Good Day Google+ - SEO Edition

Hey there everyone, I'm Chef Dennis Littley and we're here today with Good Day Google Plus and it's always a great day on Google Plus and I've got some of my friends from the Northeast here and they braved the blizzard and Hercules I think they call the snowstorm there today. My wife and I were both doing a little happy dance because it was a no school day and even though we're in Florida, we used to live for those days when we were up in the Philadelphia area and they would call school on account of snow. So it's a good day in Florida for me too today. Although it was in the 40s this morning, we were shivering, let me tell you something. Had the blankets and the heat on.

We had single digits here, so you don't get to complain about your 40s.

I know, I love it, I love it. It's a great thing to be able to do that, and I love to torture my friends sometimes with it. They tend to just grumble and call me names, but that's okay. We're here with Good Day Google+ and it's the SEO edition. We were supposed to have Mark Traphagen with us, and unfortunately he had a little procedure this morning. Couldn't make it. So we wish Mark the best and hope he's at home feeling better. And if you're watching this, maybe you can pop a few questions in there for us or answer some things. But if not, we're gonna move right ahead. And let me introduce my guest today. And, and actually, last-minute fill-in for him, and it was supposed to be a surprise for Mark, I have Eric Eng on today with us, and he is here. Hi Eric, how you doing?

I'm doing great, thanks for having me. And yeah, it would have been quite interesting to have Mark and I both on the panel for Those of you in the audience who don't know, Mark joined us as our Senior Director of Online Marketing officially yesterday at Stone Temple Consulting. So that was a big day for us. We're thrilled to have him as part of the team, but he's recovering from a minor surgery, not a big deal. It's just he's not ready to go live, showtime, just yet.

Did he have Facebook removed?

No, I can't. Good one. Oh well.

Well, tell us a little bit about, while we have you, tell us a little bit about Stone Temple and what you do there.

Sure, well, we're a digital marketing agency, so most well known originally for our SEO expertise, and that's still a very large part of our business, but we also have a very strong component of content marketing, which of course has a strong overlap with the the link building side of SEO, as we used to call it. So that's what we do, and we work mostly with larger size clients, including Fortune 100 companies and folks like that. So we have a grand old time trying to teach them how to get out of their own way.

That's good. Somebody needs to do that. All right, and Joshua— Joshua Berg is here, and thank you so much for coming today. It's great to see you again.

Hi, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah, it's been a very exciting year and I'm really looking forward to the new year. This last year, Google+, I met so many new friends. Basically, this whole thing got rolling for me here on Google+ just in the last year. Because I was not one of the early adopters of the Google+ platform, and I was pretty much just getting rolling on it at the beginning of the year. I was still a newbie, and so it's been very— a great run, and I've met so many great people and connected with so many influencers, so It's been a really great time here, and so happy to meet people like Eric Enga and other people in my industry, and Mark Trafagan, who couldn't make it today. And anyway, everybody, it's been a very great year, and I think 2014 is going to be Much better. A lot of good things to come for sure.

Sounds good, and we're very grateful that you did join us. And if you had been an early adopter, boy, you're a wealth of information now. I can't imagine how much more you know about Google+. But we're really happy.

I think, I think the fact that I was a late adopter was actually a good thing for me because I, I think I, it caused me to really dig in to try and figure out a lot of things that I didn't understand. So I was actually— that was convenient for me in many ways.

Well, I'm glad however it worked out, I'm glad you're here now because we certainly use your help and appreciate it. All right, Jules, you ready for us there?

Yeah, I'm here.

And I have my fellow food blogger and a gluten-free blogger at that, Jules Shepherd. And every week I like to try and bring one of my food blogging friends on too, and Jules was kind enough to come on with me today.

Happy to be here, yes. This is going to be fun.

Yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about your blog and what you do?

Sure. I actually do lots of things. We're experimenting with the light here. We had so much snow here and trying to dim the lights because it's so bright outside. I write cookbooks and also write resource books for people who have celiac disease or are living gluten-free and have a very active blog and social media presence. I like to travel around the country, and I give lectures to industry and trade groups, but also consumer groups as well, and have a line of gluten-free flour and baking mixes. It keeps me pretty busy. I love to share food and share food ideas and help people who have medical needs to live gluten-free to do that well and happily and not feel like they're suffering or missing out.

I know so many of us now are thinking about we may be having some issues that are caused by gluten. It's coming to the forefront, and people are saying it's a trend. No, it's not a trend. It's something very important as a way of life now that people need to recognize and really take heed of and start looking at how they eat, because I think a lot of us are going to find that we have some type of gluten problem. I don't know what you want to call it, deficiency or allergic reaction to it, and we could probably live a lot better if we would find what it is and eliminate it from our diets.

Yeah, that's a great point, Dennis Littley. I mean, so many people try the diet for one reason or the other. It could be because they think they're going to lose weight, which is usually wrong, but it doesn't matter. When people try the diet, a lot of people feel better for one reason or the other, and when you feel better, you kind of want to stick with it. So this is a great time of year to be talking about it. New Year's resolutions, people are trying new things, trying to live healthier, and a gluten-free diet can actually be super healthy, but it also can have all of the cookies, and cakes, and pies, and muffins that you wanted to have in it too. You got to balance that out if you want to live a healthier lifestyle. It's true. So many people are hearing about it for whatever reason, and finding out that they really are feeling so much better on a gluten-free diet. That's been a lot of fun because connecting people through social media has been a great experience for me. You'll just be talking to someone and mention gluten-free, and, "Hey, you know what? I thought about that," or, "So-and-so needs that," and then they learn more. Social media has been a fantastic way to really get the word out about how to do the diet right and how to live happily gluten-free. It's a great opportunity to be talking about that today and also all of the SEO stuff we're going to be talking about.

Dr. Pompa: Absolutely. My friend Jean Layton is a gluten-free blogger as well, and she always says that— she mentions, she says, "Try it for 30 days. See how you feel, and then after that 30 days, just go back and eat whatever you think you You've been missing as much as you want because she says usually you're going to get so sick you won't want to go back.

