by Courtney Logel
Is Google giving preference to its own products over competing products? Has an anti-trust issue caused Google’s Page Rank to decrease from 10 to 9?
Jim Brown and Jesse Laffen once again create a compelling debate in episode 4 of Search TV- they hit on search industry highlights through rapid-fire, two-minute discussions of 10 different topics.
The show hosts held nothing back when discussing the on-going debate of Page Rank and its authority in determining relevance online. What does matter?
According to our experts, conversion rates and click-through rates provide more relevant data than outdated page rank.
The latest buzz in SEO is surely Google+, but what are its implications in search? Jesse highlighted his thoughts, “I really think that long term for Google, if they can get more people on their own social networks, then they can use that data obviously a lot cheaper then they could by buying it from Twitter, which they just stopped paying for. I think long term it is a financial gain for Google.”
What are your thoughts on Google+? How do you see Google benefiting from it?
Another topic discussed in the episode was reputation management- managing the links that appear for your brand or your personal name when searched for online. A new tool released by Google, Me on the Web combines everything that Google knows about you personally into one place – “a central identity hub.”
The “final rant” was awarded to Jesse, where he attempted to provide understanding about the latest significant algorithm update, Panda. Additional topics of conversation included Webmaster Tools, Social Significance of Search, and Rel=Author Support. Watch the video or read the transcription to learn Jim and Jesse’s insights and opinions on these prevailing subjects.
What topics would you like to see covered in the next episode? Leave a comment at the end of this post or tweet Jim Brown or Jesse Laffen with your feedback!
See you for our next episode, on Thursday, August 4th at 4pm!
Transcription:
Jim:
Good afternoon boys and girls, and welcome to the July episode of Search TV. I’m Jim Brown and I’m joined by . . .
Jesse:
I’m Jesse Laffen.
Jim:
I hope you guys all had a great Fourth of July. I know I did. I celebrated my birthday, and I think the nation had a birthday as well, America.
Jesse:
You are America.
Jim:
Well, a little bit of fireworks. Thank you so much for joining us for this half an hour look in to the world of SEO. Before we get started today, I’ve got a little bit of current events to catch up, some office catch up. If it weren’t for the Houston Astros, my Chicago Cubs would be the worst team in baseball. I’m not proud of that, but as a result of that Jesse and I had a bet. He’s a Twins fan. We bet the first team with 50 losses, the other person had to buy him a case of beer. Jesse, you asked for a case of dark beer with no preference. Search TV viewers, I’m going to reach out to you. What is the best dark beer that you had and can buy in Indiana? Tweet that to me, and I’ll get that for Jesse and thank the winner. Maybe I can get them a Slingshot T-shirt or something.
Jesse:
Maybe. We can do that.
Jim:
The best dark beer, get a Slingshot T-shirt. All right. Are you ready to get started?
Jesse:
I am. Let’s do it.
Jim:
All right. As always, you can participate in today’s show on Twitter with our hash tag Search TV. Today’s show is titled “Google Transparency.” We’re going to be talking about Google is opening up the curtain a little bit more and showing us inside. So we have topics about the PageRank, algorithm update, Webmaster Tools, and reputation management. Let’s start with the Google antitrust case or suit that may be coming. I’m reading about rumors of the investigation from the FTC centered around Google allegedly giving preference to its own products over competing products and things like that. Where do you see that going?
Jesse:
The actual details of the case are pretty obscure right now. It’s going to take a while for this to actually come to the surface of exactly what is going on.
Jim:
Sure.
Jesse:
I do want to be very clear. It is an investigation. This is not an indictment or a case or a charge or anything like that.
Jim:
Right.
Jesse:
The odd thing about this, not to get too legal or anything, that’s not really our thing, but when this happened to Microsoft, it was under, I guess, the Sherman Act, which is what the Feds use to do this kind of thing. This isn’t one of those. This is something called Section 5 that hasn’t really been enforced successfully since 1972, I think was the date that I found.
Jim:
He’s not getting legal though, remember that.
Jesse:
Right. Basically, what I’m trying to say is this is kind of an odd thing that is going to be pretty fascinating. I think, when you’re talking about giving preference to your own products, maybe we can be looking at YouTube being the single largest downstream receiver of traffic or something like that.
Jim:
Sure. Some of the things that I was reading about, complaints, like Expedia, Microsoft, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc. because Google’s playing in all of those same spaces. They’re saying, “Hey, you’re putting a Google product ahead of us that’s more prominently clicked on, whether it be through pay per click or that kind of deal. You’re getting more visitors than us just because it’s your product.”
