Last week, Google announced the highly anticipated smart display support for the Google Assistant. Basically Google Home devices that show you the answer, in addition to speak to you with the answer. Google said they are now launching "smart Displays, a new category of devices for the smart home that brings the Google Assistant to an interactive screen for a richer visual experience."

So asking Google for the weather, will show you a nice overview of the upcoming weather. Asking it for traffic, will show you on a map the traffic. You can see your calendar, watch YouTube videos, listen to Podcasts, do video calls, find recipes, see photos, control your smart home and so much more.

Google also introduced ways for developers to build and design for the Google Assistant on a smart display. Google has new rich responses optimized for a smart display. These let developers implement "basic cards, lists, tables, carousels and suggestion chips, which give you an array of visual interactions for your Action, with more visual components coming soon. In addition, developers can also create custom themes to more deeply customize your Action's look and feel."

You can learn more over here as a developer.

Lenovo Smart Display is available in two display sizes and colors: the 8-inch HD version for $199.99 and the 10-inch Full-HD version for $249.99, and they both come with a full-range 10 watt speaker for loud and clear audio. You can buy them at Walmart, BestBuy.com, Amazon.com, Costco.com, SamsClub.com, Lenovo.com and other stores.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

You know what they say about having all your ducks in a row? Well, John Mueller of Google responded to a related question on Twitter around should you have to keep your header tags in your HTML, i.e. h1 tags before your h2 tags and so on, in order or not? John said it can help if you keep "clear structure on a page" but it won't "count it against a site if they improvise / get it wrong."

As you can see, he is saying two different things. If it helps to do it right, doesn't that mean it hurts to not do it right?

Here is the tweet:

It helps Google if there's a clear structure on a page, with headings & content, but we're not going to count it against a site if they improvise / get it wrong. That said, a clear semantic structure of a page can also make sense outside of search.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) July 29, 2018

I think the short answer is that it doesn't really make a difference in rankings but John here is more concerned that if you are not following a clear and consistent path, that some code make eventually break and cause issues with crawling and indexing?

Previously John Mueller said having this out of order really doesn't impact ranking. I don't think that messaging has changed but hey - here it is for you to look at, test and make your own call about.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

John Mueller offered insights into the different kinds of manual actions and what to do to recover from the penalties. John Mueller’s comments are compared to how Google used to communicate penalties and some interesting correlations are discovered.

Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller discussed manual penalties.

Two Kinds of Manual Actions

John Mueller describes two kinds of manual actions, one more severe than the other.

1. Complete removal of a site from search and from indexing
2. Partial removal from search

John Mueller’s description helps clarify that manual actions differ.

Complete Removal From Google

The first kind of penalty that John Mueller discussed is the harshest. It results in the complete removal from the search results and also a removal from indexing. This kind of penalty results in a situation where the site does not exist at all for Google.

History of Google Penalties and PageRank

When Google’s PageRank Toolbar functioned, the toolbar would green in the bar style meter to indicate the level of PageRank it had accrued.

If a web page had zero PageRank assigned to it, then the PageRank meter would show a white bar. This was referred to as being White Barred. Being White Barred meant either that you didn’t have enough links to register any PageRank or that your PageRank had been reset to zero.

The worst sign that the PageRank toolbar could show you is a gray bar. A gray bar meant that your site did not exist at Google, that you were completely banned from Google’s index.

This meant that Google no longer crawled the website. This also meant that Google no longer showed the banned site in the search results if you searched with the name of the site or with random snippets from the site.

This type of manual penalty was called being “Gray Barred.” It was the absolute worst penalty.

Gray Barred: Google’s Worst Manual Penalty

Being gray barred was the worst situation to be in. A webmaster would remove all links to a web page should they discover it was gray barred.

The search community would treat your site as if it had a communicable disease. Right or wrong, it was taken as a given that any site that linked to multiple gray barred sites would soon see it’s own PageRank meter go gray.

John Mueller on a Severe Manual Penalty

The historical experience about being gray barred matches what John Mueller described when he discussed Google’s most severe manual penalty.

Here is how Google’s John Mueller described a severe penalty:

“On the one hand, we only remove pages completely from search with a manual action if there’s really something problematic on those pages.

