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Dr-Pete

@PRAComms This may vary case by case, depending on the strength of the brand, but the good news is that the Brand Authority model is designed to recognize both.

We don't try to detect a brand name based on the domain name itself. We look at all of the keywords the domain is ranking for and analyze those rankings/SERPs for signals that tell us that Google thinks those keywords have navigational or brand intent. Ultimately, this can cover variations of the brand name, queries containing a part of the brand name, and even recognizable products and services.

For example, for TSA.gov, the Brand Authority algorithm recognizes that both "TSA" and "Transportation Security Administration" represent the brand, as well as brand-specific queries like "TSA customer service." Even more interestingly, IMO, is that it can spot the brand relevance of searches like "PreCheck" and "TWIC card."

So, it's complicated, but in summary: All of the above.

Dr-Pete

With the caveat that this is a 7-yo thread -- I'd say that it's generally more of a filter these days (vs. a Capital-P penalty). The OEM or large resellers are almost always going to win these battles, and you'll be at a disadvantage if you duplicate their product descriptions word-for-word.

Can you still rank? Sure, but you're going to have an easier time if you can add some original value. If you aren't allowed to modify the info, is there anything you can add to it -- custom reviews (not from users, but say an editorial-style review), for example? You don't have to do it for thousands of products. You could start with ten or 25 top sellers and see how things go.

Dr-Pete

Don't have an exact date, but the UI feature is relatively new. I agree with @effectdigital that this is a general capability that Google has been building/expanding for a while. It's helpful to look at that underlying logic, as it will spawn new features over time.

Dr-Pete

Unfortunately, some keyword research tools may strip that special character out, so I'd be a little wary of the results. It may not reflect what Google does in all cases.

Dr-Pete

While this is interesting (especially to me and others who like to dig into the nuances of search), I'm not sure if it helps you much practically. I don't think a typical searcher is every going to enter "¾" (or, if some do, it's incredibly low volume).

Dr-Pete

Can you provide a context? Over the past couple of years, Google has started to treat symbols differently depending on the context. I've seen weird situations with the $ sign, for example.

In some cases, Google will try to actually do the math and pull up calculator functions, for example. However, the handle a search like [3/4" wrench] pretty well and seem to understand the context (and match it to '3/4' in title tags, etc.).

Dr-Pete

From a product perspective, we tend to need to set guidelines that can be quantified, but I'm afraid the whole truth is never quite that black-and-white. All else being equal, I think keeping your titles to a reasonable length is beneficial. Long titles don't automatically harm you (there's no Capital-P penalty for it), but they tend to create a few problems:

(1) Often, long, CMS-generated titles front-load repetitive words (like the site name or category/sub-category), which devalues the unique/important words in Google's eyes and is more likely to make it look like duplicate content.

(2) Long titles tend to devalue important words for search visitors as well, which can harm click-through rates. I'm a firm believer that CTR has indirect impact on ranking over time. Even if it had no SEO significance, it's generally bad for engagement and for your site.

That said, it depends a lot on what you're dealing with. If a title of a page is, say, a title of a blog post, and it's just a long title, that's probably fine. If you have 5,000 product pages that all start with "Bob's Discount Propane Warehouse | Propane and Propane Accessories | ...", then that's going to be detrimental to your usability and SEO.

You mentioned images in your reply to Christy -- could you give a couple of examples of the types of pages and titles you're talking about? In general, image-only pages with no additional content (especially if they have near-duplicate titles) are going to be low-value from a search perspective.

Dr-Pete

You can't really "optimize" for Hummingbird, but understanding RankBrain can certainly help you do keyword research and write relevant content better.

Dr-Pete

I know it's not very clear, but I think the important thing to remember about Hummingbird is that it was a complete rebuild of the core algorithm. I think natural language queries drove part of that rebuild, but Hummingbird covers a lot of ground and will be powering algo updates for months or years. As Danny said, it's like they put a whole new engine in the car. RankBrain is much more specific.

Dr-Pete

I'm afraid it's probably more complicated than that, and I'm not sure anyone outside of Google (and most of the people inside of Google) has a handle on all of the details.

Hummingbird was very broad. It wasn't just an update, but an entire rebuild of Google's core "engine." When Google launched it, they gave examples that make us think a lot of the updates were necessitated by natural-language queries (voice certainly created some of that pressure). So, it definitely changed how Google processed very-long-tail queries, but I think it also created a framework for much more (and may have even been a foundation for RankBrain). Danny's very early FAQ is still a good resource:

https://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-172816

RankBrain causes confusion because it gets conflated with ML in search in general, but I think RankBrain has a very specific meaning to Google. I've written about it quite a bit and have had a handful of private conversations with Google employees, and still don't feel like I have all the facts. Here's what I'm comfortable saying... It is an ML-based approach to understanding query relevance, very likely related to models like Word2Vec. Best I know, it acts as a sort of re-ranking layer. So, Google returns results and then RB re-sorts them based on its understanding of relevance. So, truth be told, it's probably not as impactful as some folks think (ML in search could be much broader). It's most active for long-tail, natural-language queries, so there's some connection to Hummingbird, conceptually.