Jesse:
It could just be a better product though. There are such things as maybe natural monopolies, I think might be the term for them, where you just have such a superior product in the marketplace. I mean, “Why wouldn’t I use Google. I know that the results I’m getting are going to be great.”
Jim:
The biggest thing too, I think, if it does go to court or there is a true, actual case brought against them, was there actually harm done to these downstream providers that you’re talking about, or are they just competing?
Jesse:
Well, I could argue that I’m Yelp and if Google’s giving preferential treatment to their own products that there is some sort of monetary damage there, but I’m not really sure what that looks or how this is going to actually play out. It should be interesting.
Jim:
I think that might be odd to see a click-through rates case go to the courts.
Jesse:
I’d like to see the click-through rate.
Another thing that we are going to talk about, as we are wont to do when this happens, is a brand new Google PageRank update. It happened mid-June. One of the most interesting things was that Google was actually downgraded from a PageRank 10 website down to a PageRank 9 website.
Jim:
Do you think that has anything to do at all with the antitrust investigation possibly being out there? They’re saying they’re not the most superior site on the Internet.
Jesse:
Well, it would be an insignificant way to prove that they are not showing favoritism to their own properties. Actually, what I find kind of fascinating about that is absolutely Google is one of the most authoritative sites on the Web. No question about it. But when you look at some of the components of Google as a website versus some of the things on the Web, they have a homepage without any content on it. They only show search results. Their add to content ratio is teetering on 50%, 60%, maybe even 70% sometimes. It’s kind of funny where we live in this world of do as Google says, not as they do. But getting back to your point, I really do think that this was kind of one of those things where it’s an insignificant way to show that.
Jim:
One of the things that you said too is people aren’t linking to Google anymore, right?
Jesse:
Yeah.
Jim:
It’s usually set as the home screen of a lot of browsers. You have the search box in your toolbar. People aren’t really linking to Google much anymore. So that could have had a little bit to do with it. I definitely think it’s part of the antitrust. We’ve harped on this quite a bit. PageRank doesn’t matter. But what are some of those other metrics? Again, I think even in the last show, we talked about conversion, bounce rate, your click-through rate, these are all things that matter. The moment in time, I guess, is kind of what you said before. It just doesn’t matter.
Jesse:
Exactly. If you listen to me talk for 15 minutes about SEO, you’re going to get some sort of rail against PageRank. One of my favorite quotes that I just found last month from an actual Google engineer said, ” Just because it’s easy to track (this being PageRank) doesn’t mean that it accurately represents exactly what your site is doing well or not doing well.” Some of the things that she started bringing forward were things like your conversion rate, your bounce rate. What is the click-through rate from your SERPs? Are there things that you can be doing to maybe have a better user experience and focus on that instead?
Jim:
Right. One of the things too is that Google is launching at least nine – sometimes more than that – updates every week to the algorithm. A metric that’s updated twice a year, just like you said, it’s outdated.
Jesse:
Do right by your users.
Jim:
I guess Google+ has been the big buzz the last couple days or weeks. Its only been out about a week. We’re talking about antitrust. We’re talking about the transparency, Google opening up and saying, “Hey, you know what, here’s everything we’re doing.” But then you have Google+ which is linking together even more Google products so that you start to use them. I actually had a friend say, “What is Picasa?” Picasa has been around forever. It has been Google’s photo service. But now that it’s a part of Google+, that’s how you’re going to manage photos on Google+. Where do you see this having a fit in search or in SEO?
Jesse:
Well, one of the things that I know Google has said they were interested in at least is the idea of social affecting search. It can be good and bad. We touched on this, as well, in the last episode. I really think that long term for Google, if they can get more people on their own social networks, then they can use that data obviously a lot cheaper then they could buying the hose from Twitter, which they just stopped paying for, or grabbing Facebook data out of a browser or a toolbar or something like that. I think long term it is a financial gain for Google. The other part of this that I find interesting is that it obviously looks a lot like Facebook. It works a lot like Facebook. Facebook is the only other website on Earth right now that’s coming close to Google in terms of touching their traffic numbers. You have 750 million Facebook users now. Google just cracked 1 billion users a month or something like that. It is very similar. I’m sure that’s a lot of traffic that they would like to capture.
Jim:
There are a couple things that I’m seeing here. The Sparks portion of Google+, it allows you to go in and say this is the content I’m interested in and lets you see content in a different way. Some people are starting to say that might start having SEO impact. The other part of that is you know that business pages and business profiles for Google+ are coming. I think there’s an article on Mashable I read yesterday or the day before that said, “Businesses, please don’t go create profiles yet. They’re coming.”
