When I started out by saying, how come that website ranks in. Mine doesn't. Were really distilling that down to the e a t stuff, the experience, expertise, authority and trust.
Yeah, they'll be doing one of those things or a couple of those things better than you.
So let's talk about authority. What is it? Why does it matter and how do you improve it?
It's Google's way of assessing whether you're the sort of go to person for a given thing, right? Do other people in your industry frequently reference your content?
Yeah, we did a thing many, many years ago on our website explaining deer rates. Every day people come to that web page, and that's because lots of people have linked to it. That page was written ten plus years ago and gets traffic pretty much every day. It doesn't help us, but some of the links to that page.
Do help.
Our ranking. We need to go and reanalyse that and see exactly what's coming into that page. So welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Once again, Alex has not a clue what I'm going to talk about, which actually.
Doesn't.
It doesn't really matter because even if I'd given you a heads up, you still wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about. So.
Um, it's true. I do know about digital marketing.
Broad subject for today. How come this is what we get asked? How come that website ranks and mine doesn't?
Oh.
So not a big subject. Probably only take us five minutes to discuss this. Um, but yeah, we want to talk about so this is, you know, this podcast, you know, if you're all over your digital marketing, if you kind of if you're killing it, then you kind of won't gain anything from listening to this podcast. So off you trot, you don't need to listen, but if you've got a website that you think should rank and you look and do searches in Google for, you know, maybe keywords you think people are using that you'd like to appear for in search rankings and you keep finding your competitors and you're not finding you, and you're getting kind of angry about the fact that you're not seeing your business appearing in those search rankings, then yeah, it's probably worth a listen. We might, there might be, there might be something of use in the gibberish.
Yeah, definitely. It's a very confusing subject for sure. I mean, I'm just thinking about Semi-recent conversations I've had with people where they said things like, is it because I don't pay for Google ads? And my competitor does and, you know, similar and you know, the other one that we get a lot is how come, you know, I'm playing by the rules and doing all the things that Google says I should be doing. They're not, but they're ranking better than me. That's a conversation we had last week. I think with somebody.
I think you're right. Yeah.
It's a very common thing.
Carry on talking shite while I go and turn off that air conditioner thing.
Just fill the empty space. Thanks, man. But yeah, no, and you know it. You know, I think we should probably start out by saying that it's definitely not because of any secret things that they might be doing. Like paying for Google ads is somehow making them rank better. Or, you know, they've got some secret magic thing that they're doing that's making Google rank them ahead of you. A lot of the time, to be fair, I feel that it's sort of inertia in SERPs in the sense that, you know.
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa.
Search engine results pages.
Thank you.
Google doesn't index and and crawl websites and kind of change people's positions all that often, especially not if you're in a market where, you know, there's just not that much traffic or interaction. And people aren't really talking about subjects as much. You may see websites that have just, you know, done very well for the last twenty years and just aren't moving around very much because they're there and they're sort of established, they're part of the furniture, and it will take a little bit of time or a little bit of effort to knock them off that spot. But generally, I think that the sort of basic principles of why one website doesn't rank and another one does are fairly simple and straightforward, aren't they?
Well, my first thought is that I'll teach me to ask you a waffle on. Will I go and turn the air conditioning off because you did that with aplomb, Jesus Christ. You're right. And, uh, well done for reading my notes upside down. Uh, it's not black magic, and it's then there's no mystique. It's it's a, it's a very obvious, um, to geniuses like Alex and to a lesser extent me, it's very obvious when we look at, um, people's websites using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs or Moz. Stupid names. All these tools have.
They do have.
Stupid names. Yeah. But you know, when we use tools like that and analyse websites, it's very easy to see quite quickly why one website's ranking, i.e. their competitors and they're not. And there's no real mystery. So the first thing I would say, if you're frustrated that your website isn't ranking and isn't appearing in search, etc., then using a reputable digital agency, Um, we're one of them. Read evolution, but there's plenty of others. Get them to audit your site and try and figure out what's going on with it. That's, that's a good starting point. If you, if you're not confident doing it yourself, because there will almost certainly be a whole list of obvious reasons why you're not getting the visits to your website that your competitors are getting. And it's better to know all that. It's better to understand that in some detail than than just to continue being angry from Darlington.