That's true. I was just reading something from the Mayo Clinic yesterday that said there's no test for gluten sensitivity, which is what people— really, mostly have gluten sensitivity, not celiac disease, statistically speaking. The only way to do it is exactly what Jeanne just described through you, was to go off gluten entirely, which can be tricky. It hides in all kinds of funny places. If you really, truly go off of it 100%, and then after you feel better, reintroduce it a little bit and see how you feel. It's amazing how many people really are like, "I'm never doing that again." They have energy. They don't have brain fog. It can really affect you in so many ways. Migraines. It's an amazing thing what diet can do for your body. If you treat it like fuel, you put the right stuff in your body, it works really well. If you don't, it doesn't work so well.

Dr. Pompa: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thanks for being here today.

Thanks for having me.

Oh, my pleasure. And we also have Mark Vang with us today, and he's almost becoming a regular on this show. It's your third time, and I'm really happy to have you again. And would you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do on the Plus?

Alright, well, thanks, Dennis. First of all, thanks for having me back as a repeat guest. I always enjoy your show because of the variety format and stuff like that, so I get to meet new people like Jules there and stuff like that. I hang out mainly in the kind of social SEO space, and my interest is something called social media optimization. So I like to study the relationship between what you're doing online and how that can affect, you know, hits on your blog and maybe drive traffic to your blog and how all that works together, whether Twitter's working more, LinkedIn. So I kinda look at all that stuff, and, you know, I kinda like looking at data and analyzing the raw data rather than anecdotal type stuff. So I enjoy that. And, you know, clearly, well, clearly I've drunk the Google+ Kool-Aid, but also I can go look at Google Analytics and measure using tracking URLs and see that a massive amount of my traffic comes from my personal profile or from activity on Google compared to any other network. So, so when I say that I'm, you know, my profile URL is Mark Vang Loves Google+, well That's actually true because Google is kind of responsible for a lot of, you know, my notoriety on the internet and search results and stuff like that. So I've drunk the Kool-Aid, but it's— I think they've earned it too. You know, I just wanted to— since we're talking about weather a little bit too, I did want to point out here in Virginia Beach, Virginia is 28 degrees, which is lethal weather for anybody. Yes. Oh my God. I mean, you know, and I'll just point out that in Virginia Beach, 1 inch of snow is enough to close the schools. 2 inches, the governor declares an emergency. So, you know, Eric, I know you're feeling it up there, but, you know, we had a pretty close call here. It's kind of funny because we're in hurricane territory too, so a Cat 4 hurricane will swim by, nobody pays it any mind. We get 2 inches of snow, those air raid sirens start going off.

So it's interesting. I don't really want you to feel bad for me though. It had warmed up quite a bit by the time I went to lunch. It was actually up to 11 degrees.

Oh, that's about what it is here too. It's like negative something with the wind chill. I actually used I wasn't sure that that's where you were. That's great. And I can attest to the fact that, yeah, 1 inch of snow is enough. Everything shuts down in Virginia Beach.

And Dennis, if you're interested in turning the entire show into a rant on eating patterns, I actually am very passionate about that topic as well, just for the record. I've done a lot of different diet stuff. So Jules, I'm fascinated with the stuff you're doing.

Yeah, and I see there's tons of questions and comments there as well.

So I'm sure there's lots of folks who would love to engage a little further on that.

I'm happy to talk about it if you have questions.

Really?

Yeah.

Absolutely. You know, well, gosh.

I'm so passionate.

That's what this is for. You know, there's no set format. You just ask each other questions and learn from each other. Although, you know, I know we're going to have some questions about SEO too, but you know, go ahead and get your diet questions. We're happy to take them. What were your dieting rants there, Eric?

Well, you know, the thing is that people don't realize that the way that food is produced, particularly in America, market today, it's a big business. It's built around scale, and it's built around producing food efficiently and pushing it out in volume so it gets out cheaply. That's what they do. The quality of the food and the health benefits of the food are all sacrificable along the way. It's all very secondary to to the profit margin. Running a business to make a profit's not illegal. I'm not saying that. It's just unfortunate that the general public is so ignorant that this whole thing is taking place. Gluten-free is one example. The issues with gluten is one example. The issues with white grains is another example, which is like pouring sugar into your bloodstream. It isn't really any different than that. These are things we all routinely accept in our diets. There's an opening rant for you right there.

There you go.

Hey, I'm all about that. I think it's fantastic. One of the things that's really neat to me, and Chef Dennis, I'm sure you've seen a lot of this in your work as well, this is a great time to be involved in food because the generational shift has really come full circle. When I grew up, my parents hardly ever cooked at home. They both worked outside of the home. There were a lot of TV dinners, that kind of thing. Now you start seeing people who are actually returning to the kitchen, and they're investigating exactly what you just talked about. Where does our food come from? What is it made from? Who's growing it? The local movement for food is— people are so passionate about that. I love taking my kids to the farmer's market, taking them to the farm to actually pick their own food. This is a fantastic time to be in the food industry because we're actually really seeing it come full circle and come back around again. People aren't eating out of cans like they used to. They're not eating their frozen dinners. They're questioning where their food comes from. What's a GMO? Who grew this? It's a really, really exciting time because we're learning so much more about what we put into our bodies and what we can get out of it because of that. We're questioning, just like exactly what you said, what is this that I'm putting in my body? If I can't pronounce this ingredient, should I really be feeding it to my kids? This is exciting to me. Gluten-free is just one piece of that puzzle, as you alluded to. I'm thrilled to talk about food and where it comes from and how we can make it better any day of the week.

That's the one thing. Everybody eats, so we're all passionate about food one way or the other. Some of us are just— I think need this extra information that everybody's starting to bring forward and help us to eat better. I remember an old Macrobiotic friend of mine years ago had said, you know, this was years ago, 30 years ago. He said, you know, anything you put into your body that's white is bad for you. White rice, white flour, white sugar, you know, this is way, way back. And he said, you know, you can't eat— he wanted me to eat mung beans and the other one, but he said I could live on, on, on it.

So my brother actually died My brother saw a nutritionist at one point, and the nutritionist is giving him all these things to do, and he finally said, "You need to simplify it to me. Can you give me, like, some way that I can improve my diet in a single sentence?" And the nutritionist said to him, "I'll give you two words: avoid white." Avoid white.

That's good. That's good. Well, and now we finally actually have access to options. I mean, when your friend was telling you this, Dennis, years ago, it was harder to find those things.

