Donna Snow, PMP®

I wrote one article and rank #1 in Google results for standard #SERP and #SGE. This is the new SEO hat trick in 2024! https://lnkd.in/gA8qjvmW

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30 million browsers have already deprecated digital cookies. It's not a question of if the death of third-party digital cookie data is happening, it's a question of how fast its death will dry up your pipeline. https://lnkd.in/gzke3QXR One key solution: Gathering and cherishing zero- and first-party data or forging partnerships with those who have it. If your #marketing and #demandgeneration strategy hinges on advertising at a programmatic segment- or persona-level, the death of the digital cookie will be the death of your marketing-led lead generation. You need to own the contact information of who you market to not only so you can still reach them, but also so you can tailor your messaging to win more business with less wasted spend. Lippincott | David Mayer | Amit Sabharwal | Gabe Knapp | Paul Ricard | Michael D'Esopo | Tom Ajello™

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Content marketers aren't copywriters. That's not to say that they can't serve that function, especially when the organization is small and everyone is wearing multiple hats. But as you grow, that shouldn't be the focus. Content marketing teams should be creating a strategy, running content programs, and working with demand generation to serve content to the right people at the right time. They shouldn't only be reviewing landing page copy and making sure blog posts follow the company style guide. If that's how content marketing is spending their time, you're doing your team (and your entire organization) a disservice.

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After listening to last week's conversations on the Google leak, here are my top three actionable takeaways. Yes, aligning titles with queries still matters. More importantly, embeddings are key to mapping your site's topic authority. Michael King has extensive resources about vector embeddings and why they matter, especially in the age of multimodal AI. https://lnkd.in/g9pjcPaE Treat E.E.A.T. like influencer marketing. The leak has shown that Google stores individual author citations across the Web. If there are reputable experts in your field with an expanded digital footprint, they can be valuable in supporting your content's authority. Think quality over quantity when it comes to site authors. Chrome's clickstream influences Google's value signals. Monitor your site's user browser data and adjust your tactics accordingly. #SEO #GoogleLeak

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https://lnkd.in/gt-dRTT6 Per Barry Schwartz, after May 5th, you'll be able to report any website for spam, whether it's -irrelevant -spammy -deceptive -low quality -riddled with paid links This is an extremely slippery slope. -Do we have the freedom to report competitors' websites in mass? -Are we going to see an uptick in freelancers offering mass reporting software with "guaranteed rank increases" by shoving competitors down? -And if you can report a website, can you do the opposite - i.e., counter the report, or are your hands tied? I really don't see how this can end well.

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So if you have ever started a status update and realized the content pulled into LinkedIn was wrong, and then fixed it on your website, but still couldn't get your status update to show the updated content... all you needed was the LinkedIn Post Inspector tool! Tech Tips: Fixing LinkedIn URL Cache for Status Updates (LinkedIn Post Inspector Tool) https://bit.ly/3ycP77C

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More technical SEO is NEVER going to get you out of an algorithmic demotion. If a site has been impacted by an algorithmic update, technical SEO is not the problem, so technical SEO is not the solution. I see agencies making technical SEO recommendations too often for sites hit by Helpful Content Updates. If the content is the issue, improving the technical SEO doesn't address the root cause of the demotion.

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“…And it's now clear to them that Google hasn't been entirely truthful regarding how its search algorithm worked over the years.” 🤯 Google has never been forthcoming on how their algorithm works, but ICYMI - a leaked document (since verified) detailing the secrets behind Google’s search algorithm has created a lot of discussion in my world. It seems they have knowingly allowed a number of misconceptions to shape ongoing SEO strategy. 😡 So now, we learn, we experiment, and we pivot. #seostrategy #contentmarketing #seo

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There've been critical Google Chrome security updates in the last week; are YOU up-to-date with your version of Chrome? If not, "•••" > Help > About Google Chrome will force an update, then it will re-open every one of your tabs on restart.

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Bot 🤖unsubscribes... ✨ We got into trouble with email providers recently... 😯 Didn't know what was happening... Until #activecampaign has sent this.... Basically, there are some spam filter automations that now follow links, and if it is an unsubscribe one they will automatically unsubscribe without your email hitting the inbox or being seen by anyone.... Do you think that #ai 🤖 is going too far in this matter, or is it necessary due to the amount of spam people are dealing with? What ActiveCampaign has done is introducing a verification so when the link is clicked people have to confirm they are human... Is it a sign of curbing #ai? It's certainly a move in the right direction...