Yeah, I think we could probably shed some light on what it is that we'll actually be auditing, right? Because I think for me, this always comes down to one of sort of four factors. And in a way. You're going to shout at me now for making this really geeky really quickly. But so Google have this whole concept of eats, right? Or e a t s, which are these four factors that they look for when they're reviewing websites and working out whether things deserve to rank. And that is Yes. Leaning forward. Tell everybody what.
Each.
Stands for. That is basically experience, expertise, trustworthiness, and authority. Not in that order, because obviously I can't spell. Um, you.
Didn't say it here. What was.
It? Authority. I said them in the wrong order. All right. So, yeah. Experience. Expertise. Authority. Trustworthiness.
Yeah, it sounds better, actually.
Well, you know, I get why they went for the.
Just go through them again and explain each one.
So experience is. Are you a subject matter expert or does Google looking at your website? Think these people know everything there is to know about whatever subject it is. So this is basically what we're saying here is like, if you are trying to rank for keywords that are about, I don't know, clay bricks, and your website is actually about, you know, several different subjects and you occasionally post a blog post about clay bricks. Google is probably looking at your site and saying, okay, these people don't actually know everything there is to know about this specific subject. They're not domain experts.
Okay? Domain expertise is what we're talking about with the E the experience. Yeah. Okay.
And then sorry, I lost track of where we were.
Second. The second of the E's.
Yeah. Experience. Expertise. I mean, admittedly, these were sort of combined until very recently. Right? So it was just the one E and now they're breaking it up into like, do you have the real world experience and do you have the deep knowledge and are you communicating that so well?
Yeah. And when we talk about expertise, we might also be talking about actual qualifications.
Yes.
For example, certainly in certain niches Google would would be very reluctant to provide rankings to a website providing medical advice. For example, if it doesn't look like it's a bunch of doctors that are providing that medical advice.
Yeah. This is exactly it. And it's also the same as I think. So they call them like your money or your life things, right? So it's like medicine, it's like insurance. It's all of these things where, you know, you can you get a lot of people who act like they know what they're talking about. And Google is saying, actually, do you know what you're talking about? Do you have the requisite qualifications? Are you actually a subject matter expert? Um, so that's all things that you're communicating with your content, right? Yeah. Um, then the next one is authority and this one is more about your website's backlink profile. So how oh.
No, no, no, that's fine. Kind of keep it very high level at this stage to go through the. Yeah, yeah. And then we'll dig in. We will talk about authority because we've been yeah. We've got some thoughts on that from some of the things that we've been listening to ourselves and some of the things that we do ourselves. So we'll talk about that in a bit more detail, because I think that idea of authority is a thing that does still confuse people.
It is. Yeah. But basically, are you well regarded by other people in that subject or other people that Google considers to be experts in that subject? Or are you just a sort of outsider on the fringes commenting about something? Um, and then the last one is trustworthiness, which I guess sort of speaks for itself. Um, you know, you know, can you be trusted or relied on to provide accurate and honest information? Does Google look at your website and think, oh, this is a bit suspect. this doesn't look like a legitimate kind of repository of useful.
How do we think how. If you think about the experience, if experience tic expertise, tic authority, tic. So how does trustworthiness. How do they differentiate? Because if you are experienced, you have the expertise. Your site has the authority. Why do they also need to, to establish if you're trustworthy and how do they do that?
Well, so so I think the trustworthiness thing is, is a lot of the time about ticking boxes, right? So for example, one of the examples Google themselves give is that if you are running an online shop, but you don't provide any customer service or returns information, that's not trustworthy because you're not doing the things that they'd expect a legitimate business to do.
What about a website that maybe, again, e-commerce, it could be a professional services business that hasn't got a phone number on it, for example, would they.
Or.
Are they clever enough to figure out that that is a trust signal that's missing?
Well, an important thing to remember about these eats and an important thing that I think a lot of people miss is that these are guidelines created for manual review. So this is given to people who are going to be manually auditing websites that are sort of on the fringes, or that Google is using to test out the algorithm. And then the people go and they say, okay, these signals are there. I feel that this website is trustworthy. Like you say, does it have an about page with pictures of people on, you know, do you name the people who are going to be giving the advice or whatever? And then, you know, those people are going to say, okay, this looks trustworthy and reliable. And then all of that sort of stuff gets baked into the algorithm. So these are actual guidelines for people to review. So yeah, to a degree, I think when it comes to algorithmically assessing a website's trustworthiness, probably, you know, Google aren't very good at that.