And in cases like that… it’s really a strong sign across the board where we look at that website and think there’s really very little value in us investing any resources in indexing content from this website, because it looks like a complete copy from somewhere else, or it’s just scraping or spun content… then we’ll usually completely remove it from search.

And when that happens we… stop showing it in the search results, which is kind of the visible part. And… we stop indexing it in search.

So essentially over time we don’t have this website in our index at all.”

Recovery from a Severe Manual Penalty

Once that manual penalty is removed, in my experience from almost twenty years of doing penalty recoveries, the first indication is that the site can be found in Google for their domain name.

One of the most rewarding feelings I experienced as a consultant was from one of my firsty clients I helped in a penalty recovery. They emailed to tell me that everyone in the office was shouting in joy because they saw their site return in Google’s search results for their domain name.

That experience, of a site’s presence returning to Google’s search results matches how John Mueller described when discussing what happens after a penalty is lifted.

Google on what happens after a penalty is removed:

“If that manual action is removed, so for instance if you take over a domain that has a manual action like this and you clean it up or you start fresh with new content and you submit a reconsideration request then what will happen is first we’ll have to start indexing this website again; and that can take a bit of time.

So that can easily take… a couple of weeks for us to start picking up content from this website and saying… this is actually good content, we’ll start indexing this again. We’ll start showing it in the search results.”

A severe penalty requires a comprehensive review in order to recover. Many things that competitors get away with will be required to be removed in order to recover. A manual inspection is strict.

The White Bar Penalty

The White Bar penalty is a situation where a site isn’t completely removed from the search results or the index. Google’s PageRank toolbar showed zero PageRank and this was expressed on the PageRank meter with the color white. This situation was called being White Barred.

The white color meant that a site is indexed but does not have PageRank assigned to it. This was a bad situation. Not as bad as being gray barred, but still bad.

It was bad because it meant the site lost rankings for all meaningful keyword phrases. It wouldn’t necessarily lose all rankings, but it would lose rankings for the most important phrases.

The white bar was also treated as a communicable disease. A webmaster would immediately remove any link to another site if that site started showing a white bar.

The idea was that there was something wrong with a white bar site and that any site that linked to it would eventually become untrusted and also acquire a white bar and lose rankings.

John Mueller on the Less Severe Penalty

Google’s John Mueller commented on this second kind of penalty that used to be called being White Barred. He said that recovery from this kind of penalty was faster. This matches the description of the White Bar penalty.

Here is how John Mueller describes recovery from a less severe penalty:

“On the other hand, if this is a manual action that doesn’t result in the page or the site being removed completely from search, then usually that’s something that’s just a matter of us recrawling, reprocessing those pages so that we understand that things are ok now.

We can rank it normally after the reconsideration request has been… processed properly.

So usually those are the types of changes that are a little bit faster to be seen than the changes where we remove a website completely from search.”

Do Sites Remain Untrusted After a Penalty is Lifted?

There are some who feel that a site will be in a sandboxed state after the penalty is lifted.

Here is how John Mueller describes it:

“It’s not the case that our algorithms would hold a grudge or that they would say well this website had a manual action a year ago therefore I’m never going to trust it again.

When these manual actions are cleaned up we will treat the website as it is.”

Sometimes a site’s rankings return after the penalty is lifted. Sometimes the rankings do not return and the site is essentially starting from day one, like a brand new website. Why does this happen?

As far as I know, Google has not issued an explanation about these two types of recovery. My opinion, based on my almost two decades of experience in helping sites recover, is that once a manual penalty has been removed, a site is ranking where it’s supposed to rank based on the content and/or links.

For example, if the problem was due to bad links, a site would continue to rank well if it had enough quality links remaining after the bad links were removed.

If the problem was content, then the site would return if the low quality content or doorway pages were removed and the remaining content had enough links and was of a good quality.

It’s not the case that our algorithms would hold a grudge or that they would say well this website had a manual action a year ago therefore I’m never going to trust it again.

When these manual actions are cleaned up we will treat the website as it is.”

Takeaway: Penalty Recoveries Differ

It’s important to understand the differences between manual penalties. It’s also important to understand the difference between a manual penalty and a change in the algorithm that results a ranking demotion. The solution required to help a site recover depends on an accurate diagnosis.

