Weekly SEO news: 5 March 2019
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Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

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Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. SEO basics: how to fix thin content pages (3 steps)

Creating content that servers your website visitor's needs is one of the most important parts of search engine optimization. Low quality pages with thin content pages that do not add value won't be listed in the search results of Google and other search engines.

How do you identify thin content pages on your website? How can you fix them?

thin content is not good for SEO

Step 1: crawl all of your web pages

Use the website audit tool in SEOprofiler to crawl all of your web pages. The website audit bot will index all of your web pages just like a regular search engine bot. You can even specify the user agent (for example Google's mobile bot).

Step 2: go to the page 'Content topics'

When the audit report is ready, select the page 'Content topics' in the menu on the left and scroll to the 'Pages with the least number of words (thin content)' section:

optimize thin content pages

These are the pages that contain so little text that it is unlikely that search engines will list these pages on the search result pages. The table shows the word count and the number of links pages and links from the analyzed site that point to the thin content page.

A low word count does not automatically qualify a web page's content as thin. For example, some articles can have a low word count if the article is very precise.

If a thin content page has many links from other pages of your website, it's probably an important page of your website that should have more content.

Step 3: check if the pages are intended for search engine rankings

Review the pages with a low word count. In general, pages with fewer than 200 words should be checked. Some pages of your website are not intended for search engine rankings. For example, it's unlikely that a log in page gets high rankings for meaningful keywords. You don't have to optimize these pages.

If you find a thin content page that should be ranked, optimize the content of that page. Make sure that you've found the right keywords before optimizing the contents of your web pages. The tools in SEOprofiler will help you to improve the content of your pages.

Fix thin content now

2. Internet marketing news of the week

Google Google: Tools to build a better mobile experience

"We'er introducing two new updates: a top-to-bottom rebuild of Test My Site, and more availability and growth of Rich Communications Services (RCS) Business Messaging. [...]

With the new Test My Site, businesses have a single destination to measure, benchmark and take action on mobile site speed—the first step toward a great mobile experience."

Announcing domain-wide data in Search Console

"Google recommends verifying all versions of a website -- http, https, www, and non-www -- in order to get the most comprehensive view of your site in Google Search Console."


GoogleGoogle's Danny Sullivan defends Google's controversial results

"Support of the ecosystem is constantly raised in meetings I'm in. It always comes up. It is a front-line concern with everyone involved with search. Any feature you see, impact on ecosystem has been considered. [...]

Does search not become search if you can scan and scroll through results horizontally rather than vertically? Does search only remain search if it looks and acts like it's 1998. It's evolved since then & it will keep evolving."


Google’s CTR answer just what you’d expect

"After the debate around CTR rekindled last week, we asked Google for a statement from their PR team we can share around click-through rate. In short, various Googlers have told us over the years that CTR data is not used within Google’s ranking algorithm. [...]

Either way, you still need to build a great site that people want to visit and that Google wants to rank well for relevant queries."


+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++

  • What’s new in AMP, Q1 2019: Improvements to consent, videos, forms and lists.
  • You can report fraudulent activity to Google Maps.
  • Google Ads: Prepare for average position to sunset.
  • Content structure vs. structured data.

3. Previous articles

Do you need better rankings for your website?

SEOprofiler is a web-based search marketing tool that helps you to get better Google rankings. You can create a free SEOprofiler account here. The step-by-step manual will help you to get started as quickly as possible.

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