Do you think that Google would Google search engines? Do we think that search engines would, for example, on a professional services site, be able to look at the about page, pick out the key people, cross-reference that to LinkedIn to see whether or not these people are real or not. Do you think is he able to do that? Do you think it might be doing that?
I think so. I mean, like, first of all, it's hard to tell. And I think that's like that says something, right? Because we work in digital marketing all day, every day and we don't really know what Google's doing. But I mean, there's been a lot of talk recently about returning the author schema tag. So a while ago, you used to be able to tag the author of a post or.
Yeah. And when we say schema tag, we're just talking about some geeky stuff that has that provides it puts some information that's on a website that's generally not visible to people looking at the web page, it's kind of hidden underneath in the code, which the search engines can read, which provides them with a formatted, some formatted data that they can understand.
Yeah.
Broadly.
Yeah. And it used to be the case that you could say to Google, the author of this post is X, Y, and Z person. And they would take that into account when they were considering whether or not to rank it. And they took that away because people were abusing it. They're talking about bringing it back, or there has been talk about them bringing it back specifically for that sort of purpose that you're implying there, which is so that they can say, okay, this person outwith the company, this person is very active in this subject area. They're clearly an expert. They've written this post, therefore the resource is useful. Um, so I can sort of see that that would happen. I mean, certainly if I was Google, that is the that is the level I'd want to be able to do it at. But as to whether or not they actually can. Okay.
So. You know what, I started out by saying, how come that website ranks and mine doesn't. We're really distilling that down to the e a t stuff, the experience, expertise, authority and trust.
Yeah, they'll be doing one of those things or a couple of those things better than you normally.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about authority because I know that people get confused. Um, when we think, when we talk about authority and why, what is it? Why does it matter and how do you improve it?
Yeah.
Cover that. So what is it?
Well, I guess it's it's Google's way of assessing whether you're the sort of go to person for a given thing. Right. Do other people in your field or, or kind of industry respect you? Do they think that you're the expert on the subject that they can reliably point strangers to? Um, as to how they're assessing it? I mean, it sounds boring, but I think we're just going back to sitelinks and citations, aren't we really? It's. Do other people in your industry frequently reference your content? And I guess I feel like we've kind of said it to death, but it's a very similar thing to how things work in the scientific community. If you are an authority on something and you publish a paper on that thing, you would expect other scientists to cite your research when they're putting their papers together. And basically, that is what Google's looking for. You know, if you if you are in the legal field, say other lawyers referencing your content and saying, oh, if you want to find out more, go over here and look at this really in-depth resource. And if they are, then Google's going to say, okay, well, this person is clearly authoritative. They're clearly well respected. They're clearly somebody that we can trust to rank well.
Okay, so let's imagine we've got two websites and let's just use your example. We've got two websites for legal firms. Um, Robinson and Rose legal and, uh, Bussey and Smith legal. Right. Okay. Both look great. They've both got great design. Um, they've both got great content and broadly speaking, they've both got maybe a hundred pages and they've got, they've both got a blog for sharing subject matter expertise. So to the layperson, they look at those two websites. Well, they both clearly had designers involved. They both look good. They're easy to use. Nice, nice, um, nice user experience. They've got great content in them. So so far, nothing, nothing between them. Somebody does a search for best lawyer in Darlington again. Don't know why I'm picking on Darlington, but anyway. Best lawyer in Dallas. And these two firms, by the way, both based in Darlington. Um best lawyer in Darlington and um the Robinson and Rose is number one then a whole bunch of other websites, a whole bunch of other firms. And then on page two at the bottom position nineteen or something is Bussey and Smith.
Mhm.
Why?
Well, yeah. So links basically. Right, right.
So just just kind of distill that right down. That's twice I've used the word distill. If I use it again, punch me in the face. So. Let's try and just get the message across about what we mean when we talk about links. Because links build authority.
Yeah.
What is a link?
So literally when somebody. How to explain a link. When somebody literally puts a hyperlink in the text on their website that somebody can click and go to your website, right? So they have referenced your website, right?
Okay.
That's it. Is that simple enough?
I think so, yeah. I think that's okay.
Yeah, yeah.
So okay, so we, I think we understand what our link is. You're reading a web page and one of the words is a different color and you move your mouse over it, the mouse pointer turns into a little hand. And you know, if you click it, you'll go somewhere else or another browser page will open and you'll and that page will go somewhere else. So we understand what the link is. Right. Good. Um, why are they important? What, what what are those links doing? What signal are they giving to the search engines?
