Pretty much all my learning has been from Whiteboard Fridays and Moz blogs.  I love the way this forum is never about gaming google like some others. It's all whiter than white hat.  That's the future of SEO.  There will be no black hats in a few years. It's going to be impossible to compete.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I must have read about 100 of your responses on here. You're prolific.  Are you from the UK?  It's Brighton SEO tomorrow?

I've just come back from a forum where we were discussing this exact thing.  It was suggested that older sites can have a multitude of sins and google will overlook them or ignore them until a big event (such as an https switchover) where google take a closer and more comprehensive look at the site and it's pages and backlinks.

A few people said that they were not immediately hit by panda and penguin type issues until they did some big event on the site and it came under scrutiny from google.

This was only anecdotal stuff but I see tons of sites with legacy black hat and grey hat SEO that are still ranking and seem to be doing ok. It was also suggested that links are just less important these days and so long as the page is getting good implicit user feedback signals like time on page, users clicking around and engaging with content then things hold out for longer.

Just like it takes time to get a pages authority and position up it also takes time for it to diminish.  So in the long term you need to correct these issues or you'll gradually (or sometimes quickly) get either a penalty or an algorithmic suppression of your page.

Newer pages will never get ranked with this type of profile and the standards for indexing newer pages are much higher now.  So just because it's not causing problems now doesn't mean you don't need to get it fixed or at least start adding pages that are in line with the latest stricter quality guidelines.

Hope this helps.  I know it's not really an 'answer' because it's a very tricky issue.  I can see how these ideas make sense though. If you were doing things that used to be ok and now are not ok, google is going to be less likely to hammer you like if you tried to launch a brand new site using clearly banned practices.

Hi There,

It's great that you're niche.  This means that you don' really need to worry much about difficulty.  I get frustrated with people talking all the time about 'difficulty'.  It's self-defeating.  You should go out there and write content that's so good it beats all the competition no matter how 'competitive' or 'difficult' the keyword.  If anyone in my team said they were going to be dissuaded from doing something because it was 'too difficult' I'd send them to another team

So look at your competitors but don't blindly follow them.  Speak to your customers, stakeholders and suppliers to discover the words they use.  Are there phones that you can listen in to at your business?  I listen to call recordings to get a feel for what language patients are using.

And at the end of the day don't worry too much about semantics.  Google is very good now at figuring out what you are talking about so I would be tempted to just do some free thinking and try to write the most comprehensively, the most brilliantly and with the most detail about these products and your customers will find you.

If they are technical customer, write technically.  Don't 'dumb it down'.  Use the big complex words and include an FAQ section to pick up questions and long tail keywords (but beware of keyword stuffing)

Once you have written some content then you'll be able to optimise and analyse and test and get a feel for what is right and what people are searching for and reading about.  The competitor research is just the start and in a really niche place you often just need to get things down and out there in the world and see how they perform.

Once you get cracking you'll soon become an absolute specialist and if you keep your eyes on the data you should be able to dominate your niche.  Tight niches are great.  You're lucky because broad or very high volume keywords can have problems all of their own.

Hey Adam,

It can be difficult to determine what google considers to be the same 'topic' and you want everything contained in a topic to be on the page to make it stronger and comprehensive.

The only way that I have had success solving your problem is to test.  So many SEO's are terrified of breaking things, losing rankings and getting asked the terrible question, 'what did you do?!'

I'm lucky that I'm the CEO and can break whatever I want.  I've tested splitting out products from a 'topic' to see how they rank.  Sometimes they will just not get enough traffic and I think Google doesn't get enough feedback to rank them with any stability.

I've also tested combining pages and sometimes it works very well and other times it confuses visitors.  So talk to your customers and do some googling yourself and competitor research to try to find the delimitations of the 'topic' so that each page can have the maximum information on it.  Also write comprehensively.  Usually if you have split out a topic and it's cannibalising or competing with another one you will see this pretty quickly and you just revert to how it was.

Test, test and then test again.  That's the only way to solve this one I'm afraid.  You're not going to get a definite answer because there isn't one unfortunately.  It's what Rankbrain learns from customers and searches and you can't control that. But you can start to get a feel for it by researching.

Thanks Christie,

Yeah we could start a book with that lot right? Sometimes people just disappear. Others will still be able to search it though and get help.

