SEO Careers and Your Right to be Removed From The SERPs
In issue #269 of the #SEOForLunch newsletter we discuss Google's approach to DMCA complains, SEO careers, and your rights to be removed from the SERPs.
Hi Lunch Buddies!
I’m super excited to share that the #SEOForLunch has officially become a sponsor of the Seerfest digital marketing conference.
What’s Seerfest you ask? It’s a two-day online digital marketing conference on March 16th + 17th. Get access to all 12 sessions for as low as $25.00. 100% of ticket sales are donated to charity. Get your ticket here.
How does it get better? I’m giving away FIVE free tickets.
All you need to do is fill out this Google form using the same email in which you receive the weekly #SEOForLunch newsletter.
I’ll be drawing the winners in 2 weeks!
-Nick
WIX announces big SEO upgrades
[sponsor]
In the latest of a series of major SEO upgrades, Wix now offers full URL customization.
You can customize subdirectory names, edit, remove or add a prefix to your URLs or even create a completely flat URL structure in blog and product pages. Plus, Wix automatically takes care of creating 301 redirects for all impacted URLs.
That’s on top of a long list of advanced SEO capabilities that are already built-in:
Structured data out of the box
Bulk 301 redirects
Editable robots.txt file
GMB integration
Enhanced eCommerce for GA
Bot log reports
Full control of meta-tags
Automatic page caching
Instant homepage indexing (Google)
Official Search Engine Updates
Article
Google Strengthens The Pirate (DMCA) Penalty Algorithm
What's Important:
Barry Schwartz covers a document that Google sent to the U.S. copyright office explaining how they’ve strengthened the penalty applied to a website that receives a “large volume of notices.”
Nick’s Take:
Obviously Google doesn’t want to see pirated content within their search results. Back in 2012, Google launched a DMCA update and now its clear that they are fine tuning the update to have larger impacts on sites who regularly get reported for piracy.
Podcast
How Aleyda Solis Started Her Career in SEO
What's Important:
Google’s John Mueller and Gary Illyes interview well-respected SEO, Aleyda Solis about her start in the SEO industry.
Nick’s Take:
John and Gary kick off the interview by saying they want to talk to more established SEOs. If this series continues, it will easily become one of my favorites. If you aren’t yet familiar with Aleyda, start by listening to this interview and then follow her on Twitter at @Aleyda
Video
Requesting Content Removals Under The Right to be Forgotten
What's Important:
Based on a court ruling back in 2014, individuals now have the ability to remove URLs from their search index for specific queries. This video walks you through the four main criteria for your request to be valid.
Nick’s Take:
This is a really good video for those who oversee the reputation management for individuals. This video will walk you through the criteria (inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive) in which you may be able to get a URL suppressed for a particular query. This isn’t specific to the standard search results but also the image results too.
Video
How BERT helps Google Search Understand Language
What's Important:
Bidirectional encoder representation from Transformers (BERT) is a machine learning architecture that helps Google understand the context in which words are used. This video walks users through the complexity of this natural language model and how its used within Google’s search results.
Nick’s Take:
BERT is very complex. This video does a great job of explaining what it is and how it’s been used in Google’s search results since 2019. If you aren’t confident in your understanding of BERT then I highly recommend you spend the time to watch this.
Sitebulb is your SEO auditing sidekick
[sponsor]
Sitebulb is a purpose built SEO auditing tool that acts as your website auditing sidekick - built to help you with interpretation, explanation and prioritization of issues:
Issues and opportunities are automatically identified and prioritized, saving you time digging through spreadsheets and focusing your attention on the things that matter.
In-depth explanations accompany every single issue, so you understand exactly what the data means.
Client-friendly explanations, intuitive visualizations, and customizable exports help you create impactful reports.
If you'd like to give Sitebulb a try for free, you can get a special, extended, 60-day trial license with #SEOForLunch. Just go to: Sitebulb.com/SEOForLunch/
Top SEO Resources From Last Week
Outcome-Driven SEO Roadmaps
Adam Gent, TheSEOSprint.com
One of the biggest mistakes that an SEO can do is creating a “to-do” list without any prioritization. This article explains the reasoning behind adopting an outcome driven project management approach to ensure that performance needle actually moves vs simply ticking check boxes to say various SEO items were completed.
Hiring an SEO Consultant? Ask These 9 Important Questions
Michal Pacanek, Ahrefs.com
I know not everyone who reads this newsletter is an actual SEO practioner. Some are VPs of marketing and others CEO/owners of various businesses. This post is for you. While we all have our own unique interviewing styles, this post really does a good job of identifying pointed questions to help identify the best applicants for your open SEO position (or even hiring a freelancer/agency)
How stable is SEO as a growth channel?
Kevin Indig, Kevin-indig.com
I love that people are taking a step back and doing an assessment on the organic search channel. Last week Tom Critchlow wrote about “is SEO even worth it” and this week Kevin tackles the stability of the SEO channel. While the value nearly always exists for SEO, both of these articles do a great job of challenging an assumption and forces people to set very appropriate expectations for this wild wild west of channel.
The Cheat Code to SEO Consulting is Effective Communication
Nick LeRoy, TheSEOFreelancer.com
It’s not often I include my own content in the list of resources to check out. However, effective communication is truly one of those skills that can seperate a good SEO from a great SEO. Regardless if you are a freelancer, in-house, or agency side, I highly recommend you check out this post.
How to use GPT3 to classify Keywords
Danny Richman, SEOTrainingLondon.org
This is your advanced technical post of the week. This video walks you through how GPT3 can classify keywords within a much larger keyword research task. Best yet, Danny walks us through a Google sheet he created, how to get a free API key and how to get access to all of this for free.
You Made It To The Bottom. You’re AWESOME!
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Learn About The Guy Behind The #SEOForLunch
Nick LeRoy is a professional SEO Consultant specializing in technical SEO, content strategy, and website migrations.
Nick is also the author of two SEO-focused newsletters: #SEOForLunch and The SEO Freelancer.
You can connect with Nick online through Twitter and LinkedIn.