Well, that somebody else thinks your content is a useful resource for their readers, right? So specifically that somebody else, not you, an independent third party, has looked at your content and thought, oh, this is shit hot. I want to send my web visitors to search.
Okay, so, um, on the, on the Robinson Robinson Rose, uh, legal firm website, we've got a piece of content and we say in our content, of course, those idiots over at Bussey and Smith got this completely wrong. Their case got thrown out of court because they are a bunch of morons, and they've written about it on their website. That particular case, and here's the link to that piece of content. So what I'm actually doing is I'm saying these guys are idiots. Sure. But as far as a search engine is concerned.
It's still a helpful signal of trust. I mean, another way of looking at this is you're still saying from Google's perspective, Robinson and Rose legal or whatever, has still mentioned this other company, which means they're aware of them, which means they're in the same sort of niche. They're the same sort of industry. They're probably the same sort of level. So in a way, you know, even though the link is, you know, wholly defamatory and is likely to open you up to a lawsuit, it's not in and of itself a bad signal as far as Google is concerned. Right. Because it still says these two people exist in the same space.
The words on my page, the Robinson legal what if those words that link to the Bussey Smith website actually say Bussey? These guys are idiots. What would. What would I.
Like the idea of a link on the word morons.
Yeah, I didn't say that. Idiots. But what if it did? What if it said Bussey and Smith. Solicitors are idiots.
So to a certain degree, the anchor text that is the exact phrase that the link is attached to is important, right? So you hear a lot of times people will talk about optimising anchor text, because if you can get a link from, you know, Robinson and Rose to your website that says legal experts and it links to your website, then that probably counts. You know, it'll help you rank for the phrase legal experts better than a link on the word idiots. But I don't think anchor text is all that important. The the entity, the link itself is what actually matters. People, people really do get tied up in knots about all this stuff, you know, like which specifically which two words should I, should I link? And for a while the guidance was only only ever get people to embed anchor text anchor links on your brand name, for example. Don't try and use them to stuff keywords in there and trick us and that sort of thing. And then it switched. And I just think all of that stuff is sort of irrelevant because what actually counts as the trust signal? I mean, again, going back to the scientific papers thing, it doesn't matter where you reference the other paper, the point is at the bottom in the bibliography for your paper, you still mention this other one, and people will look at that and say, okay, this paper has been cited sixty two times instead of twelve times. Nobody actually pays attention to what the citation was for.
Okay, so we've covered because we're looking at authority and how and what it is and how we improve our authority at the moment. So we know what a link is. And we now, I think, have made it clear that they matter because they are used as a trust signal. And those trust signals build up and create the authority that we desperately want. Because it's worth saying, once your website gets authority and that authority in starts to improve, it becomes easier to rank pages. It becomes easier to get your new pages to rank well in Google, because your website overall has good authority as well as individual pages having.
Yeah. I mean, and this is a. And to be fair, that is a big subject in and of itself, isn't it? Because a lot of the time people will build links to a specific page to get it to rank better, you know, in the short term, in the immediately. But that matters less than your overall, the overall weight of your domain, if you like. And this is again, it goes back to the whole idea of these signals being sort of site wide and more about you than individual aspects of your website.
And if you go to Moz dot com, moz.com, and click on their menu item, it's free tools or free resources. They've got a thing called domain, something I can't remember or Site Explorer. Yeah. Basically you can push your punch your domain name into this box like a Google search box. Press the button free of charge and it will feed back your website domain authority, which will give you an indication of whether or not your site is trusted by the search engines, which in turn means you'll know whether or not it's easy or difficult for your website to rank for the things you want to rank for.
And it's probably on the subject of trust, really important to point something else out, which is that this is not a numbers game. I think much like in real life, if you know your mate who you go to the pub with every night, you think he's a bit flaky, he's a bit of an idiot. Recommend somebody to you. You might think, oh, all right, you know, whatever. If somebody on the news like a newsreader that you trust really well says, oh, this person is the subject matter expert on this thing, you'll probably take that recommendation and give it more weight. And Google does the same thing in search. So if you're linked to by a really small website, that itself has very little authority that way that link carries less weight than if a website that has a huge amount of authority already starts talking about you.