Watch the Google Hangout here.

More Resources

Images by Shutterstock, Modified by Author

The other day, I saw a couple complaints from higher profile SEOs that Google is not doing a good job with preventing spammy PDF content from showing up in the Google search results. Jennifer Slegg posted on Twitter saying "I wish Google would do something with all this PDF spam in the search results." Then Pedro Dias, former Googler, posted also on Twitter, "I wish Google would do something with all this spam I keep finding. I keep reporting and it's still there, for years... I even got a client that admitted to manipulation, never got hit for 1+ years."

Gary Illyes from Google said he wants to see examples of this spam and wrote "That's frustrating. I BET if you knew someone at Google, at least some of them could get looked into." In short, he personally wants to look into these cases, so if you see them, let him know on Twitter, I guess.

Here are those tweets:

That's frustrating. I BET if you knew someone at Google, at least some of them could get looked into...

— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 28, 2018

Show me

— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 28, 2018

Do you have examples of PDF spam in Google? Share them.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

About ten days ago, Google was Googlebombed in image search for for the term [idiot] where it would photos of Donald Trump, the current President of the United States. I've been meaning to report that 5 or so days later, that Googlebomb dampened. Most of the photos now are not images of Donald Trump, at least it isn't as bad as it was previously.

Here was the before screenshot:

Here is what it looks like right now:

As Marie Haynes wrote on Twitter "Trump no longer owns the image SERPS for idiot."

It is unclear if Google did something algorithmically to try to dampen the Googlebomb here or if the recency of those images just died down over time?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Just in case you missed the news from a year and a half ago, the Google link operator is dead. This was officially confirmed back in January 2017 that Google no longer supports this search operator, i.e. [link:www.domain.com] is dead.

Gary Illyes from Google had to respond with the news on Twitter:

It's not broken. It's completely removed and we don't support it anymore

— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 30, 2018

John Mueller from Google also responded:

would probably tell you not to use the link operator in search. ?

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) January 11, 2017

So stop trying the link operator, it doesn't work and isn't reliable.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Looks like somewhere in some stairwell in the Google office is special wall art with birdies all over the place. Corrie Davison shared several photos of this wall art on Instagram. This is at the main Google campus in Mountain View, California.

Corrie wrote "More stairwell birdie wall art. #putabirdonit #decor #art #design #lifeatgoogle"

This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.

The success of every marketing campaign – or business, for that matter – is measured by a single thing: the bottom line. The “measurement” part, however, is where Marketing Analytics comes in. Data helps marketers analyze their performance, change their tactics, wisely allocate their budgets, and manage and maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns.

On digital channels, all of this translates to metrics like traffic, clicks, views, engagement, and so on. During last week’s #SEMrushchat, our guest Steve Hammer shined more light on how organic traffic and other metrics influence customer acquisition, business growth, and revenue. Steve is the founder of digital marketing agency RankHammer, winner of the Best Small Agency award in the U.S. Search Awards. Here is a summary of his opinions and what our other chat participants had to say:

Q1. What are the biggest drivers of growth within a business? Does it vary by business size?

The answer to that is obvious. Steve clarified that awareness is the need of the hour for small businesses, while bigger ones could directly focus on conversion. Data, however, is the key to understanding your most significant growth drivers. Online metrics give an indication of gaps in overall business milestones. For example, less direct traffic to your site is an indication of low brand awareness

Almost all of the #SEMrushchat participants agreed that growth drivers vary by size, but their opinions differed on what the most important ones are. These included:

Dawn Anderson - @dawnieando, said that growth depends on a lot of different factors, including budget, team cohesion, focus, and leadership structure. Ekaterina Vasileva - @AskEkaterina also outlined a bunch of factors for consideration, including strategy, brand image, and customer relations. Most importantly, accurate data that helps you pinpoint what’s working and what’s not and pinpoint the best growth driver for your business is paramount to success.

Of course, business fundamentals state that it all depends on your marketplace and how your business fits within it.

There are also some growth drivers that don’t necessarily vary by size but are rather affected by the lifecycle phase where the business is at the moment. Innovation is one of these factors, especially in the startup marketplace.