Jesse:
I actually find that curious. It says to me that maybe this was rolled out a little bit before they wanted to. If I was Google, I’d definitely want businesses who might spend money on advertising on Plus to be incorporated in this as soon as possible. But the fact that the Ford Motor Company has to go in and say I’m a male or a female shows that maybe it was hastened a little bit because of the Skype integration with Facebook.
Jim:
Are the business pages though a way to get businesses to quit using Facebook, and say go put all your information here because we control the algorithm.
Jesse:
I think eventually that’s maybe indirectly what they’re hoping that you will infer from this. That’s a very diplomatic answer.
Jim:
You have to.
Jesse:
Another tool that Google unveiled this month had to do with a subject that we deal with quite a bit, called reputation management. Just for those who haven’t tuned in before or haven’t talked to us about this, reputation management for us, as an SEO company, really means managing the links that are shown for your brand or for your name personally when somebody searches for that online. So if I type in “Coca-Cola”, what are the websites I’m going to get? The tool was called Me. Is that correct?
Jim:
Me on the Web.
Jesse
Me on the Web. Basically, what it does is it will combine all of the things that Google knows about you personally into one spot so that you can see everything that’s going on there. As somebody who is very open and wants a lot of openness on the Web, tell me a little bit about what you thought of this.
Jim:
We talked about it last time. I am a very open person. I don’t mind that kind of stuff. However, having a name like Jim Brown, good luck finding me. I like that part of it. This idea of a central identity hub, we’re going to talk about some other things here. We’re going to talk about the rel=author in a little bit. But Google wants to get the idea of anonymous traffic or anonymous people off the Internet. I support it. If you’re writing great content and we can link back and know that it is verified content coming from you, a verified update, a verified post. One of the worst things I’ve seen online is the trolls. I’m going to call them trolls, I’m sorry. The trolls that post at the bottom of news articles on the newspaper, the TV stations, I mean, it’s just awful. They’re doing it because they’re anonymous.
Jesse:
The more local you get, the worse the comments get and it’s kind of comical. One of the interesting comments to me from Google when they rolled this out is they said, ” It’s a common misconception that Google is not the Web.” When you have 91% of users going to your website to actually start off whatever they do, you kind of become the Web in a way. There is no warehouse of the Web that isn’t Google or I guess Bing. I just kind of find that really odd. Another thing that Google did with this that I found kind of weird is that they actually recognize that there may be instances when you are online, when you are doing things when you want to be anonymous. Facebook doesn’t do that. They pretty much own you in perpetuity online.
Jim:
The last thing, Google with this Me On the Web thing, it is giving you the opportunity to remove or request to have certain things about you removed. There is going to be some gray area coming there. If it’s true, should it be removed? I don’t know.
Jesse:
Yeah.
Jim:
Getting more back into the transparency, Webmaster Tools. Again, when we talked about this at the top of the show, Google is really starting to try to pull back the curtain and allow you to see the things that are making the search results happen. One of those things is happening in Webmaster Tools. Google is now alerting you to bad links. We’ve had the whole JCPenney thing and the Overstock thing. Google says if you’re buying links, renting links, or links coming from bad places, some unnatural link building efforts are happening. They’re starting to warn people. They’re going to send a letter out to the webmaster saying, “Hey, this doesn’t look real or natural. We see it. You might want to remove it.” Where is that value in Webmaster Tools?
Jesse:
Well, one of the things that I really like about this is that it kind of seems like, maybe not for the first time, but more so than in the past, Google is saying we understand that there are good SEOs out there. There are good people trying to build their brands, go out and be in places on the Web where they should be and actually do the right thing. For me and for us, that’s awesome. I love that. The actual reporting of the links they have done it in a couple different ways. But I think what they’re trying to do is say that Google has been like the sheriff of the Internet in a certain regard for a long time now. They’ve been out there policing the Internet, but the laws haven’t necessarily been published. We can go and we can say, yeah, we know there are bad links. But which of my links . . .
Jim:
We’ve got guidelines.
Jesse:
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. They were mostly born out of research and things like that. They never really came from Google. What Google gives us are very hard, definitive things. Don’t buy links. Okay, we won’t do that. But what are the links that I should be getting? So this is a really cool way for us to police ourselves so that Google doesn’t have to maybe do all that work for us and these very obscure and cloudy guidelines. I appreciated it.