So okay, that makes sense, right? So we know what they are. We know why they matter. How do we get them? Because we've now, yeah, we've now established that our website, if we're going to get improve our authority, which is really important if we want the website to get, you know, ranked better and found by our potential customers, um, where do we get those links from? We just go out and buy them off people.
So winning links is like probably the heart. I would say probably the hardest bit of SEO. Maybe that's just because I'm rubbish at it. I don't know, maybe the rest of it's really difficult. And this is the easy bit for some people. Winning links is really hard. It used to be very easy. You used to be able to do all sorts of things to get links, and there were many websites on the internet where you could, you know, pay them a tenner and get thirty backlinks or, you know, you could just freely post your website on other people's blogs or, you know, post guest posts where somebody would say to you, okay, you can write a five hundred word article on this subject and include as many links to your website as you want in it, and then we'll publish it. Um, why.
Did you just punch the.
Table I was waving my hand.
Will do to you.
Naughty bad table. Um, I don't know, but it did hurt a little bit. Um, no. And and then, you know, um, things changed and Google realised that people were taking advantage of this system and they decided to make it much harder. Um, basically they ignore links from websites like that now. So the only way to really build links that have any impact on your overall sort of authority or trustworthiness, as far as Google is concerned, is to win them from really reputable places, which is very difficult. Um, we build links a lot of the time by, um, fostering relationships with journalists. So there are plenty of places like Haro is a service that we use.
Okay, let's talk about some of those. Let's talk about Haro because it's free. Yeah. So it's um, if you just Google Haro and it stands for help a reporter out. Yep. Um, and effectively journalists who are able or not are able journalists who post content on reputable websites are often looking for help when they're writing articles. They're often looking for help, um, from experts. And if you provide them with some help, then quite often you will earn a link from the article that they're writing back to your website. And those links can be very powerful. If some if a journalist, for example, the Wall Street Journal, if you if you if they reach out using Haro and you then make contact with them and they like what you're saying and you and you manage to pitch to them in a way that they're interested, and then they write their piece and link back to you. That one link could have a significant impact on your website, because a very trustworthy resource has linked out to your website. Therefore, some of that goodness rubs off on you. Yeah.
And a lot of the time, these, these news outlets are just looking for somebody to quote and some, you know, a comment from somebody who's an expert in the field. So it's not like there's a huge amount of work and effort required to win them. It's just a sort of right time, right place thing, which is why we monitor them sort of all the time, don't we?
Yeah. And sometimes, um, you get requests in Haro and you mentioned vulture response source. That's a system that we subscribe excuse me. We subscribe to. So I'll start again. Sometimes those journalists reach out and they're actually looking for an expert to write five hundred words or something on a particular subject that they can then use inside.
Aka do their work for them.
You could say that.
A little.
Bit. Yeah, there is an element of that, I'm sure. Um, it's, um, just, just kind of the way it works. But getting back to the essence of it, this method of getting links is easy or hard.
Well, it's, I mean, I mean, the work involved once the opportunity has arrived in your lap is easy. The hard bit is, you know, they don't want comment all that often. It might not be relevant to you. So you've got to sit and monitor these services for quite a long time in order to find something that you're going to be suitable for. And then you can guarantee that when you're writing in to say, oh, yes, I'm happy to comment on this. Seven hundred other people have also written in to say the same thing. So it's about finding ways of kind of standing out. It's about ways of communicating with journalists succinctly as sort of an art in and of itself, isn't it?
Yeah. And if you genuinely are a trusted subject matter expert, you are going to find it easier to get Haro links to get links from trustworthy publications. Publications. Yeah. That's right. Because journalists, good journalists will do their homework if you contact them because say for example, there's a digital agency. We contacted a journalist and said, hey, you know, we're experts on, um.
Artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence. Um, and, you know, we can provide you with some comment. They would almost certainly go to our website, go to our about section, look at our people. And there doesn't seem to be anybody in here who's an expert on artificial intelligence, and you've wasted their time and annoyed them, right? So, you know, it's not it's not a technique that you can use if you're trying to blag it. There are services out there who will help you to blag your way with Haro and and and con journalists into giving you links just because it's SEO and there's plenty of con artists in SEO, but if you do it properly, it can be a game changer because if you put the work in, you will get the links. That said, it's expensive to do it.
In terms of time invested. Yeah.
