Rank Theory #18
The 18th in a long line of regrettable rants (and also a big announcement)
Sean Markey
August 10, 2022
Rank Theory #18
Hello. Friend.
It used to be you could rely on seeing a newsletter every week or every week from me, but the last one I wrote was in May--and the one before that was in February!
But this isn't a newsletter about the relentless passage of time, the way it steals your life away one day at a time until you look back and all at once months have passed and you don't have much to show for it besides a slightly confused look and a quiet, simmering embarrassment.
I've been through the ringer with mental health shit this year (and really my whole life up until this point, it turns out).
But this isn't a newsletter about the systemic failure to identify, address, and treat mental health in the US--nor is it a newsletter about how hard it can be to stitch together soft pieces of success from a chaotic life the texture of broken glass to make a wholly inadequate blanket to seek shelter and warmth beneath.
No, this is a newsletter about S. E. fucking O.
So let's get into it!
In today's issue, you can expect to read about:
- A premium newsletter the like of which we've never seen the like of
- Anchor text and redirects
- Google's exquisitely fucked up algorithm temporarily
- Honey I Shrunk the Content
Rank Theory: Now With More Cost!
That's right, y'all. I'm taking my talents to South Beach my newsletter premium.
Why?
Well, why not?
This newsletter contains valuable info that you can use to make money, so hopefully it's easy for you to justify 11 measly dollars each month for at least $13 measly dollars worth of SEO info.
Also, all this great SEO info is delivered in such a way that it's a god damned joy to read (so I'm told), and while a subscription to my SEO newsletter is less than a subscription to Netflix, you can also take comfort in the fact that I'll never autoplay a show's trailer when you navigate to it on the Roku AT FULL FUCKING VOLUME, so that's gotta be worth AT LEAST, like, $4 all by itself?
But seriously, I like writing these. It gives me an excuse to spend a shocking amount of time studying sites and reverse engineering shit and doing stupid things to a website in the name of science, and publishing newsletters has been the lowest item on my priority list while doing a bunch of other actually paid work so I can afford groceries and A SUBSCRIPTION TO NETFLIX.
If I can support myself--at least partially--by writing this stupid newsletter, that would be pretty cool.
So I'm giving it a try.
If you've enjoyed these newsletters in the past, if you're enjoying this one, please consider signing up 👇👇👇
(wow, I am not able to edit that button color. thanks for that, Beehiiv!)
It's only $11/mo. It'll be slightly more when I do a whole big public launch thing, but because you're already on my list you've got the chance to get in at the low tide mark.
So that's it. This shit takes most of a day to write so I'm trying to justify taking that much time on this, providing you a great read and some valuable info in the process.
If you don't want to/cannot upgrade, don't sweat it. You'll receive an email every so often where I show you all the stuff you could have read about and guilt you in to not being a subscriber.
/self promotion.
Anchor Text and Redirects
Sounds like the title of a Dashboard Confessional album.
Because I'm lazy I've never paid much attention to anchor text.
Oops.
I honestly didn't give it a lot of thought until I saw this Twitter thread by Grindstone:
I started looking at the sites I mess around with--specifically the low authority ones--SPECIFICALLY the ones I've redirected other sites to without much of a thought.
What does the anchor text on those sites look like?
Yeah, it's merda.
The site performance has been hit or miss (not just from the anchor text spread), so I thought I'd turn off some of the redirects and see what happened.
Would rankings improve without the shitty and unrelated anchor text?
Would the site do worse without a strong redirect propping it up?
It's not amazing--but it's a clear improvement from what it was before. The site is very tiny, with not much authority, so to me, with this data point of one, I am intrigued. There's been no other work done to the site in a WHILE, so I'm confident there's a direct correlation with removing the redirect and all the "other brand branded" keywords.
What's next in this series of experiments?
Well, I have a very big authority site that has seen 3-5 big redirects over the years. It's DR 60 (mostly from a mega authority 301 I did a while ago) and has hundreds of pages of really really good content.
It ranks like ass.
Could it be the hundreds and hundreds of links going to it from several years-worth of redirects that have nothing to do with the brand (and in many cases, the niche) holding it back?
So, I'm going to slowly, over a few weeks, unwind those 301s, starting with the weakest and working up to the DR 65 URL with hundreds of links about shit my site isn't about.
Want to know the results of that?
Me too!
A write-up of this will FER SHURE go out to subscribers over time as we see how it does. So subscribe and enjoy those interesting results.
Google's Search was More Fucked Up Than That One Time You Ate Three Whole Brownies and Didn't Realize They Were Marijuana Edibles, You Absolute Glutton
Do you like your sites to be indexed?
Are you tired of your pages constantly not being indexed?
According to this SE Roundtable post, Google has recently struggled with the basic, singular function of what makes its company so much money: indexing websites and serving the most relevant (or the newspaper/magazine with the highest authority and the most tier 2 links) to a searcher.
John "J. Muney" tweeted that things should be fixed soon. Sounds like they already are? But my sympathies to you if your money site dropped out of the top 10,000,000 for an evening or two and a bunch of .pdfs or something replaced it. Such a horrible feeling.
But while we're on the subject of Google ruining your life... the Great Google Product Update of 2022 II (the first was in March 2022) recently finished rolling out. How did your site do?
I'm genuinely curious, hit reply and tell me about it, I won't post any revealing info publicly.
I will post my thoughts on the recent couple of updates in the future.
It's Not the Size of the Content That Matters, It's--No Wait I Think The Size Is Important
As time passes we ride the waves of trends.
- White text on a white background stuffed into a huge footer.
- A link from anywhere it doesn't matter what diseases a site has, just give me a link and also make that anchor text EXACT, baby.
- My domain, it is exact match.
- etc.
One trend that had to break eventually (sometimes, probably) is the ever increasing word count of a piece of content.
Hmm, our competitor wrote 4,522 words about what the best saddle is. Can we do 6,000?
No sweat, dawg, I'm on it.
There were two places this could go:
1. every god damned topic on the internet is covered by 10,000+ words
2. shorter and more to-the-point content starts ranking.
Aside from those monstrous fucking sponsored posts, I think the shorter is better path has been gaining ground for a little while and will continue to.
I believe this so much that I'm taking the several 4k-6k word articles on one of my big authority sites and breaking it across 3-6 posts, depending.
My specific belief here is that more focused topics will satisfy search intent better than humungoid ones, AND ALSO give a site more topical coverage with which to better be seen as an authority.
The site is fairly new (301 redirect authority site) with a mess of anchor text (see above) so I'm not sure I'll see much improvement directly from this. But it has about 7 mega articles across the most important info-keywords, so I'll be breaking these up into several different articles and reposting them to see what happens. I will, of course, report back here.
~
That's it for this edition of Rank Theory. Here's an idea of what I'll be covering in my next post:
- a verrrry interesting Google local pack hack for ranking exactly match keywords that aren't Google local sites
- thoughts on algo updates/industry happenings whatever they may be between now and then.
- preliminary results of the great 301 unwinding
- whatever genius thoughts flow out of me when I sit down at the keyboard to type, the thoughts just flow out of me I'm the Kanye West of SEO newsletters
- other stuff?
One last nudge for you to sign up to the premium version of my newsletter so I can hit the dispensary later do normal, responsible things with money like... bury it? Buy something non-fungible? More research needed.
I hope you enjoyed this and found it helpful. Hit reply and holler at me if so.
Until next time...