Oh, yeah.

White was all we had in terms of choices. Now you go to the store, you can buy quinoa, you can buy chia. There's all kinds of different choices out there now. The fact that they're available and people are actually getting to be aware of the options now is what makes it so exciting. Most people think gluten-free, all the grains have gluten in them, you can't have any grains at all. Most grains don't have gluten in them. It's just that we're finally having access to those grains, a lot of these ancient grains, amaranth, and all of these wonderful things that are so exciting to use for us foodies when we like to mix and match and come up with really fun recipes. For the average person, they can go in a regular grocery store now and pick up quinoa or brown rice instead of white rice, or making those little changes that can make a big difference in health. It's the awareness combined with the access that makes right now where we are in society and how we're living today so exciting.

Dr. Pompa: The other part of that is it's actually becoming profitable now for companies to produce this stuff, so we're going to see more and more of the products available. Once that That's a big part of it.

I saw someone in comments was just mentioning pasta. There are all kinds of pastas available now, even if you're gluten-free or if you're avoiding white. There are some amazing pastas that are made straight from beans, just absolutely nothing but beans, like black bean pasta, linguine, tortellini, all kinds of wonderful things. They taste really good, and they're super healthy. They've got protein, all kinds of stuff. You don't have to say, "Well, I'm 'cause I'm avoiding white or because I'm avoiding gluten, I can no longer have pasta or I can no longer have bread or I can no longer have these things that I like. There are ways to get those things in your diet still and enjoy them, and, you know, they're pretty exciting to taste the new flavor combinations and see what's out there in terms of opportunities for food and manufacturers, as you mentioned, Eric.

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I just wanted to pop up a real quick comment here from Lynn. So great to see Jules Shepherd here. Big fan of hers for the past couple of years. Used your recipes and for the— and Thanksgivings to help family get off gluten. So see, there is a good way to do that. And Jim Whiteley just finished the book Wheat Belly, not on this venue, but would love to hear your take on that book. Anything about that, Jules? I guess not. I've never heard of it either, so okay.

Yep.

Alright, well, we've been talking about food for a while. Let's move over to SEO because I know there's a lot of questions about that and I have some myself. There's been some recent changes over the Christmas holidays as Google always likes to do. They just kind of sneak them in, they don't tell us and people find them. And it's my great Easter egg hunt I like to refer to it as. And luckily for us we have people like you guys that do know what they do and do see them when they happen. For us, it's like somebody hit me with a hammer a few days later. But what did you see? I'll start with you, Eric. What did you see as some of the changes in what happened over the holidays?

Well, you know, nowadays they're providing a lot less information about the individual updates than they used to. But we definitely saw a number of clients that were reporting some rankings changes. But to be honest with you, I haven't dug into it that much, so I'd like to see what Joshua and Mark thought about the update. But from my perspective, I don't have much intelligence on it just yet.

Okay. Joshua, you got anything on it for us? Have you seen much of the update?

I will say that Mark is the expert on what's been happening with the update, with the authorship updates lately.

Well, yeah, the authorship updates, of course, is a big deal. No question there.

All right. And that was a big thing lately with a lot of people, some people wondering why their authorship disappeared. Well, not authorship, their image may have disappeared and instead it's just their name there. So Matt Cutts had mentioned that there was going to be some refining and cleaning up of the authorship results and that's what was seen recently. So it looks like they've already started that. So it's good to make sure that you've got a good handle on, you know, what the different authorship guidelines are and that you're following them. Myself, I had some that I wasn't actually sticking with quite correctly. Like, early on, I had stuck authorship in some places on sites that later on it was suggested that those are not ideal to be authorship, tagged as authorship sites or authorship pages. So I neglected going back to clean that up. And afterwards, I had to go and do a lot of different cleaning up like that. And a lot of people do need to do that. One thing about Google though is that changes, they're always changing. So if you did see your authorship image disappear for a while, you know, then you should— I wouldn't panic and freak out about it like the end of the world, because, you know, if you go and fix it and clean it up, any kind of Google filters, penalties, whatever they are, ultimately they, they, they've never been permanent. They, they always— sometimes they cycle quickly within, at the very shortest, days, weeks, and sometimes longer, months. But, you know, you need to go in and get any of those kind of things fixed up. Did you—

there were a couple of different things that happened. One And I was actually addressing— I had seen some reports of rankings changes, which is separate from what you're talking about, Joshua. We had seen a wave of reports come through of some ranking changes that we haven't really been able to confirm what the source of those are yet. On the authorship side of things, what I can add there is that Google— well, Matt Cutts did say at PubCon, which is a conference in Las Vegas, that they were going to start taking out authors that they— or listings that they felt were no longer a fit. And it was going to affect about 15% of the total listings showing authorship in the search results. And so that means your pretty picture showing up in the search result next to your article would go away for about 15% of the situations where they were doing it. And at the time when he presented it, he made it seem an awful lot like they were going to take authors out. In other words, an authorship was just going to— an individual author was going to lose all their authorship privileges. But in the implementation, it looks like there was a strong component of some of the authors losing their least well-fitting authorship privileges, but not all of their authorship privileges, which was really interesting. It wasn't what anybody expected. Do you agree with me on that, Joshua? That we were all thinking that the author was going to get knocked out, and instead a lot of what they did is they took out some of the listings for some of the authors.

Yeah, I've seen that, but I've also seen, you know, maybe certain types of purgings of the authorship were more industry-specific, like they saw there was an issue there, like real estate, for example. A lot of different real estate people mentioned to me, and, and it was mentioned, uh, by Google, that things like listings and things wouldn't be something you would attach your authorship to. So if Realtors, for example, attached authorship to their whole site as a default, then all their listing pages are gonna have authorship but even if there's no content written there. So there was a lot of that. And so some of those kind of things in certain industries, we did see some big, more specific drops. And then also, I think related, possibly due to the CTR effect of the images. You know, there was ranking, or I mean click-through rates and traffic down for some of those different people as a result as well. But I think it's still in the fine-tuning process, to be sure.