In terms of time, in terms of the skill set required to reach out to journalists, pitch to them, persuade them that you are the person that can help them with this. And not only that, even then you're not guaranteed a link because they might mention you, they might mention your company, they might mention you and they and they don't link to you. You can't say, look, I am only going to give you this information if you give me a link.
Because a lot of the time it's implied that they will. But we've had we've had things in the past, haven't we, where we've put comment forward and then people have just not linked to the website. And yeah, that's annoying.
When we went back to them and said, hey guys, you know, like, could we have a link, please? And this is why we'd like it. And quite often they'll say yes, but quite often also they'll say no. We were with a new client yesterday, um down, down south and they'd been cited in the Guardian. Um, so I, I, I, you know, he shared the link and the piece was really good and the comment was really good. So I said, look, go back to the journalist and say, hey, any chance that that little piece of text there in the, in the information that I gave you, you could link it back to our website and got a resounding no. Yeah. So, you know, and yet I've heard other people do something for the Guardian and they've got a link. Yeah.
So it's hit and miss. I think that's the thing. And you can't go into it with the expectation. And one of the things I always find really entertaining with SEO is where people are like, right, I'm going to build ten links this month or something like that. You can never have that expectation. You have to go into these things thinking, I'm going to do my best to be useful.
Well, you can if you use one of the services that guarantee ten links for either thirty bob and a fried fish, or five hundred dollars.
Because they're going to go away and work there.
Because they own a bunch of websites, and they can post any old garbage on those websites with a link back to you in order to improve your rankings. There used to be a big thing, and they do still exist called private blog networks. So companies would own thousands of websites where they would quite happily post any content, even machine generated gibberish with a link in it back to somebody's website in order to link build. It was dirt cheap and it worked. But Google put a lot of effort into finding these private blog networks and not only disavowing the links. So they had no value anymore, but sometimes manually penalising the websites that had used them. Yep. Um, I don't think manual penalties are a common thing now. I think Google is more inclined these days. Just say, hey, you know, if you want to spend money and effort and put time and effort into building those links, you carry on. But we're ignoring them anyway. And by the way, we're not telling you which ones we ignore, so you know what I'm saying. What I'm trying to say there is you can you can try and you can try and game the system. And that might work. It might work forever. It might work only for a while. It might never work. But if you go through the hard yards of earning a proper decent citations, like for example, in the world of academia, which is where this idea came from, you would only cite another paper if.
It was genuine.
Usually because you were it kind of supported your hypothesis. For example, you might cite another paper because the person got it spectacularly wrong and you were pointing out why they got it spectacularly wrong. Well, that'd be quite unusual, probably.
Yeah. I mean, just going back to that whole idea, I mean, I do think one of the techniques and tactics that can work for some people in certain industries is this whole idea of kind of like producing linkbait, right? So I mean, just going back to your point there, people generally cite things when they're useful, when they support something, when they can be used as evidence for something in their own writing. So I do know quite a few companies that do a very good job of posting things like industry stats that only they have access to or, you know, facts and figures, that sort of thing that other people will then go and link back to as proof or evidence of something in another article. And that can be hugely powerful if you've got the kind of resources to create those, those things.
We did a thing many, many years ago on our website explaining, um, deer rates because, you know, in agency land, deer rates are quite common. We tend to steer away from them. Um, but they're quite common and people look for such deer, it's explained or something like they're trying to understand. It's quite maybe freelancers who want to understand what they should charge and how it all works. Um, every day there are people come to that web page. And that's because lots of people have linked to it saying deer, it's explained here. This is a really good page to explain how deer. So it's a very simple example. That page was written ten plus years ago and gets traffic pretty much every day now. It doesn't help us as an agency. It doesn't it doesn't help us. But some of the links to that page.
Do.
Help remind me. We need to go and reanalyse that and see exactly what's coming into that page, because we're probably not actually doing what we should be doing and linking from our page, which is getting linked from lots of other resources to other important pages on our website. So let's just explore that a little bit. And it's not too geeky, you know, because the idea of getting links from external resources, yes, it's important. And it's also to get decent ones really, really hard. But you can also link internally within your own website, talk about why that's worth doing.
Well, I mean, so I guess the thing is to remember about links is that Google is trying to understand which of your pages is important and what they're about all the time. Right. And links from other people's websites really help it do that. Equally, if you link to a specific page of your website, lots from loads of other resources all around your website and you talk about it frequently, Google is again going to assume that page is really useful. That page is really important or authoritative. So you can I mean it. Yeah. As David sort of implies, it carries less weight than somebody else linking to your stuff. Um, but ultimately, if you link to one of your resources a lot from all over your website, that does help Google to understand that that is an important page that deserves to rank well or, you know, should be considered.