Jim:
The other side of that too, not just bad links. They’ve added the ability to see all of your +1s, your social actions, and your click-through rates based on those social buttons. There’s value to that too. They’re telling you, “Look, we know there is value to social, and we’re going to start to calculate it.” But there isn’t really any guideline to that yet, but I think that is coming as well.
Jesse:
I think it helps you be popular on the Web. How do I measure that? There are so many different ways.
Jim:
Sure.
Jesse:
Speaking of +1, we wanted to talk a little bit about the social significance of search. This is kind of born out of Google basically drop support of real-time search results from Twitter. They didn’t really drop it. They let a contract expire that was actually feeding that information in to them. It got us talking a little bit about, “What does social actually mean as a ranking factor?” Obviously, we support social efforts as a marketing channel in their own right, and they are very important or will be very important in the future of search. Today, right now, what is the social significance of search? Any thoughts?
Jim:
The first thought that came to mind was the article, and we’ve talked about this before, the correlation versus causation that SEOmoz talked about and said Facebook shares and Facebook likes have a direct impact on your search engine ranking.
Jesse:
They were the highest correlated.
Jim:
The highest correlated, I’m sorry.
Jesse:
That’s all right.
Jim:
Then the reality was Matt Cutts is on the other side saying that has absolutely nothing to do with the search rankings. Kind of what you were telling me was, “Look, if you’re popular on Facebook, if people are sharing your stuff, you’re going to be popular on the other site.” So it’s anecdotal evidence to say one causes the other.
Jesse:
Exactly. So if something is popular enough to link to, why might not I like it or Tweet it or +1 it I guess. Really the idea here is that social signals are important. Obviously, if you have great content, people are going to find it, whether it’s through social or a link or somewhere. Google will eventually catch up to the those signals. But can you like a page to a number one ranking in a really competitive SERP? No. I don’t know if you can like a page to a number one ranking at all.
Jim:
Going back to that, we’re talking about one aspect of that. But the other side of that is going back to the Google+ profile getting to one person. I already said it once. Our next topic is going to be the rel=author. Getting back to saying it’s one person, there is a social significance there if I, Jim Brown, am saying I like this or I want to share this versus masses of anonymous people just saying yeah, I’m going to throw it out there. If Google has the opportunity to send out an email to all 200,000 employees and say, hey, go +1 this, does that give them an unfair advantage for things?
Jesse:
If it’s a ranking factor, it absolutely does.
Jim:
If it’s a ranking factor. That makes a lot of sense. Getting to that, I’ve teased it now twice, the rel=author support has been launched by Google as a tag, if you will. What exactly does that mean in a code standpoint?
Jesse:
Basically, this is the idea that . . . and actually WordPress has been doing this for quite a long time. It’s a pretty neat little feature. The idea is that you’re Jim Brown. If another Jim Brown is a White Sox or a Cardinals fan, god forbid, and is writing about the Cubs somewhere, Google wants to know who is actually responsible for this content. It’s a very simple piece of code that basically tells a search engine that this is my home on the Web and all my articles will point back to this, which creates an archive and all this other cool stuff. That’s technically what it is.
The interesting thing about it though is this idea of author rank that we’ve talked about maybe on the show before and certainly around the office a lot. The idea that Google wants to quantify the authority of you writing about something versus me writing about something or versus my nephew writing about something. So not only would a page have some sort of authority rank, that’s just like latently sitting in the index, but also you as a person could also have an authority score based around SEO or Nickelback or something.
Jim:
Really, Nickelback one more time?
Jesse:
I’m just going to keep bringing that up.
Jim:
One of the things though, if we look at a New York Times author versus some great social media bloggers, Jay Baer who has been in our office, Doug Carr, Jason Falls, etc., how is Google going to assign author rank to those types of people? Is that person from The New York Times, because it’s a traditional publication, going to weigh more?
Jesse:
Well, I think there are a lot of things you could look at. The authority of the places where you are publishing would certainly be one. Maybe the popularity of the things that you’re publishing too, like when Jay or some of those other people are out there talking about that stuff, they get a lot of comments and retweets and a lot of likes, things like that. Also, maybe your following to follower ratio could be a part of that. The author rank of the people who are following you could be a part of that too. Then also, just like a web page would have an authority score and then tied to a relevancy score to produce a search result, the author could have an authority score, but maybe not necessarily authoritative on this subject versus another.
Jim:
The way I saw it working was if I write an article on a website, that website should then have an author page that lists its authors and that author page should link back to a Google profile. That’s how they’re going to . . .