The depth of customer experience and the quality of your product or service is something that is invaluable to business growth. Once you recognize and identify your hustles and motivations, you can then build on your reputation and scale your business.

Q2. What are some ways that you can turn marketing analytics into effective marketing strategies?

Steve starts out by looking for gaps in strategy and then figures out how to fill those gaps. He also stresses on benchmarking and comparing with the competition, especially when it comes to strengths.

And when it comes to competitive analysis, SEMrush can help you a lot, especially when it comes to discovering competitors and tracking their search visibility using features like Position Tracking.

It is essential to understand the customer journey before you even begin formulating a strategy. Your analytics will help you to find customers’ pain points that you can then use to decide how to tweak your strategy and apply specific tactics like making relevant offers. Obviously, you need to tweak your budget and efforts as well to maximize ROI.

Good analytics comes from good data. You need to ensure you are collecting accurate data by using the right tags and applying the right tracking parameters. And this data should come from all departments of your organization, especially feedback from support teams. Further, the availability of historical data is necessary to help you to form long-term graphs, so that you can identify patterns and trends, as well as react quickly to inconsistencies.

Understand that no business ever goes according to plan; this is where strategists need to go back to business goals, capitalize on strengths, and iron out weaknesses. A simple rule of thumb is to see where your best-performing traffic comes from and do whatever gives you more of it.

Understanding user behavior from past data is key to planning and forecasting. Data, such as who your audience is and what products they browse on your site helps you understand their thought process and buyer intent; this helps you identify growth opportunities and even new markets. While user segmentation is critical, don’t forget the speed and direction of your business.

With analytics, marketers no longer need to shoot in the dark. You can discover why and how your audience is converting, and use that data to optimize conversions. Test out different strategies and pinpoint the ones that give you better ROI. You can also tie those back to your company goals and determine if there is a need for a pivot.

Finally, use your analytics wisely to produce relevant content that targets your customers better, as 20% of your content drives 80% of your visitors. For instance, Spotify regularly uses consumer data to create content that drives their marketing campaigns. Another great example where analytics influences content marketing is the #SEMrushchat itself!

Q3. What are the most important metrics to measure when looking at your marketing analytics?

Never take your eyes off your goals! Steve gave the example of an inverted funnel when prioritizing metrics to measure: focus on sales first, then middle funnel activities, and then generic engagement. Sales matter most!

Some participants echoed Steve’s thoughts in as many different words. Goals, conversions, results – they all point to the same thing: revenue.

Others’ opinions were that there is a much larger set of numbers to look at, depending on the business in question. It could be the number of unique visitors, the number of views, time on site, nature of content consumed, bounce rate, task completion, engagement, customer sentiment, cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value, and so on. Look at which of them correlate more with your campaign’s ROI.

At the end of the day, while every bit of data is important, you need to base your ‘whys’ on your KPIs.

Q4. Which digital channel has given you the hardest time to measure your success? Why?

Returns from social display ads are a big pain, according to Steve. Views are too broad a metric while clickthroughs are too narrow, so achieving a balance is more of an art. The key to success in measuring ROI of digital channels is experimentation.

The #SEMrushchat participants recognized the subjectivity of the question and were quick to point out that results vary depending on the channel, industry, target group, campaign objectives, and budget. Moreover, it’s crucial to differentiate between and identify micro and macro conversions.

SEO is a very hard channel to measure for ROI, especially when the business isn’t selling much. It is trickier to measure results compared to PPC, especially for B2B businesses. What’s more, Google Analytics – the very tool meant to make web analytics simple – withholds keyword data.

Thanks to tools like the SEMrush On Page SEO Checker, though, marketers not only have access to a ton of data about their website rankings and competitors’ content, backlinks and keyword strategy but also get actionable recommendations for using this data.

It is also extremely hard to figure out where your direct site visitors stand along the marketing funnel unless they take an action on your site. Once they do that, interactions like site search can be strong predictors of their purchase intent.

As far as social media analytics is concerned, the general consensus is that Instagram is a tough nut to crack. Telling which posts induced clicks, managing a business profile, and exporting data are some common pain points. All that is improving, however, as Instagram continues to introduce new capabilities for businesses.