Hi Rand,

I found myself last night explaining to my fiancee (and owner of my business) about why we'd lost some of our precious Moz DA points.  She was disappointed looking at the new metric and I assured her the below and wonder whether you could sort of give a semi official 'what to tell stakeholders' in the event of a loss of DA. This is probably a much bigger issue for agencies than in-house people.

Let me assure you _I understand _that DA is a comparative metric and prefer a more accurate picture and prefer to know the real picture. Plus there's all the benefits you outline in the OP.  But I found myself saying:

1. Dont worry - it isn't actually linked to google in any way.  A lowered DA assessment by Moz isn't going to affect our traffic, conversions or ROI.  That's a big one.

2. We now have better data and it's not just affected us but our competitors will now have new DA scores and some are better and some are not.

3)  Nothing substantive has changed in the real world.  This is a measuring tool.  So imagine you were proud of your 40 ft yacht but then the length of 1 ft was changed to 11 inches.  Your boat would now be 'shorter' but nothing has actually changed.  Just how we measure it? Wasn't sure about that analogy. Have you a better one?

Thanks.

You're forcing your competitor to make some really bad strategic decisions.  Use this - if you know or suspect who it might be - to inform your competitive strategy.

Keep disavowing the inks and they will get bored and give up because it's costing them time and resources to build them. It's like tennis.  You need to 'force errors' in your competition rathe than going toe-to-toe with them.

Have they recently started advertising for the categories where you are hurting them?  If so you can look at the ads and find out their value proposition and most profitable categories and erode their market share by being better than they are and draining their resources.

I don't know if there's any negative SEO police.  I'm not sure you'll get very far with that although you could hire a forensic white-hat-hacker to try to reveal their identity.  But I don't see how that will help.  And I don't like bringing even ex-hackers anywhere near my business for obvious reasons.

Did you manage ok with the 'disavow tool'?

I have extensively looked for this too to try and correct for inaccurate estimations of mine and competitions traffic in SEM Rush.  If you're ranking like 25 for a 100,000 volume keyword SEM Rush attaches a value to that where in fact I expect there is no value much past page two.

I'd say they only go as low as 0.1% CTR because to go any lower is worthless from an ROI and financial perspective.  I wouldn't imagine it changes much either.  Just keeps on going at around 0.1 until page ten or whatever.  The only real interesting insight I saw was that halfway down page two can be a better position than the top of page two.  So those keyword's just teetering on page one are a real focus for my SEO efforts.

Have you tried getting in touch with Advanced Webranking.  They certainly will have more data but wanted the graph to be readable so just went to position 20.

Just bare links and natural links go to your homepage and give it power.  Then links from your homepage to other pages on the site contain the anchor text that tells google what the page is about.  Also sometimes external places will link to particular pages inside your website (deep linking) with anchor text or not.  Better with but it's becoming less and less important as time goes by.  I don't think we'll all be talking about anchor text or maybe not even about links at all in a few years time.

Some of my best pages are ranking number one nationally (for the whole of the UK) and they are super-high competition and they don't have one single backlink.  That must tell you something...

Likewise some of my pages I've done 'linkbuilding campaigns' and spent weeks and months building links to and it's not made a blind bit of difference.

Please remember to mark the answer as a good one if you like it. Helps me get recognition for helping out. And feel free to ask more questions.  I only started learning SEO in May 2017 and my site back then had 900 users a month.  Since then I wrote and optimised about 60 pages and we now get 32,000 users a month and our business has tripled in size.  Linking was the last thing on my mind.  Writing good content came first.  And proving to google that we are who we say we are with links from universities and professional bodies for the dentists.  those are the real power links.  You must have suppliers who will link to you in their 'find a distributer' sections?

You need to use the disavow tool in google search console.  I keep trying to attach a link but it's not letting me today for some reason.  Just google disavow links and read how to do it from the google webmaster forum and google manual and then go into search console, upload your file of bad / spammy links and submit.

Piece of cake. Don't panic though.  Make sure you use the tool carefully and come back if you get stuck with anything.  How do you know it's a competitor?  Have the links appeared overnight? you can't find out who's doing it usually (without a lot of wasting of resources) but google will keep the data for the future and sometimes bad links won't cause you any harm at all.

But other times they'll get you a penalty so get the disavow file in as soon as you can.