Jesse:
That’s kind of how it works, but it’s actually beyond that even. You’re author profile can be across many different domains on the Web now using this. So it’s not just one site, one page.
Jim:
Right, but it links ultimately back to one profile.
Jesse:
Yeah, exactly.
There is some news about new TLDs being introduced. For those who don’t know what TLD is, it’s the .com or the .net, the end of a URL. There’s a finite number of TLDs right now. ICANN, which is the international authority on actually releasing these and having those standards, said that they were going to open that up and allow people to apply for a TLD that said pretty much anything. For example, no longer does it have to be Ford.com. It can be Ford.cars or .ford.
Jim:
Or we were talking about .ford.
Jesse:
Or .ford or something like that.
Jim:
That’s when we talk about, is this going to imply some confusion?
Jesse:
Right.
Jim:
First of all, it’s $185,000 to apply for this, so only the big boys, the big brands, if you will, are going to be able to do this. If Ford goes out and purchases .ford as their generic, top level domain, what does that mean for their website? What kind of architecture is it going to have? Are they going to have cars.ford, trucks.ford? What’s it going to look like, the architecture?
Jesse:
It really does start breeding a lot of confusion. If I’m looking for a Ford F150, just to continue the Ford thing, is it F150.ford? Is it Ford.car/F150? There are so many new things that I might be able to type in. When we started talking about this earlier, it dawned on me that this makes search engines more important then ever, right?
Jim:
Absolutely.
Jesse:
How do I find the Ford homepage? Right now, I’m pretty confident I could type in Ford.com and get there. No big deal. In the future 2013, when this is fully functional and I’m looking for the same thing, I not really that comfortable anymore just typing things into my browser and trusting that I’m going to get that. So a search engine becomes even more important than it is today.
Jim:
I think both search engines and .coms become more valuable because people don’t change, or they are slow to change. They’re slow to adapt. People like .coms. You’ve seen this. If you have a .net or a dot something other than com website, you may get a lot of missed hits because people go to the other site. They go to the .com intentionally. The value of a .com now could become even more and could become a higher ranking signal.
Jesse:
Kind of like an 800 number or something like that?
Jim:
Absolutely. Moving on from that, let’s talk about the power of press releases. Sometimes we talk about search engine optimization as technical as it is; programming, content, all those kinds of things, we miss some of the basic elements. Every company should be doing press releases. If you are a legitimate company, you’re hiring people, so you are going to put a press release out that you’re having new business, new client signing, things like that. You’re going to put out press releases. It’s a traditional marketing mechanism. Talk to me about how we can really capitalize on the power of press releases for search.
Jesse:
Sure. This kind of gets back to something we have talked about on the show before. Everything that you’re doing can be a digital signal. If you are already doing press releases, but you are not doing them in a way that could be maybe picked up by a search engine, why not? So let’s talk about some of those ways. First of all, news wires are fantastic ways to actually put your content in front of other websites that may publish it. For example, the AP Wire or Business Wire and other wire services. Different websites out there are always looking for newsworthy things to put on their website. If you’re already producing these, why not also put them on these wires in order for them to get picked up maybe with a link in it back to your site? If you’re not doing press releases, I’d ask, “Why not?” They’re easy to write. Most of them are only about a page long. If you want some help with it, I’m sure that Slingshot should probably produce a how-to guide to help you out with exactly how to write one.
Jim:
Good idea.
Jesse:
Maybe I will, The idea here is that your company, your brand does things every day that are newsworthy. I’m sure that you’re even producing some of those releases. Why not produce them in digital form instead of just like offline form?
Jim:
You said it right there with that offline form. One of the things that I’m talking about with our new clients that come on board is we want to work with your traditional PR leaders and departments, etc. because we want to know what’s going on in the offline world so we can make those digital signals as well.
Jesse:
Absolutely.
Jim:
By putting out a press release, we can also start talking about editorial calendars. If we know certain things are going to happen during the month, we can start to lay that out. We can put social signals behind it. We can create content around the press release. There are a lot of good things that press releases can do for a company.
Jesse:
Yeah, definitely. Another thing that was talked about in search engine land was this idea of Schema.org. It’s a new website. Basically, what it does is it’s new standards for the Web, kind of.
Can you explain that just a little bit better for me?
Jim:
The way I saw it is a partnership between Google, Bing, and Yahoo to say we all need to use markup on a website for the same reasons to index and rank websites and that kind of deal. Let’s not make people put three different types of tags on a website to say the exact same thing. That’s kind of how I was reading it in laymen’s terms.