The demands of your client also play a huge role in setting KPIs and measuring performance. It is easy to identify traffic sources, but optimizing your website to cater to the most profitable ones is not so simple. And it is not just your website – clients frequently confuse goals with metrics (like brand awareness with likes on social media) and ask for irrelevant or unclear metrics (such as audience learnings from display ads).

The diversity and depth of experience of the #SEMrushchat participants really showed when they discussed functionally limited platforms like YouTube, Quora, Reddit, Google My Business, and – wait for it – Google+!

Measuring results from a single channel is very simple; the real work lies in blending all the data together to get insights that help make decisions. APIs and software like Tableaux come to the rescue here. With a bit of an effort, it is also possible to pull data from sites that don’t allow tracking or charge a premium for data.

Q5. How important do you think is it to assign dollar amounts to your activities, campaigns, and results?

Assigning dollar values to campaigns, customers, and even leads makes your processes much easier! Steve even dished out a timeless quote to emphasize that, “No one can take bounce rate improvements to buy groceries.” However, estimating the worth of online to offline conversions are challenging, especially in industries like auto.

Ultimately, all digital marketing activities are tied to ROI. So assigning dollar values is essential to identifying and prioritizing successful activities. Profit is the number 1 goal for a majority of businesses, and the best visual indicator of progress and growth. Without money, there is no business. Associating a campaign or an action with real dollars helps you pinpoint the next steps in the execution of your strategy. Failing that, your marketing turns into a bottomless pit that swallows your budget whole.

The primary benefit of assigning dollar amounts to marketing campaigns is to differentiate between what is (that may or may not include traffic sources, media, devices) working and what isn’t, and focus on activities that bring you the best ROI. Losing track of dollars will quickly vaporize your campaign!

Having said that, money should be used as a goal rather than a raw value. Think about the impact your spend will have on your brand as opposed to the money it will bring back.

Assigning a defined value to SEO is doubly important, given that the C-suite usually doesn’t understand its significance. Tying SEO dollars to major marketing goals helps digital marketers justify their work and makes it easier to get resources in the future. You can also go a step further and assign values to specific pages or traffic sources to demonstrate and clarify your efforts and results to clients.

Lastly, don’t go overboard with dollar associations – hard sales are what will bring in real money. Engagement or education don’t generate revenue by themselves. Attribution is a complicated process, and you need to be sure you are getting it right. Again, the attribution methods and approaches for B2B and B2C will differ, depending on the complexity and length of sales cycles. You need to be very sure you understand how to quantify campaign segments.

Remember, if you can’t gather accurate data, there is no sense in attributing value to actions based on that data.

That is all for today! If you have any insights to add, we’re all ears in the comments.

Hope to see you this Wednesday – we’ll be picking Craig Campbell’s brain on “How to score true social media automation!”

Blog comments can legitimately help your brand if done correctly.

The problem? Many people in SEO don’t use them correctly.

Over the years, blog comments have been misused and abused.

As a result, some people no longer even consider blog comments a worthwhile link building tactic.

Blog comments are usually viewed as the opposite of the link that keeps on giving. Blog comments are usually the nightmare that never ends.

I’ve worked with some of the top brands in ecommerce, tech, and travel and have some tips to help you tackle blog commenting effectively.

Don’t Give the Boot to Blog Comments

There are a lot of link building tasks to fill up your workday — content creation, link reclamation, podcasts, oh, and actual work.

Blog comments are no longer a high priority tactic for link builders.

However, rather than dismissing blog comments entirely because it’s an outdated spammy link building content (and it can be when done wrong), maybe you should reimagine it as a type of community engagement.

Former Google Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts once perfectly explained the difference between spammy blog comments good blog comments: the key is leaving topically relevant comments on topically relevant sites.

Think of blog comments as a more sophisticated, grown-up cousin of what once lived of blog comments in the ’90s.

They can be engaging and add value — though they require slightly more work.

Benefits of Blog Commenting Links

Active blog commenting is important beyond SEO.

