There was a discussion Twitter about competitor research and duplicating the SEO strategy. The person researched their competitor and found obvious examples of spammy tactics that obviously were helping. John Mueller entered the discussion and gave an answer that gave a profound insight into competitor research.

Here is the original question on Twitter

“Hey SEO’s will I get penalized for duplicating local service pages and just changing the cities?

For example: will “HVAC Repair Dallas” and “HVAC Repair Houston” get flagged as duplicate content if they’re the same except for the city?”

Someone else tweeted:

“How frustrating it is when a site that appears to have thin content still manages to rank well.”

To which John Mueller responded:

“They might be ranking well despite these things, not because of them — no need to copy their bad practices, when you know better!”

Red Herrings in SEO

A red herring is a literary trick that writers use to mislead readers with a clue that seems to point to the most obvious answer. Writers use red herrings to purposely surprise their readers when the most guilty suspect turns out to be innocent and the most innocent party turns out to be the true guilty party.

When diagnosing why a site is not ranking or why a site is ranking well, it’s easy to seize upon the most obvious clue and stop analyzing.

Many years ago someone I knew reached out to me and said he was under a negative SEO attack that was causing his rankings to drop.

I looked at his backlinks and they contained the most heinous anchor text one could imagine. I took his word for it, as he was a competent SEO.

I thought this was an interesting case so I forwarded it to someone at Google. The Googler responded a couple days later and said it wasn’t negative SEO, it was a Panda issue.

That was a lesson in SEO for me. It taught me to continue researching after finding the most obvious reason. Sometimes the most obvious reason for a rankings drop is not the reason.

Another example is someone who came to be about a Medic Update ranking issue. They felt that they didn’t have enough Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) signals. I did a thorough review and discovered there was nothing “wrong” with the site. It just wasn’t relevant.

I prescribed some changes to make their pages more relevant and the site soon started moving up the SERPs.

The point is, when doing competitor research, be wary about copying some of their tactics, as those tactics may not be what’s powering their rankings.

Read the Twitter discussion here.

Google’s John Mueller commented recently on Reddit about pagination. Pagination isn’t something you think about until you need to think about it. So getting a refresher on the proper use of pagination versus a canonical is useful, especially if you enjoy the nerdier side of technical SEO.

When to Use Pagination

The original question was about canonicals and Angular JavaScript. The question started off with a bias on the part of the original poster of the discussion. The bias was that the issue was about canonicals.

Here is the question:

“I’m having issues with canonicals on my site and I believe it’s due to the angular JS used in the HTML. For thousands of pages on the site Google is ignoring the canonical link and selecting their own, the issue is the page Google is selecting is incorrect.”

The problem with that question is that the OP is using the wrong tool for solving a problem it wasn’t designed to solve.

John Mueller answered:

“That’s basically a question of how to handle pagination…

Google has a guide on this at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744, however in the end, I think it mostly comes down to: “does this page in the paginated series bring joy?” and if not, then just no-index it.

Some sites feel all pages in a paginated series are important, so they keep them indexed (the fancy ones using rel-next/prev). Some sites cap paginated series at a certain number, perhaps letting the first one get indexed, and the rest not.

The decision is also sometimes based on the content of the paginated series. For example, if it’s a list of linked detail pages, then you could decide by whether or not you can reach all pages even if you don’t have the full paginated set indexed (if you cross-link to related posts/products, then usually that’s the case).”

John Mueller then warned about using rel=canonical to try to force Google to stick to the first page of a series. That’s actually the wrong way to do it.

Here’s how John Mueller explained it:

“The main thing to avoid, since this post is about canonicalization, is to use the rel=canonical on page 2 pointing to page 1. Page 2 isn’t equivalent to page 1, so the rel=canonical like that would be incorrect, practically speaking. Short of page 2 potentially being indexed, it wouldn’t break anything significantly though.”

Rel=canonical is just a suggestion, it’s not a directive that Google is forced to follow. So when Google sees that page two is different from page one, Google will ignore the rel=canonical.

John Mueller then said that normal indexing should typically be able to handle a few groups of paginated content that may exist on a website:

“If there are just a few paginated sets across your site like this (which sounds like it might be the case), then I wouldn’t sweat it and just let them get indexed normally, without any special rel=prev/next linking or no-indexing.”