Jesse:
So basically, if I’m Google or Bing or Yahoo, one of my greatest expenses is actually housing all of the information that I read, 3 trillion web pages or whatever it is. It’s just an inordinate amount of information. If I can just cut out maybe two lines of code from every single website that I read, that’s a lot of money that I am putting in my pocket in savings. Really what this does is it’s a consistent standard for both algorithms to not have to index each others markup. I don’t have to tell Google I don’t want you to read this page using this thing, and Bing I don’t want you to read this page using this other directive. If they can both recognize and read the same one, then it really cuts down on their warehousing of information.
Jim:
The other thing I saw out of this is we’ve talked about the Blekko search engine before. It’s semantic search. I was reading some of these being semantic tags in that if we’re talking about Honest Abe, we can say that could the president or there could be a local restaurant named Honest Abe or a book or figurine or a bobblehead, whatever. We can tell Google, or whatever search engine it is, what we’re talking about and how we’re referencing it. So if I’m looking for a restaurant in Indianapolis and there happens to be one called Honest Abe, they can link it up.
Jesse:
I thought that was definitely interesting. Even inside a paragraph or a block of text, you can say this one is about subject A and that one is about subject B. You can actually dissect your entire page using some of that stuff.
Jim:
Quick question for you. Does this put Google at odds with the W3 standards at all, because it is actually a little bit different than what have been the open standards of the Web for the last 10 years?
Jesse:
I don’t think it’s at odds. I just think that W3 was written for Web usability from a browser standpoint, and then Google is coming in and saying we understand that browsers are important but so are we.
Jim:
Sure, that makes sense.
Jesse:
I guess the final rant this week isn’t as much a rant as it is a everyone calm down type of talk. A lot has been made of Panda lately, and it definitely has affected a lot of websites. Some of them are friends of ours. Not all of them. I just want to take a moment to dissect Panda as we understand it and give everybody maybe a little bit of hope who may have been affected by it or everybody else just a little bit of understanding. I think I mentioned before, Google goes out and it crawls your website. When it does that, it’s actually establishing, “All right. How much do I trust what’s going on with this website? How much authority should I lend it?” It’s taking that score, attaching it to your domain, and it’s putting it away in an index. When a user comes in and they type in a search term, like Slingshot SEO or something like that, Google says, “All right. I’m going to take the relevance of that search term, look at your web page and give it a second score.” It combines those two things and it says, “All right. Now, I’m going to rank them in order of who has the highest scores combined.”
When Panda came out it was a question of, all right, is it actually affecting the authority score of a website sitting in the index, or is it more like a filter, like a check at the very end? Through some research and some of the terminology that Google engineers have been using, we’re pretty confident that what Panda is, is that it’s not affecting your actual authority score sitting in the index. Google says, “All right. Here’s my authority score. Here’s my relevance score, I’m going to put them together, and right before I go rank this, I’m going to ask the Panda filter, ‘Hey, is this a good idea? Should be doing this, yes or no?’” The Panda filter says yes or no, and then it ranks your result.
Google keeps adding websites to that Panda list, keeps adding them and adding them. To date, they haven’t released an update that actually takes websites off of that. If you took a website with 10 million pages with absolutely no content and turned it into Wikipedia overnight, you’re still on the list right now. All of that hard work and dedication to your content and improving the user experience will pay off for sure. Just keep working hard on it, and once Google rolls out an update that actually removes sites from the list, as they have said that they would, you’ll start to see that pay some dividends.
Jim:
So ranking factor instead of an actual algorithm update?
Jesse:
Yes, it’s more of like a filter, I guess.
Jim:
Well, that brings us to the end of the July episode of Search TV. Come back and join us in August where we’ve been promising and teasing some updates to the show. Ben Shadley, we have a new producer on board. He’s doing a lot of great things with us. We have some software coming in, and we might be able to get rid of this paper even and actually have some on screen graphics. That might be good. We’ve been talking about visitors and guests coming on. That’s going to happen. Again ,if you’re in the Indianapolis area, come join us first Thursday of every month at four o’clock. We’d love to have you in our audience. Don’t forget to send me those updates about dark beers. I want to know what the best dark beer is in Indianapolis that I can buy.
Jesse:
Or questions about SEO, we’ll do those next time too.
Jim:
I guess that works too. We are going to start doing that. Again, hash tag SearchTV. Send us your questions. We want to know how to make this show better for you. That’s it, Good night everybody.