Leaving one or two comments per day can lead to extremely positive results such as:

• More traffic to your website. If this is your goal, your best bet is to comment on blogs that get a lot of traffic and are in your industry or niche.
• Reputation building. You can use blog comments to build your personal brand. Just be sure to use your real name and an image of yourself if the blog allows it for your profile. If you’re using anchor text or keywords as your name, you’re doing blog commenting completely wrong.
• Expert positioning. People will get to know who you are as you demonstrate your expertise on relevant topics. You can achieve this by lending a helping hand or just agreeing with someone.
• Building inbound links. If you take the time to comment on two blog posts per day, with a backlink back to your website (even if the links are nofollowed), the end result will be roughly 60 backlinks per month, or 720 per year.
• Leads and conversions. If you can attract more visitors to your site, you can potentially convert them from visitors into leads. And those leads could turn into customers or clients and actual revenue. Check out this post for more.

As for ranking? Years ago, the right comment on the right blog may have a powerful way to improve your rankings. Today, it’s not nearly as effective as it once was.

Top Blog Commenting Tips

From finding high-quality sites and engaging with commenters like a pro, here’s my best blog commenting tips:

• Find high-quality websites to comment. When I say high-quality, I’m looking for websites with a domain authority of 60+.
• After you pull your list of top websites, search for an article most relevant to your target audience.
• Now, you can begin to add value with your comments. I follow the “sandwich affect” when I comment on an article.
  • Acknowledge the author by name and add a compliment.
  • Sprinkle in valuable information you took from the article, while adding additional data that may spruce up the article.’
  • If you add a link, it needs to be relevant and add value to the post or discussion.
  • Again, acknowledge the author by name and end with a compliment.

Remember to keep your blog comment short and sweet. I aim to keep mine under 100 words.

Finally, and most importantly, when it comes to blog commenting, you should follow one crucial rule, no matter what:

Make your comment valuable to the post and the discussion.

A comment that has nothing to do with the post itself, no matter how long and intelligent it sounds, won’t help you one bit.

You have to actually read the post and make your comment a response to the post, or a response to another commenter’s comment.

Be a valuable commenter, not a comment spammer!

Summary

Timeframe: Month 7, then ongoing monthly

Results detected: 4-12 months

Average links per month: 4

Tools: 

• Manual commenting. This is not something you want to automate, spam, or copy/paste!

Benefits:

• Blog comments can give you a greater reach to your target audience.
• Blog comments help grow authority and thought-leadership if you’re name and face is being seen on well-known websites.

The Google logo on Google’s home page in the United States, Mexico Argentina, Chile, Peru, Singapore, and Uruguay celebrates the life and achievements of María Rebeca Latigo de Hernández.

María Rebeca Latigo de Hernández was a Mexican-American rights activist who fought for the rights of Mexican immigrants. She was born in San Pedro Garza García, Mexico on July 29, 1896 – 122 years ago. She got married in 1915 at the age of 19 to Pedro Hernández Barrera in Hebbronville, Texas. They had 10 children.

She was an activist against the segregation, racial oppression, and poor education that the Mexican American children were receiving.

She passed at the age of 89 on January 8, 1986 in Texas.

Google wrote:

Today’s Doodle celebrates what would have been the 122nd birthday of María Rebecca Latigo de Hernández, a civil rights leader integral to advancing Mexican American and Mexican immigrant rights.

Born in Garza García, near Monterrey, Mexico in 1896, Hernández later immigrated to San Antonio, Texas, where she became one of the leading voices speaking against economic discrimination and educational segregation that was faced primarily by women and children of Mexican descent. Among her many contributions, she co-founded the Orden Caballeros de America (Order of the Knights of America) – a benefit society dedicated to educating Mexican Americans about their rights. She also helped organize the Asociación Protectora de Madres (Association for the Protection of Mothers) which provided financial aid to expectant mothers and La Liga de Defensa Pro-Escolar (The School Defense League) which fought to replace segregated educational facilities.

In addition to being a powerful organizer, Hernández was also a talented orator: she became San Antonio’s first Mexican American female radio announcer, and spent much of the rest of her life speaking up against injustice and inequality across both the Mexican and African American communities.

Today’s Doodle illustrates Hernández doing what she did best – using her voice to elevate and benefit her community.