Yeah, now a couple comments I want to add there. I mean, when you think about what you do with Google authorship, you really want to make sure that you're only associating that with your very high-value content pages, right? It really shouldn't be on your commerce pages and things like that. That's not what Google wants it to be for. And so that's one way that I think people were impacted And that was something from their perspective that made a lot of sense. Think about it this way. You want to associate your authorship with something that shows off that you're an expert in what you're talking about. Right? And that's really, I think, where it belongs. So people who are trying to implement this for their businesses should really focus on that. By the way, Dennis Littley, we have a comment here from Greg Trujillo. Reporting that his image disappeared from his post. And he noticed that he lost about 20% of the traffic to those particular pages, which is pretty interesting. This is a real hardcore statistic showing the benefit of authorship and why you should pursue this if you can. But it just underscores that it's really important to associate this with really your best quality content. You don't want it across your whole site.

Are there other instances when, when Google would penalize you for having certain pages? Or you had mentioned as a penalty removing your image, Joshua. Or are there other instances that they might penalize you for doing something or that we don't want to have it associated with? Or is it just like those kinds of pages?

Yes, there are a list of things that you, you know, shouldn't and shouldn't do with authorship. So it's too easy. I mean, originally it was too easy to just turn on authorship as default for your website or websites. But if your website had a lot of other content on it, like it was an e-commerce site then maybe a whole lot of it is just sales pages of products. And, you know, I don't know how much this affected the, you know, food industry or people like recipe type sites, different people's blogs. A lot of those, well done, would be considered good authorship examples. But anyone who's got, say, recipe sites where, you know, it's basically just fast rewrites, very short, almost nothing there, or it's duplicate content, just, you know, so-and-so gave me this recipe and so-and-so's this recipe, like that. And then if you had authorship default on for your website in total, then you would be claiming authorship for a lot of low-quality content and content that wasn't yours. So those kind of things, you, you really do need to be careful. So you need to make sure authorship is only applied to your content that you've written, and also the content that is your quality content.

Sounds good.

What about for product pages and things like that you mentioned earlier? But if that's what people are looking for, should there be authorship there as well?

If it's a page which— my short answer would be no. Yeah. That's not what they want it for. They want to associate that picture with an expert, right? An authority, right? And your product page is not a reflection of your authority in the sense that they mean it. Because they really are looking for authoritative content, Jules. That's really what they're trying to use that for. In fact, Edward Antrobus has a question here. What if you're trying to operate in several different niches? He's a food blogger and— thank you— and a PF blogger and an ebook specialist. This is an interesting case. I'd love to get Mark and Joshua's take on this because now, you know, you're trying to be an expert in 3 different spaces. I guess my own take on it would be if you are in fact investing enough time and energy where you are in fact coming across as an expert and truly adding value in multiple different spaces, That probably can work, but the real answer to that question is rousting around somewhere in the hidden corridors of Google. So who the hell knows what really is happening? That's a way to put it.

I was going to add that in the pre-show, in the green room, Joshua and I were kind of talking about all this. And I want to point out that we were mentioning that sometimes these changes kind of roll out, and then there's a little rollback too, because Google's going to tweak things. I've seen a huge number of people jumping into all sorts of comment threads, like in response to some Mark Traphagen who, you know, is trying to help some people out and everything. But a lot of people are jumping in and doing all kinds of little experiments. Well, I'm going to try this and do this and do that. And, and I might suggest that you might want to just wait for things to settle a bit. You know, if something's disappeared, you know, over the course of over several months, it's not unusual for people to kind of notice a listing change and change back anyway, just in day-to-day life on Google and in search results. So perhaps trying to dive in and overhaul your whole authorship strategy, you know, within 2 weeks after this rollout, uh, maybe isn't something you want to consider. I don't know how you feel about that, Eric or Joshua, but it might be, you know, if Google's tweaking things and you're tweaking things at the same time, maybe you're not really helping the situation, uh, get aligned. And I think also a lot of people get confused between personalized search results and, you know, you guys know what I'm talking about there. You know, if you're logged into Google, you're going to see a completely different picture than you will if you're logged out of Google or in a separate browser than Google. So it's kind of important to have an understanding of how to look for changes before you even start looking for changes, because the structured data tool, the Rich Snippets tool, is always going to show it in a perfect, you know, setting. It always is kind of going to look like it's working for you, but you have to kind of understand the relationship with, with, you know, if you're logged into Google, you're going to see different things. So I'd like to see a little focus on that, maybe just kind of temper off a little bit on, on chasing the changes, because who knows what it's going to be like 2 weeks from now. And, you know, if you, if you make too many changes to your site, that might affect other things that you're not even thinking about right now. So. I tend to be a little laid back. I know, you know, it seems like I'd kind of be on the cutting edge of all that, but I like to see how things settle out over a month or two before I get too excited. What do you guys think? Am I—

Yeah, I'd kind of split the difference with you, Mark, to tell you the truth. I think, you know, if you've got authorship sitting on product or e-commerce pages, I'd take it off now because you just know that's not what they want to do. But if it's like your blog posts and stuff like that and some of them disappeared and some didn't, I agree with you. I wouldn't go rush off in a panic and go change everything. Just let things settle out a little bit, right? So if you know you're using it in the right kind of places, then yeah, let's see what Google does with it in the end after they make some adjustments.

Sounds good.

Yeah, I agree too that you definitely want to fix anything that is is obviously not correct. But at the same time, know that there will be and always is continuing fine-tuning. And then what you mentioned, Mark, about the personalized search results related to that is interesting too. Because— and Eric, maybe you've been noticing this— but some people who have had authorship, like their authorship image not appearing in, in a lot of the search results, still have that image appearing in the personalized search results and with people that they're connected to in the personalized search results. So whereas if people go and then search through a proxy, or I mean an incognito window or something like that, then they will not necessarily see the same thing. So some people, if they're doing their own searches, you may see your image still there all the time, but it is possible that it's actually not there in an incognito logged-out type of search. So that's something definitely worth checking on. I mean, I'm sure you get it right.