Dr-Pete

Someone who will not be named (it rhymes with "Bomb Itch Slow") told me to Mechanical Turk the crap out of it

Dr-Pete

Thanks for sharing your story, Rick. My wife and I lost our first pregnancy due to Turner's Syndrome, so I'm painfully familiar with how random the genetic lottery can be. I'm happy to say we have a healthy, happy 17-month-old girl now. I'm glad to hear Noah is doing well, and I'm heartened to hear how proactive the doctors are being.

First off, I'd just like to say that you're doing a lot right. You have a well-designed site with great content, a good core structure, and many of the important features of a modern site/blog. The wide world of SEO can be overwhelming, but it's rare that you need to tackle it all at once.

I think it's great to be thinking proactively about categorizing your content, and it's ok to let that evolve organically as your needs are clear. Categorizing the videos certainly makes sense.

At this point, though, given that your basic structure is good and you've got a lot of content, the social and link-building aspects are probably equally or more important. You have one tremendous tool at your disposal - sincere passion that can connect you to an audience. Your own outreach efforts, interactions with other parents, discussion boards, communities, etc. will go a LONG way. As you build relationships, links will start building themselves.

One thing that wasn't clear to me until I fully read your post and dug into the site was that your wife is a pediatrician. The "Mom MD" just read like a cute category name to me (no offense intended - that was just my first impression). This fact, IMO, adds a lot of credibility to what you're doing, and makes this more than a personal blog. I'd make this clear, especially on the About page and at the top of the Mom MD section.

Dr-Pete

I have some smaller clients who have had limited luck with it, but I think it's best to just stick to one of the sites and do periodic releases (maybe every couple of months). If nothing else, it'll give you a sense of what's working, and you can take some of the popular releases and push to get them a broader market.

What I wouldn't do is go after multiple low-value PR services and plaster the same releases everywhere you can. At best, it's diminishing returns - at worst, they'll be devalued. I'm with Peter G. - the best press release opportunities come through relationships with the media. Obviously, though, that takes a lot more time.

Dr-Pete

Rand has a great post on link valuation:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

There's no magic to .edu links, frankly - the data over the past couple of years doesn't really support that they're inherently better than .com's, etc. It's true that many .edu sites are high-authority sites, of course, but that's just a correlation (it's not that Google prefers .edu or .gov inherently).

Within any site, though, you have to look at the Page Authority, the number of links on that page, the placement of the links, the anchor text, the relevance (to some degree), and a lot of other factors. Let's take a non-edu example - DMOZ. People kill themselves for DMOZ links, but lately I'm seeing DMOZ listings where the entire page isn't indexed because it's so deep. No indexation means ZERO link juice. So, even though it's DMOZ, the link is worthless.

Dr-Pete

This gets into the realm of opinion pretty fast - it can be shockingly difficult to measure the value of one link. Here are a few of my opinions:

(1) One link is one link. It's rarely the magic pill people want it to be, even from a very authoritative site. I've seen people get a link like this and then wait on their hands for a sudden change in rankings, and it almost never comes. If you're just starting out and you have little or no link profile, a strong link can kick-start you, but I wouldn't pay $750 just to get a link if your site is established (I'm not sure I'd pay it even if your site is new).

(2) DA and PA both matter, and how much each matters can really vary with the situation. Your profile on a deep page of BBB is not an authority=96 link. It will carry weight, but the weight of any given profile could vary a lot.

(3) BBB has gotten a bit more aggressive, IMO, and I suspect Google will devalue these links over time. People tell me that they haven't yet, in this case, but it is, in essence, a paid link. Any day, Google could say "These BBB links are counting too much" and just lower the volume. So, don't put all your eggs in one basket, no matter what you do.

Now, to be fair, your BBB listing does have other value, like using it as a trust signal. The business case for spending the money goes beyond SEO, and that's a decision you have to make for yourself. If 100% of your interest in the listing is for a followed link, though, I personally would spend the money elsewhere.

Dr-Pete

Let me jump in and clarify one small detail. If you delete a page, which would naturally result in a 404, but then 301-redirect that page/URL, there is no 404. I understand the confusion, but ultimately you can only have one HTTP status code. So, if the page properly 301s, it will never return a 404, even if it's technically deleted.

