Not every ranking problem is a Panda or Penguin

1. Not every ranking problem is a Panda or Penguin
Brühl, 13th July 2018, Jonas Weber

2. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
Vita
▪Almost-pilot (10% SEO)
▪Garbageman (30 % SEO)
▪Doctors best friend (60 % SEO)
▪“Freelance“ SEO consultant (100 ℅ SEO)

3. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
References

4. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
Speaker

5. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
Search Quality Team

6. Lets start

7. Updates

8. 200
Factors

9. 201
273086 Experiments

10. 201
2665 Updates

11. Last Updates

12. 200
9Vince Update -> Brand ↑
Reputation

13. Branding – trend of a ranking

14. 201
0Mayday Update -> Quality Long Tail ↑
Relevance

15. Mayday Update – copy cat, no thanks!

16. 201
1Panda Update -> User behaviour ↑
User

17. Panda Update – no more thin content: bad user experience!

20. Do we need all pages in the index?
index,
follow
Noindex
follow
delete

21. 201
2Penguin Update -> SEO websites & bad Links ↓
Reputation

22. Penguin Update

23. 201
3Hummingbird Update -> Semantic
Search ↑
Relevance

24. Hummingbird Update

25. 201
4Pigeon Update -> more local search
results↑
User

26. Pigeon Update (July 24, 2014)

27. 201
5Mobile Update -> better usability ↑
User

28. Mobile Update (April 22, 2015)

29. 201
5RankBrain-> Artificial Intelligence↑
User

30. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
SEO Pyramid

31. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
Manual penalty vs filter/algorithm
Manual Penalty Filter issue
Manual action from a
Googler
Yes No
A Google has to take
manual action to revoke
the ranking issue
Yes No
Ranking problem can be
solved without a
Googler taking any
manual action
No Yes

32. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
Healthy vs. sick pages of a website
▪On Page, Directory, Subdomain and Domain level
▪Rankings brand vs non brand searches
▪Rankings commercial vs non commercial
keywords
▪Ranks the right page?
▪Technical changes: what and when? Journal?

33. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
The process chain of a search engine
Crawling
1
Indexing
2
Serving
3

34. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
Current „SEO“ trends 2018
▪Search intention -> „holistic“ content rocks!
▪Switch to https -> not a positive ranking factor so far
▪Speed -> more Crawling budget but only a direct
negative ranking factor for very slow sites
▪Mobile first index -> happening right now
▪Snippet optimization -> same position, more traffic
▪Featured snippets -> position 0

35. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
Featured Snippets

36. 12 Case Studies

37. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
1. noindex,nofollow vs noindex,follow
▪ Huge online shop with 8000 domain backlinks
▪ ALL categories on noindex,nofollow
Homepage
Categories
Products
Amount of pages Demand / traffic
Homepage
Categories
Products
Noindex,nofollow
index,follow
Main competitor,
same products
Equal quantity of
backlinks

38. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
2. robots.txt: PageRank kill with wrong crawling setup
Website
1/3 natural links to homepage etc.
2/3 links to cooperation form
with individual ID‘s
canonical
Standard-
Form
Robots.txt
disallow

39. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
3. Relaunch: never change all at once
1
2
3
4

40. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
3. Relaunch: never change all at once
Content URLs Code Design
Website

41. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
3. „Relaunch“: Domain Switch (also https)
▪ Before
▪ Create Google Search Console property for old and new domain (also http + https)
▪ Full access to both domains and servers (FTP, CMS, Shopsystem)
▪ Capability to create 301 redirects on old domain and to react FAST
▪ Full Access to .htaccess (Apache)
▪ Same content, same design, same URLs
▪ While
▪ Copy Website 1:1
▪ Create redirects from old domain to new domain, http to https, non www to www
▪ Communicate move to new domain in Google Search Console
▪ After
▪ Monitor the process for technical faults in Search Console and with a Crawler like
Screaming frog (broken links, server codes, etc)
▪ Monitor the Google rankings: does the new domain takes over the rankings?

42. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
4. Change .de tld to .org for international SEO?
„Mr. Weber, we have a .de domain and have the feeling that the .de might be a disadvantage for
our international rankings. We also have the .org domain. Do you suggest to move the whole .de
domain to .org? Also important to know: just the rebranding would cost around 10 to 15 millions.“

43. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
5. Too many pages indexed
Convince chief editor to delete 50 % of his articles
Some technical changes

44. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
6. Wrong homepage – what does Google prefer?
www.domain.de
www.domain.de/start/
index.html
301 redirect

45. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
7. Soft 404er might harm your website

46. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
8. Penguines without a fundament have a real problem
domain.de
domain.net

47. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
9. No database access for Google bot
Keyword
Keyword + City A
Keyword + City B

48. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
10. Your texters are selling unique contents twice

49. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
11. hreflang tag implemented

50. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
11. Hreflang tags of tripadvisor

51. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
11. hreflang tag .ch. vs .de in Google.ch
.de
.ch

52. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
12. no mobile version
Mobile index +
rankings
Desktop index +
rankings

53. seo-kurs.de / jonasweber.com
Cheers!
Kontakt
Mail: jw@jonasweber.com
Websites: jonasweber.com & seo-kurs.de
Twitter: @JonasWeber_com
Xing: https://www.xing.com/profile/Jonas_Weber2
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/jonas-weber/