I look like a rock star, rock star when I'm logged into Google and I do a search. You know, there's Mark Vang, he owns page 1. And it's like, well, that's, that's a nice little ego stroking. But it, you know, then I log in through the Tor browser or something like that, which is actually even pulling in from a different IP address, and incognito. And then I'm like, oh, I really don't even show up till page 2 in this particular search, and I'm not getting my authorship snippet. So, you know, it's important to think about that. Now, I don't, I don't want to tune that down too much though, because you have to realize that people who are in your network, in your circles on Google+, if they're logged in, that's also working for you, because that means that people who are already kind of tuned into your content If they're logged into Google, they're going to be getting those personalized search results. So that actually is helping you out in a way too. So it's not a piece of trickery. It actually is going to help you out if you have a lot of people who have circled you on Google+ and you do your Google+ posts and stuff like that and get ranked. So it can be confusing, but it's actually a nice little perk. One thing, one little negative of this whole thing is that it used to be fairly easy to talk to people. Like, for example, I have a lot of LinkedIn first-level contacts, and I would try to explain the benefit of Google+. And it used to be very easy to just, you know, show them the picture. You had a very tangible reward for joining. You know, you join, you get a profile. It wasn't guaranteed, you know, you had to do certain things the right way, but now it's becoming a little more a little more nebulous that you can guarantee them that reward for, you know, coming over to the Google+ team. So I don't know if in the long run that will hurt our ability to, you know, social media managers' ability to communicate with people and show a benefit because they're already a little skeptical. A lot of people are still skeptical of Google. You know, I keep saying we all drank the Kool-Aid already, but a lot of— the gluten-free Kool-Aid, by the way, just want to put that in there.

And very good.

Yeah, but, uh, you know, we still have to convince other people who still look at Google+ as a replacement for Facebook or something and aren't getting the big picture. So this might make it a little harder to promote, but we'll just have to wait and see. Maybe in the end it's better. Anyway, that's my two cents on that. I'm sure Matt Cutts will listen to that with great interest and take note of my concerns.

So, uh, modified their business plan already, Mark.

Oh, excellent, excellent.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, you'll be plus mentioning me in a private message right away. Noted.

I didn't get an update from him, so I'll just have to wait for mine, I guess.

I don't think you're in his circles there, Jeff.

I don't think I am. I think Vic accidentally plus one one of my things the other day, though. I got so excited when I saw he had.

So, right, plus one to post to mine once, actually, when I I put a picture up that I had purchased a Tesla. I don't know if people know that, but I actually own a Tesla.

I was so jealous.

Wow.

Yeah, and I put the pictures up, and then, you know, like an hour later I looked at it. Damn, Vic just +1'd my post.

That's what you had to do to get the +1. You had to buy a Tesla.

There you go. There you go. It worked great.

Yeah.

Maybe I could get a payday loan and pick one of those guys up just for a couple days, long enough to get a +1. Plus one and then get it repo'd later.

New strategy for Google+.

Yeah, social media strategy.

Yeah.

Buy a Tesla, interesting.

We have a couple comments here I'm just going to post up. Nazim Beltran was curious to understand what would be the main recommendations for a medium-sized firm to deal with SEO strategies based on the latest changes implemented by Google, social engagement, in-house or external? And Nazim's talking to us from Italy right now, too. I wanted to bring that up.

So should we assume here for this question that Nazim means the authorship change? Because again, I do want to point out that Google did some sort of update— that's kind of what I started when you asked me the question earlier— that caused some ranking changes for a number of people that created a little ripple through the community. It wasn't a big one. But should we assume we're talking about the authorship?

I think so. That's what we've been talking about, so I would assume that.

I'm going to go with what Mark and Joshua were saying, which is if you've only been trying to get authorship for your quality articles, I'd sit and wait a little bit. But if you're trying to get authorship for product pages, pages where you're trying to sell stuff, I mean, I'd pull it off of there. But other than that, I'd sit and wait.

Okay, I've been, you know, that's, this is actually a question I've been trying to bounce off of Mark Traphagen periodically. By the way, I just want to clear, clarify one thing. Earlier on they said, and Mark is the expert on this, they were referring to Mark Traphagen when they're talking about authorship. So as flattering it is for me to sit here and incidentally pick up the byproduct of, yeah, Mark's the expert on authorship, that's wrong, Mark. And this is the second time I've kind of scooped in on a Hangout that Mark Traphagen hasn't shown up on and been kind of like been the default mark.

The default mark.

Yeah, that's my tactic. I find Hangouts that Mark Traphagen is scheduled for, then I wait for him to can out and I kind of slip in.

And you poison his food too, right? Yeah, yeah. I think you're giving him too much gluten is what you're doing.

Yeah, I'm giving him the gluten-filled Kool-Aid is what I'm doing there. But what was I talking about? Oh yeah, something happened. Eric and Joshua, maybe you're better tuned in. We've been telling people, you know, make sure your authorship is tuned into your quality content that you're creating. Of course, Google also has that publisher attribute. If you put a page badge for your Google+ page on your blog, which from what I can guess they haven't really fully activated whatever it is they're doing with that. It seems to be similar to the function of authorship but it's not been fully turned on yet or maybe it has. I just want to toss in for the layman there that maybe that's one way to differentiate between your content if you have pages where you're displaying products, you can use that +Page Badge on those pages because that'll set the publisher attribute. And then make sure you have your personal badge on your blog pages for your authorship. Does that sound accurate?

Yeah. Well, let me define that for people a little bit. When we were talking about authorship, first of all, we've been talking about a tag called rel="author" that you put on pages of your site. And I don't think we'll try to define how to implement that just here. But you can look it up by searching on rel="author." And that's specific to individual authors. And what Mark is telling you now, the non-Traphagen Mark is telling you there, just to enhance that clarification. There's another tag called rel="publisher." And this is a tag that you're supposed to put on the home page of your site and point not to your personal profile page on Google+ but to your brand page on Google+. Then you want to have the brand page point back to your website. When you do that, it actually accumulates knowledge. It helps Google accumulate knowledge about the quality of the content that's on your site on an overall basis. The first tag is associated with an individual. And the second tag is associated with a business. And there is actually some indication that Google may be doing something with the rel="publisher" tag. And that is that they released in the fall something called In-Depth Articles. And if you search on— just to give you a sample search, if you search on US Constitution when you scroll to the bottom page, you'll see this section of listings that says "In-Depth Articles," and it will list a few very authoritative, very in-depth discussions of the US Constitution. And I don't know that they're actually using the rel="publisher" tag for this. But when this "In-Depth Articles" thing came out, people were speculating that it was driven by authorship and the rel="author" tag.. And then people quickly realized that no, that isn't the case. It appears to be more associated with showing authoritative sites that write authoritative pieces of content. So if anything is in play here, it's more a rel="publisher" or a publishership kind of tag. So Mark, it's a great point. You really need to make sure you take advantage of both those tags in your strategy for your sites.

