‘Mark Williams’ moderated the educational #SEOchat on Twitter, in case you missed it. These tweets are jam-packed with information, but you might miss them because they come and go so quickly. I attempted to collect and cite all of those comments
Founder @alsoasked
Organiser /@searchnorwich
Q1. Do you think there is any advantage or disadvantage to your organic search visibility splitting a single site over sub-domains vs sub-folders? If so, what? Any experiences to share? #SEOchat pic.twitter.com/DxZa3G4xGi
— Mark Williams-Cook = ???? ???? (@thetafferboy) November 3, 2022
Tech news site has a 3rd party job board on a sub-folder. That software was slow and didn’t have any control over it = caused lots of slow/bad experience & crashed a bunch. We moved it to a subdomain and the website is flying now. Early days still but nice
Jess Joyce
hard enough to build links. Trying to build to the main domain AND to a subdomain is Herculean. Given that there IS a Google tendency to treat/understand subdomains independently from the main domain, you’re then relying entirely on how sub-is linked from main
Jeremy Rivera
I hate to say this… it depends. But I will put this out there & I KNOW ppl will trash me for it… I feel like if Google can create a self-driving car it can also understand that travel.cnn and sports.cnn are all part of….. CNN.
Mordy Oberstein
Q2. Do “social signals”, such as having your URL retweeted by lots of popular accounts, mentioned on platforms like Facebook have any impact on search rankings? #SEOchat
— Mark Williams-Cook = ???? ???? (@thetafferboy) November 3, 2022
Well, we know Bing has explicitly stated it includes social signals. FB is a closed market. Insta is the same. Twitter is open data though for Google…They show in SERP features often… So MAYBE (for Twitter ONLY)
Jeremy Rivera
: I would expect they do, esp if the social content is producing results. I actually think separating social and website responsibilities allows dedicated social listening which is beneficial for other reasons.
Pam Portland
A2: I’ve only seen it when the content get republished by the popular account OUTSIDE of the social network. E.g. social media / blog post roundups
Sweepsify
Q3. Does CTR (click-through rate) from the SERP affect how well a website will/can rank? #SEOchat
— Mark Williams-Cook = ???? ???? (@thetafferboy) November 3, 2022
A3. You now have HCU which is a machine learning algorithm, and a very straightforward dataset available for “pogo” and CTR. COULD that dataset be PART of that determination of what’s “Helpful” = what retains traffic more? Maybe… But that’s speculation
Jeremy Rivera
A3: I don’t think it does directly but if it’s a UX issue that increases bounce rate, it will (e.g. signup button not working). As if there has been a consistent technical issue causing the low CTR, it leads to low rankings over time bc it was never fixed.
Sweepsify
A3. My understanding is that CTR isn’t a ranking factor. But, if you rank in P1 or P2 and you just don’t get clicks for a KW that has significant volumes then I would think it would be hard to maintain rankings, given the value and competitiveness of the serp real estate.
Tim Vickery
Q4. Do you consider Bounce Rate (as defined and measured in Google Analytics) to be a ranking factor? If people are “bouncing” off your website, does this impact your ranking? #SEOchat
— Mark Williams-Cook = ???? ???? (@thetafferboy) November 3, 2022
A4. #seochat I kinda already used “pogo” or bouncerate as part of the idea on A3… but MAYBE (But not Bouncerate itself, because that is a flawed metric, simply meaning a person didn’t trigger a second GA event. They coulda left the site, clicked a button or hit back)
Jeremy Rivera
Hell no. Dwell time, bounce rate etc are basically confirmed as not ranking factors. Someone spending ages searching around your site for an answer is a much worse user experience than them getting the answer to their query on the first page they land on.
Jack Chambers-Ward
A4. I don’t consider bounce rate on its own as a ranking factor, but bounce rate + dwell time together are most certainly considered in ranking algorithms Pages that 100% satisfy search intent will have very high bounce rate, so dwell time is important to Google
Chris Tweten
Q5. “Most sites don’t need to worry about backlinks, just make content” as an approach to SEO has a lot of vocal supporters now.
— Mark Williams-Cook = ???? ???? (@thetafferboy) November 3, 2022
Do you think links are still an important ranking factor or are they less important now than ever? #SEOchat
A5: I think it depends on the context of the SERPs you’re working on. Some industries are more sensitive to links than others, whereas you can compete in some verticals with a strong content strategy. Plus, good long tail content can get picked up naturally and earn links!
Alex Wright
A5. I still believe links are very important. There is no way you can rank for difficult keywords like “credit cards” without backlinks. This isn’t to say that all backlinks are created equal. But backlinks in general will always be a part of the algorithm, imho.
Boyd Norwood – nozzle.io
A5: This amazes me bc a year ago backlinks were the be all/end all. I was tasked w/ getting more of them, as if that was within my control. Yes they can be helpful, but they are rarely from the sites we want
Pam Portland
Q6. Is “pogo-sticking” (when a searcher quickly navigates back and forth between pages in search results) something that impacts how well a particular page may rank for a particular query? #SEOchat
— Mark Williams-Cook = ???? ???? (@thetafferboy) November 3, 2022
This is a common consumer behavior in purchasing search activity, where the consumer is looking for deals or comparing prices. I doubt that Google would penalize this.
Tim Vickery
A6: Perhaps, but in the scheme of gaining results overall, this particular activity would be more limited and require more effort. Perhaps bc the orgs where I worked were not able to have that much dedicated SEO support.
Pam Portland
That’s a wrap for today, I am releasing myself!
— Mark Williams-Cook = ???? ???? (@thetafferboy) November 3, 2022
Thank you to everyone that took part and a big thanks to @NicoleCPonce and @MordyOberstein for letting me come and start the fires! ?
Couple of promo tweets below if you are interested ⬇️#SEOchat pic.twitter.com/gHxuYjmyHq
I hope you like this discussion.