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The backlash against the use of AI in content marketing is getting old. It also screams of insecurity and a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology. Instead of telling companies and marketers why they shouldn't or how they shouldn't use AI, content marketers should be investing their time learning how to use AI to create better content, faster, and at scale. That's where the opportunity lies. Stop wasting energy fighting the inevitable. AI is here to stay, and it will change the content game—whether you like it or not. #contentmarketing #contentstrategy #AI

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This week I solved one of the most perplexing URL-related anomalies I’ve ever encountered with WordPress. The other day I noticed paginated URLs were popping up in my GoogleBot logs. /page/3/ /page/6/ /page/9/ etc… This is where it gets interesting. The site (mine) had no paginated pages, yet the requests would return 200 OK and load the homepage... Now, the server stack I have that site on is utterly overkill but its core is: Nginx, Varnish, Redis (irrelevant here), Cloudflare (also irrelevant) Varnish is an HTTP accelerator and proxy that sits in front of a server. It looks like this: [web server] <—> [cache server] <— *Internet traffic*    (Nginx)           (Varnish) My first thought was that the problem was that there was a disconnect between how 404s were being handled between the three systems. But quickly realized that couldn't make any sense, because if I requested /foo/bar/ the server issued a proper 404. Then it hit me…WordPress core treats paginated URLs ( aka “Paged” queries) differently. If you use WordPress primarily as a blogging platform (like if you’re a publisher) and your front page is a Posts page, you’d never come across this issue. However, if your front page is set to a static URL (eg. home) it’s a whole different story! In this case, if it encounters a “paged” URI, WordPress will attempt to load the static page content even if the request is a paginated URL that doesn't exist As a result, you get a 200 OK response instead of the expected 404 error, and it loads the front page. My primary WordPress dev believes this is a result of a patch that WordPress made in 2015 to address a problem with pagination erroneously throwing 404s. My problem with this, from an SEO perspective, is that you’ve got non-existent URLS returning 200 and displaying your homepage. Sure, you could do header canonicals or block with robots.txt but I don't like either option, if something doesn't exist it should return 404, end of story. Also, this could be a huge problem from a crawling perspective. Think about large sites. All you'd need is a list of 500k paged URLs to seriously disrupt a large site's traffic. There are some BIG sites that I've confirmed are affected by this, although many handle it properly For sites that DO NOT have any pagination, I created this bandaid fix. /* START Non-Existent Pagination Fix */ $paged = get_query_var('paged') ? get_query_var('paged') : (isset($wp_query->query['paged']) ? $wp_query->query['paged'] : 1); if ($paged > 1) {   global $wp_query;   $wp_query->set_404();   status_header(404);   header("X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow", true);   include(get_404_template());   exit; } /* END Bandaid fix */ This should go AFTER the initial get_header(); and before the start of your page template eg. if ( have_posts() ) : #SEO #TechnicalSEO

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Big article about #Google came out this week (https://lnkd.in/gCD3Zx9N). Key finding by Rand Fishkin, one of the godfathers of #SEO: "If you care strategically about the value of organic search traffic, but don’t have much use for the technical details of how Google works, this section’s for you. It’s my attempt to sum up much of Google’s evolution from the period this leak covers: 2005 – 2023, and I won’t limit myself exclusively to confirmed elements of the leak. 1. Brand matters more than anything else Google has numerous ways to identify entities, sort, rank, filter, and employ them. Entities include brands (brand names, their official websites, associated social accounts, etc.), and as we’ve seen in our clickstream research with Datos, they’ve been on an inexorable path toward exclusively ranking and sending traffic to big, powerful brands that dominate the web > small, independent sites and businesses. If there was one universal piece of advice I had for marketers seeking to broadly improve their organic search rankings and traffic, it would be: “Build a notable, popular, well-recognized brand in your space, outside of Google search.”"

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I've always been wary of disavow tools. I've seen firsthand how websites can be hurt by improper disavow practices - and it ain't pretty. That's why I'm glad to see Google's John Mueller blast the concept of toxic links, suggesting it's a term SEO tools use to keep subscriptions rolling in. So, what does this mean? Here's the gist: > Google's algorithms are pretty good at filtering out spammy links. In most cases, you won't need to worry about them. > Focusing on building high-quality backlinks is a better strategy than trying to deal with "toxic" ones. > Disavowing links probably won't be the silver bullet you're hoping for, and it could even cause problems. If you're wondering whether or not to use the link disavow tool... rather don't.

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⚠ WordPress maintenance ≠ Update All ⚠ Just checking the boxes and pulling the trigger on “update all” isn’t maintenance. 💥 It’s Russian Roulette! 💥 Plug-in updates and theme updates are not checked to ensure compatibility with your website. Just WordPress in general. It’s just a matter of time before your luck runs out. What makes a great WordPress maintenance plan? 1️⃣ Consistency – having the maintenance completed on a regular, recurring schedule  2️⃣ Safety – a backup in run prior to starting updates giving a safety net to your website updates 3️⃣ Details – each plug-in and theme update is tested to reviewed to ensure there are no conflicts with your website 4️⃣ Expertise – Signalfire has a member of our WordPress development team personally log into the website to perform maintenance 5️⃣ Updates – content support time allotted for making minor content or image updates each month 6️⃣ Communication – each month a personal email is sent letting you know what’s been updated, any upcoming news in the world of your website, and even exclusive tips and tricks for getting the most out of your website What can make a maintenance plan stand out to you? Is there a service or offering that this is missing?

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An important read: https://lnkd.in/gY88sc4Z