Eric, and for the most part, I think that those in-depth tags that are being used so far— I mean, there's not many yet. I think for the most part they're news-related. I mean, a lot of them have been news type of websites, or I guess those are the already well-known and reputable authors, you know, if you're gonna work down from a list of, you know, content producers. But, uh, yes, I agree. It will be interesting to know how I think a lot of us would like to see the— and I think there's the assumption that there's gonna be plenty more expansion on that, but to keep it authoritative, to keep the reputation of that tag, you know, it needs to go bit by bit while they identify the good content and the the good usage of the in-depth markup, et cetera. So you'd want to make sure you're doing it right, definitely, if you're starting to explore that.

Yeah. No, you're right, Joshua. It does tend to be news-related. I just looked at the US Constitution results. And you're seeing— well, one of the articles is from January 2011. The other is from October 2010. But they are from news-oriented sites. The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Daily Beast. But these are sites that are also relatively authoritative in a general sense. And that's why I— I don't even know that they're using rel="publisher" tagging, to be honest with you. They may not even be using that tag. But this really brings up a great related point. Those of us in the industry sometimes get wrapped around these specific tags that Google creates, the rel="publisher" tag and the rel="author" tag. But Google looks for other clues to establish authorship and publishership. And so they track certain authors that don't even use the author tagging at all. And they know who they are. And if they're ever going to give any rankings benefits, they may give them as much ranking benefit based on their actual authority. And Google is smart. They're not going to limit the world to the people who happen to know about their specific tags.

Right?

And in the same token— a site can become authoritative without ever using a publisher tag.

And Matt's mentioned that the authorship adoption is still, you know, very low in comparison with, you know, a lot of the quality results that they are.

But if you do know about the tag, you should implement it. You're making Google's job easier. It's always a good idea to make Google's job easier.

Yeah. Absolutely. We have a few other comments or questions here. Roxanne Davenport, I have a community that I tried to get authorship for and it still says pending. Where do I find what I need to do so I can get authorship?

Boy, I'm wondering if the community isn't your personal content., right Roxanne? It's content for everybody participating in the community. I don't think the rel="author" tag would apply, but if you're the owner of the community and we're talking about a Google+ community here, Google already knows that. I wouldn't also try to add authorship tagging to it. You're already getting authority as the owner.

Owner. Do you guys agree with that, Joshua? Yeah, well, you can have a business page, for example. I don't know if that's what she's talking about, but a business page can become an owner of a Google+ community, and then it will show up at the top as the owner of that community, and it will also receive receive some of these social signals via being that owner of the community that authors will not receive. But yes, as Eric mentioned, whether it's a Google+ community you're referring to or even a forum or any kind of communities, authorship is content you author. So in any one community, your authorship only applies to the content that you author, the posts that you made, the articles that you wrote. And it doesn't even apply to comments because there would be no— that would be too difficult to functionally use that. So authorship applies to real content that you've authored across the board.

I just want to clarify one thing that Joshua was mentioning there. I believe that one of the things we're kind of talking about is if you have a brand page that is the owner of a community and you have a +1 badge, you know, like a badge or way to +1 for that brand page on your website, the actual community membership counts towards the +1s on the page from what I've read. So I don't know if that's part of what somebody was kind of thinking about, but if you have a community with 1,000 people and the page owns it, your page gets 1,000 +1s on the page. So it's a nice way to kind of build a little authority for your brand page, having— yes, having it own the community as opposed to you personally owning the community. So that's a little tactic you might want to think about there. Anyway.

Very good tip.

Very good tip. I didn't know that. Here's another one from Susan Sarah. A site I have written quality pieces for in the recent past is closing down soon. And I was invited to copy the pieces, which I did. Can I republish those pieces on my own site? Will Google know and/or care? The parent company of the site is a household name, FYI. It's a very positive way.

Yeah, so they'll know. Google knows everything. Google knows what you're doing right now, Susan.

No, I'm sorry.

It should be fine. It's a bad idea in general to have duplicate content all over the place on the web. By the way, I'm publishing an article on Search Engine Land on Monday. I just want to mention it very briefly because that article's going to contradict I'm just about to say now. Because there are times where duplicating content in the right sort of scenarios is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, because SEO is not the only thing that matters on the planet. We're on the SEO edition here. SEO is very important. Obviously, I believe that. But there are always exceptions to anything we say. And my favorite answer to any SEO question is, it depends. Because it's actually a very valid answer to any SEO question. Okay, that was all my disclaimers. Sorry.

Well, it's good to know. I think sometimes people worry too much about the SEO part of it and not the content part of it. And I've always been told just to worry about the content and the SEO will take care of itself. Is that—

Well, and it's largely correct. I think you got to produce fantastic content, you got to promote it really well. And then you have to be intelligent about how you let Google understand and discover those things.

OK.

So that's a— SEO is part of a broader marketing picture. It isn't the whole picture. It's a piece of it. Right? But for the duplicate content situation that Susan brought up, it really isn't duplicate content because it's being taken off the other sites.

Right.

So Susan, get them the 301 redirect.

Yes.

From those pages to your new pages so you can pick up the link juice from those pages. Right? And you know what? They may not— if they don't want to maintain the cost of the web server, get yourself a $15 a month hosting service, throw the domain on there, and implement the 301 redirects yourself.

Yeah.

I mean—

Exactly.

Yeah, but Joshua, I know you were going to—

That's what I was going to say. Yeah, definitely do that. The 301 redirects will solve the whole problem. You'll get the authority passed over to the new content as well.

How deep does it go, though?

Even more important.

Like duplicating content, but how deep does it go? Let's say it's a very long article and you are changing the first, maybe the title, the first paragraph or two. How deep does Google look into that and says, ooh, the whole thing is duplicate content and we're going to rank it lower? How does that—

Matt put out an interesting video the other day on that, a short clip that's very good. I put it up the other day.