If the page 301s to a page that looks like a "not found" sort of page (content-wise), Google could consider that a "soft 404". Typically, though, once the 301 is in place, the 404 is moot.

For any change in status, the removal of crawl paths could slow Google re-processing those pages. Even if you delete a page, Google has to re-crawl it to see the 404. Now, if it's a high-authority page or has inbound (external) links, it could get re-crawled even if you cut the internal links. If it's a deep, low-value page, though, it may take Google a long time to get back and see those new signals. So, sometimes we recommend keeping the paths open.

There are other ways to kick Google to re-crawl, such as having an XML sitemap open with those pages in them (but removing the internal links). These signals aren't as powerful, but they can help the process along.

As to your specific questions:

(1) It's very tricky, in practice, especially at large-scale. I think step 1 is to dig into your index/cache (slice and dice with the site: operator) and see if Google has removed these pages. There are cases where massive 301s, etc. can look fishy to Google, but usually, once a page is gone, it's gone. If Google has redirected/removed these pages, and you're still penalized, then you may be fixing the wrong problem or possibly haven't gone far enough.

(2) It really depends on the issue. If you cut too deep and somehow cut off crawl paths or stranded inbound links, then you may need to re-establish some links/pages. If you 301'ed a lot of low-value content (and possibly bad links), you may actually need to cut some of those 301s and let those pages die off. I agree with @mememax that sometimes a helathy combination of 301s/404s is a better bet - pages go away, and 404s are normal if there's really no good alternative to the page that's gone.

Dr-Pete

I appreciate your transparency, but to me that looks like low-quality article spinning. It's ok to a point, and it may get you a short term boost, but those pages are going to be devalued over time. Plus, they have no other value (those links won't drive traffic).

As for the argument that Google can do whatever they want so that makes anything ok, I strongly disagree. There are link-building tactics that can create long-term problems. Should a client risk a full-on penalty for a low-quality link-building tactic that might get them a 5% boost for 3 months? For me to suggest that as an SEO would be grossly irresponsible. There are smart risks and there are bad risks.

Dr-Pete

I find Google is usually good about UTM parameters, but not always - for use in Adwords, they're almost never a problem, but when you use them for custom tracking, they can start to cause duplicates. Bing/Yahoo also don't handle them very well.

I'm not sure on the scope of your site/usage right now, so it's hard to give a definitive solution, but my gut reaction is that I would use canonical tags on the affected pages. If you want to double-check, you can test for the URLs in the Google index. Use something like:

site:example.com inurl:utm=

If they're not being indexed, you're probably ok, and can just keep an eye on it. If it's just a few landing pages, though (and not a massive, site-wide issue), I'd be proactive and put a canonical tag in place, if it were me.

Dr-Pete

Sadly, the short answer is that you can't have it all. Either you index the separate calendar pages, get more pages/content out there and risk some "thinning" of your index, or you focus on one page, maximize the SEO value, but then lose the individual pages.

I would not 301 or 302 to the individual calendar URLs - that kind of daily URL shifting is going to look suspicious, Google will not re-cache consistently, and you're going to end up with a long-term mess, I strongly suspect.

I actually tend to agree with Muhammed and Paragon that a viable option would be to let the individual days have their own content, but then canonical to the main calendar page to focus the search results. That way, users can still cycle through each individual day, but Google will focus on the core content. In a way, that's how a blog home-page works - the content changes daily, but you're still keeping the bots focused on one URL.

Think of it in terms of usability, too. How valuable is old/outdated content to search users? They might find something relevant on an old page, but they still probably want to see the main calendar and view recent content.

Where are the links to the individual days, if "/calendar" always has today's content? I'm wondering if there's a hybrid approach, like letting the most recent 30 days all have their own URLs, but then redirecting or using rel-canonical to point to the main page after 30 days.

Dr-Pete

I have to disagree on this one. If Google honors a canonical tag, the non-canonical page will generally disappear from the index, at least inasmuch as we can measure it (with "site:", getting it to rank, etc.). It's a strong signal in many cases.

This is part of the reason Google introduced rel=prev/next for paginated content. With canonical, pages in the series aren't usually able to rank. Rel=prev/next allows them to rank without clogging up the index (theoretically). For search pagination, it's generally a better solution.

If your paginated content is still showing in large quantities in the index, Google may not be honoring the canonical tag properly, and they could be causing duplicate content issues. It depends on the implementation, but they recommend these days that you don't canonical to the first page of search results. Google may choose to ignore the tag in some cases.

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