This is interesting because it seems to suggest that the rel=prev/next is more useful for Google in situations where there’s a lot of paginated content. This is typically the case in active forum discussions, where a great many discussions could go on for many pages.

Here is Google’s official Developers Page guidance on rel=prev/next advises:

“Use rel=”next” and rel=”prev” links or headers to indicate the relationship between component URLs. This markup provides a strong hint to Google that you would like us to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page.”

The key takeaways about rel next/previous is:

1. Indicates are relationship between the URLs
2. Behaves like a canonical tag in that it’s a hint, not a directive. A canonical or a rel-previous/next are suggestions and hints.
3. Inbound links to the various pages are consolidated.
4. Google usually sends searchers to the first page of the paginated content.

Do Not Use Rel=Prev/Next for an Article Series

Google’s official guidance warns against using rel=prev/next for a series of articles. For example, if you create a group of articles related to how to groom a dog and you create separate articles for cutting their nails, brushing and so on. Each of those articles, although they are a part of a series, should not be joined together using pagination.

According to Google, Rel=Prev/Next is meant for use on a single article (or document), not for a series of articles. Here’s what Google’s developer’s page states:

“You should not use this technique merely to indicate a reading list of an article series; you should use this to indicate a single long piece of content that is broken into multiple pages.”

That’s good information about pagination. SEO has so many technical details and this is one of them. It’s good to have a periodic check up because some of them, like pagination, come in handy.

Read the entire Reddit discussion here.

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Images by Shutterstock, Modified by Author

Google published an article in their “Think with Google” blog that wagged their finger at bad user experiences related to ads. The article touted how it’s ad program adheres to the “Better Ads Standards.” The implication is that any ads that are bad do not originate from Google’s network. Yet the article does not once address privacy, a form of intrusion that’s a legal focus in Europe and the USA.

If Google is a part of the Coalition for Better Ads and adheres to the suggestions that Google helped create, then it follows that the criticisms in Google’s articles are aimed at rival ad networks and the publishers themselves.

What Publishers Need to Know

The article is titled, “What publishers need to know now about creating a better ad experience.” The article then lists intrusive ad experiences as reasons why users might object to ads.

Strangely, there is no mention about privacy. The reason why I say that is strange is because Europe passed the GDPR privacy rules in 2018 and California passed the Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 that takes effect in January 2020.

Both laws affect the kind of data that is collected by advertising brokers such as Google and Facebook.

Targeted advertising is the most lucrative form of advertising. They can target you by gender, geography and even sites that you have visited. Privacy may be the most important aspect of Internet advertising today by consumers. If is so important that Europe and California passed laws severely reining in the kind of data companies like Google and Facebook can collect.

Considering that Internet privacy is so important, it is odd that Google published an article about the things that publishers do to annoy site visitors. It’s almost like Google and the advertising industry itself that came up with the Better Ads Standards is trying to encourage sites to walk away from intrusive advertising models while perpetuating the lucrative surveillance advertising model.

Google’s blog post states:

“For years, the user experience has been tarnished by irritating and intrusive ads. Thanks to extensive research by the Coalition for Better Ads, we now know which ad formats and experiences users find the most annoying. Working from this data, the Coalition has developed the Better Ads Standards, offering publishers and advertisers a road map for the formats and ad experiences to avoid.”

Annoyance has been an issue to users and may be why they have employed ad blockers. Google is a part of the Better Ads Coalition and conforms with their rules.

Thus, violations of the advertising standards are solely by publishers and competitor advertising networks. This article is aimed outside of Google and finger points directly at publishers.

The strange thing about this article is that legislators from Europe to the USA are focused on Internet privacy. The legal focus is not on the inconvenience of popups and poor user experience but in the “creepy ads’ that follow users from site to site.

It is a glaring omission of this blog post to focus on “intrusive ads” instead of privacy issues. Surveillance advertising is a lucrative area of Internet advertising. Yet, this article does not discuss it.

The laws passed in Europe and California deal with surveillance advertising. So what is the point in discussing “intrusive” advertising in the form of pop ups and interstitials?

If the legal trends are considered, intrusiveness in the mind of consumers may increasingly be about surveillance advertising. So why does Google’s blog post point the finger at publishers for intrusiveness when it’s Google not the publishers that is tracking users from site to site?

Read Google’s official blog post here

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