Fantastic.

Yeah, so there's two kind of scenarios. To Susan Sarah's question— Susan has another comment here. She's actually not duplicating content. She's moving it. So Susan, our answers are still good for you, though. But Jules, to your question, if you really— there's all kinds of flavors to your question. So I'll start with, it depends. But if you are just moving, if you're taking an article and you're replicating it somewhere else and trying to change some stuff so it looks different, Don't do that. Just take a fresh cut at the article. You want to write about the same topic somewhere else? Start over. Yeah. It's the only safe way to do it.

Yeah.

You know, people ask me all the time, what if I change, you know, 30% of the content, is that enough? Or what if I change the first 4 paragraphs and the remaining 10 paragraphs Now Google knows all.

Yeah.

They can tell. They can tell if you're substituting words. They can tell if you're doing synonyms. They can tell if you're reorganizing blocks of content. They can tell if you're taking part of it but not the rest.

Differenciate, right Eric? That's what I like your talks about, diversity, differentiation. Being different is better. So the whole rewrite concept is just eliminate it.

Yeah, yeah, they're really negative.

In the comments, putting the fear of Google into everyone, right? They know everything, they can crawl through it all.

Ah, yes, well, you know, they maintain— they have a temporal database of everything that's happened on the web. They know, for example,— for your website, they know when every single link actually was initially implemented. They know when it was changed. They know when it was taken down. They know when it was put back up. They know it to— well, they don't know it to the second because they don't crawl every page on the web every second, but they track the stuff. Not only do they know what the current state of the web is, they have have a map of the state of the web over the history of their entire existence. They've seen it all happen, right?

I think Matt makes it very easy for all of us though. He says over and over, write good content. So from the prophet Matt and the stone tablet, that's all I worry about is write good content and I let everybody else worry about this changed or that changed and at the end of the day I just focus on Did I answer a question that somebody was asking, or did I answer a question that I'm asking, and did I answer it well? And hopefully that's the best I can do, because I could— I mean, I'm not even half as smart as you guys or have as much resources as you guys to keep track of this stuff, but I could literally spend all day trying to second-guess what Google's doing, and it would be a complete waste of my time and effort. So I just sit down and say Did I do the best I could for this blog post? And if so, you know, that's it. People are either going to pick up on it and like it and it's going to fulfill a need or it's not and I'll just have to learn from that next time. So, you know, there are little tactics you can employ to try to help you get a little advantage there but at the end of the day I just think, you know, you're fighting an uphill battle when you're going up against Google and Bing or anybody else trying to guess what they're thinking. Thinking because they have a whole different agenda than you do. I mean, their agenda is to have the best search engine and to compete on a whole other level. So you're almost not even on their radar in a certain way. So anyway—

Is that really Bing's philosophy?

Yeah. I didn't know this was going to be a philosophy session, did you? So we've had gluten-free SEO philosophy. Excellent. We need to redo the title on that. It all meshes somehow, right? Yeah, yes. See, I had a gluten-free gluten-free moment, so I had clarity of thought. But had I, like, had some rice or something before this Hangout, you would not have gotten that epiphany.

It's not white rice, right?

Yeah, nothing white. I didn't have anything— well, I had some cookies with white icing, but we won't get into that.

Did you bring enough to share?

Whoops, not enough for everybody watching the Hangout.

I think the bird got the rest of them, huh?

Yeah, exactly.

Yes, he's over there talking right now.

Is that your bird?

Yeah, that's why he mutes every now and then.

Yes, he's been very good.

I actually redid my whole set to where he's not in the background anymore because he would come out and preen during Hangouts. And I think he's just discovered he's out of camera shot now, and he's a little upset.

He's calling the union.

Does he speak? Because you got to watch that duplicate content.

Well, perhaps if there's an— he might be duplicating copyrighted content of another cockatiel, so I might get a cockatiel to cockatiel lawsuit. But human content, no, he doesn't, he doesn't sing or launch into Happy Birthday or anything like that. It's going to get me sued.

He's mostly on Facebook, isn't he, Mark? It's a—

no, no, no, I don't even let him have a Facebook account. No, sir. He's on Twitter.

He's on Twitter. That makes sense.

Boom boom.

Here's another question. Let me pin it up here from Eric Dieter, is it possible to be an expert in two or more topics for authorship?

Yeah, that was similar to the question we took on before, and I think it can be, but the real measure is, are people engaging with your content at the level, you know, that would be the way they would engage with an expert, right?

And I would answer too that, you know, look What if we asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, all the great experts in history, you know, are they experts in more than one topic? In almost every case, yes. And that's going to be the interesting, or maybe one of the more difficult parts in applying the author rank type of topic. And that's a whole nother interesting story there. But as far as authorship goes, it doesn't seem to be— I mean, it would be reasonable that it could apply for more than you know, all kinds, at least a number of different things. But you— but certainly it's not going to happen overnight, like you're all of a sudden you're an expert because you built these couple things.

That's right. So Chef Dennis, I apologize, but I have to jump onto a client call. But I really appreciate the opportunity to have been here today.

And, uh, well, thank you so much for coming on. It was great to see you again, and, uh, I appreciate that.

Absolutely. And Joshua, Jules, and Mark, thanks so much.

It was great.

Thanks for coming, Eric.

Congratulations on your acquisition of Mark, and yes, look forward to seeing great things.

Yes, uh, well, we look forward to seeing great things from him too.

Absolutely. I'm sure you will. I'm sure you will.

In fact, I'll tell him that later today if he's feeling better.

Yeah, if he's not as groggy. Oh, he might have been a lot of fun groggy on the show. I wish he had come on groggy. I know.

We'll make him do it next time.

We'll get some interesting answers out of him. All right. Have a great day and don't shovel too much snow.

Yeah, thanks. All right. Bye, everybody.

Take care, Eric.

I just wanted to post this from Mia. Google sounds like a bad boyfriend at times where you keep wanting to ask, what are you thinking? What are you thinking? But I still love you, Google. So I love that analogy. Mia and her bat crap crazy responses, gotta love it.

I've got one I could toss up here from Tina Willis. Eric just stepped out, so maybe this was a good one. But Joshua, why don't we take a look at this and see if we can help out? I have a burning question. Does personal— did that come up right, or did I mess it up?

Yes, I got it.

Okay, good. Does personal profile authority transfer to local business page for authority if business page isn't nearly as well developed? So now we're not talking about a brand page anymore. I believe she's talking about the local business page, and I'm not much of an expert on those guys. What do you think, Joshua? Do you have an answer for that?

Okay, well, if— when you're referring to authority there as PageRank authority, for example. That is often what we would be referring to in that type of scenario, the authority of a page or profile to rank higher in search results. Then there's not a direct direct transfer outside of the basic principles of PageRank, which would be a link transfer, et cetera. So when you post or share content from your page, then you're giving some authority to your page. But from your personal profile, you— and as a single profile, you can only give so much of that authority. To your page, and after that it's, you know, it starts— it gets to be redundant. So authority coming from a wider audience, more people, diversity to whether it's content on the web or your Google+ profiles, pages, etc. That, you know, really increases in value when it's from a diverse place, location. So for an individual with their own profile, there's only so much authority that you can give to your own business page, and that would be a drop in the bucket. Compared to what you need to be looking at. You know, what content can that, can that business page or that business share that is interesting to everybody all over so that people from, on their different blogs and websites will say, hey, look, I found this, this is really cool, interesting, share links to that content, you know, real genuine citations, those are, are good and important. And the wider and more spread out that is, and genuine that is, with good footprints along the way, then the better.

Did you like how I picked the most difficult question of the session and just passed it right to you there, Joshua?

Yeah, it really picked out a different topic that we hadn't been on yet here.

That's one of the old tricks I've learned hosting my own Hangouts. It's like always pass the ball on the toughest question.

Well, I've got a question up here as well for Joshua. It came in from Karen, and let's see if I can show it. It says, "Jules, how do you feel about people exploiting the gluten-free tag? I've seen recipes for popcorn and fruit dip." that are labeled as gluten-free recipes. I assume it's all for SEO hits, right, Joshua? It's kind of a two-part question. For me, the first part would be it's very frustrating for me to see all of these things labeled gluten-free, apples and popcorn and things like that that are naturally gluten-free, because I think it confuses people. You'll see water labeled gluten-free. Well, if you're new to gluten-free, what about this other bottle? Bottle of water. Is it not gluten-free because it doesn't say gluten-free on it? We built the world's tallest gluten-free cake a few years ago to lobby the FDA to come up with gluten-free food labeling laws, and they did in response, which is wonderful, but this is the one big glaring thing that I think is going to be a problem is that when these are implemented next year, you can label anything gluten-free if it truly is gluten-free. Milk, gluten-free. You're just going to start seeing a proliferation of these these tags and labels, which I think is very confusing. It's because they want people to buy the product. There's this aura around gluten-free. People think, for whatever reason, it's healthier. In some cases, it is if you're talking about whole foods, but not the processed junk that a lot of the gluten-free stuff is. They're just trying to get market share. They're trying to get you to buy something off the shelf. As it relates to something on the web, I suppose the analogy holds. I don't know, Joshua, do you agree? Do you think people are slapping gluten-free on everything just so that they can get SEO hits, as Karen is asking?

I wouldn't really find that to be useful. They may be doing it for that reason, but if you understand about SEO, you know, not from last year and the year before, but today and semantic search, then it's it's not useful. But that said, in many industries— Google's trying to improve the search results all the time, and in many industries it's still very spammy. And then there's a lot of other industries where we've seen search results are much better, far more diverse, and not, you know, really heavily keyword-stuffed content, etc. But in, across the board, in many types of topics and industries, there are still very spammy search results. But in the long term, those will improve and get better as semantic search, you know, as the knowledge graph grows, then Google starts to understand more and more content in a much wider way. And all of those things will be getting better. But yes, that is definitely a problem. And those would be considered spammy-type results. And who knows how long in a very niche area.

Yeah.

How long that kind of a problem will continue. And sometimes it needs to be brought to the attention of, or is brought to the attention of, you know, Google or the Matt Cutts team, where they start working on different areas. But they've tended to work on a lot of the the main or bigger areas first and then work down from there. So I wish to see all kinds of industries—

like slap spam on all these packages that have gluten-free on them. Someone just said they bought gluten-free brown sugar and it was a weight off their mind. You know, it's so frustrating.

But see, the authorship thing is what's big about— gonna help change all that. And that's, you know, where, like, you as an author about gluten-free content, a respected author who's built and building a lot of authority, will start to become— and then more authors, respected authors, will come up in search results. So by that way, a lot of that spammy type of search results will ultimately start going down anyway as long as the good authorship content goes up.

Yeah, that's good.

Good to know. And I think maybe you should go to the grocery store and slap some actual spam on those labels. That might wake them all up really well.

That would be great.

I don't know if the people from Spam would be happy, but—

Yeah, they wouldn't.

Well guys, we're running a little past time here, but it's been a really fun show today. A lot of great information, and it's kind of neat how you guys guys kind of work things together here with the gluten-free and the SEO. So it's, it's what I like to show about how, you know, we're just one big family here on Google+ and everybody's got something to contribute, and then we're always happy to learn from each other. So it's a great thing. So Joshua, thank you so much for being on today. It's always a pleasure to see you.

You've really been a great thing.

I appreciate it.

Wonderful to get to know you in 2013, and I look forward to growing great things this year coming up. Jules, thank you so much. It's very nice. We just met recently and I hope to continue working with you and we get to see more of you on Google+ doing some Hangouts of your own perhaps too.

Yeah, well thank you. If I can get Chrome to not crash then it will be perfect for the next Hangout. Thanks for having me, it was great.

My pleasure. What can happen on Google+ will happen. That's just something you need to know. It's just the way things Definitely have a second computer. And Mark Vang, to be known as AKA the other Mark, thank you so much for your third appearance on my show. It's always great to see you and happy to have you. I'm looking for, again, for great things in 2014. We're going to have a lot of fun on Google+.

Thanks, Dennis.

I appreciate it.

And to all of you out there, thanks again for being here on Good Day Google+. It's always a great day when you're on Google+. Plus. So go out there and make some new friends, get out of your comfort zone, and you never know who you're going to run into on the Plus that might give you some really excellent information. It's always a good thing. So keep learning, and I'll see you next week.