Okay. So if we manage to get a link to one of our pages, say we write something, you know, we help a journalist out and they write a piece in the Guardian. And for some reason, we managed to convince the journalist to link to a specific piece of content on our page. Then that individual page will get a ranking boost. It will gain authority. If we then from that page, which has now got some authority, link to other pages on our own website, you're saying that that.
Now carries slightly more weight, right? And this is that fantastically murky concept of link juice, which is a phrase I have always really hated. But yeah, it's that sort of idea that you are ultimately providing a, a localised boost to a specific resource and that that passes on. So when that page links out some of that extra link juice, if you like, gets sort of passed on to those pages as well. And the idea, I think the, the idea originated because, you know, it dilutes over time. So that's where the whole like juice metaphor sort of came from. But yeah, it's just important to remember that if a page performs very well and gets lots of links, that page is now more important. The pages it links to are now more important. So it's worth thinking about where you're kind of good resources are and what they're linking to.
Okay. Um, I thought with this podcast, we would actually, you know, how come that website ranks and mine doesn't, we might have talked about some other things, but I think we've kind of gone down, um, gone down the route of looking at authority. So I think we won't go into some of the other, we'll save some of the other subjects which are.
Leave them a cliffhanger.
Which are better understood. Anyway, this area is is the least.
It is fantastically murky.
Yeah, yeah. So let's just, let's just reiterate to finish off when we talk about website authority, lots of things feed into that, such as how long the website's been around, how much, how many pages does the website got? All that will feed in. However, the single most important aspect of authority is the citations, links from other websites, other domains which then give a strong signal that that that your website. If we're talking about your website, which we are is a trustworthy resource, right? So we, I think we've established that the, the, the source of the links, the source of the inbound links matters. So the, the, the quality is vastly more important than the quantity. Yeah. And when we get all that right and earn those links, for example, using the Haro approach, um, we can see dramatic improvements in our website rankings. Yep. And if you were, if you were going to isolate one aspect of improving the way a website performs in search. Would it be that. Would it be that one thing or not.
Will.
Depend on the niche?
Yeah. I mean.
Sorry for our American listeners, the niche.
Well, I think the problem is it has to be done on a case by case basis, right? And just like without sort of undoing all the great work you just did summarising everything, it goes back to that whole idea of there being several different factors at play here. And it is often links. It often comes down to like when we look at the page that's ranking number one for the search term, our client wants to get on. And we look at our client's website. We notice a huge disparity in the number of links pointing to that website that's ranking really well and our client's website. But there are, of course, a load of other factors, and it's not necessarily even the most important one. It's just one that we see very often, I think.
Okay. All right.
You were going to say something about my gesturing on the table, weren't you?
No, I was just just every time you bang on the table, it annoys listeners. That's why my hands are not on the table. So you might have noticed I don't put my hands on the table because it's. irritating. It's not annoying me at all.
It is annoying him slightly.
It isn't. All right. Um, okay, so if you've got any questions on on links and authority and we've kind of already touched on it, but what we're hoping is that we've might, we've kind of demystified it somewhat. Yeah. Um, you know, a link is a thought. It's, it's somebody else saying, yeah, that's a good website. You know, we trust that website. And then the search engines, the whole reason for it is, and I've said this in previous podcasts, um, this is number eighty nine, by the way. We're nearly ninety. We're nearly ninety. Um, I've said this in previous podcasts, you know, when Google were developing, when, um, Sergey and Sergey Brin and Larry, when they, when they were developing this, they needed to find a way of automatically figuring out whether a web page and therefore a website could be trusted, you know, why Was what? How do you decide which are the good websites and which are the bad websites? And it was this link based algorithm that they developed. And it's still the algorithm is still heavily weighted towards.
It's built around that concept.
You know, in some areas of business, you might be lucky enough that most of the websites in that niche stroke niche.
Does anybody actually say absolutely.
Do you not listen to American podcast? They pronounce the word niche niche. Um, so most of the people in your niche may not have, um, good links. They may not, you know, you can be lucky in, in our area of business, in digital marketing and certainly in SEO, it's very difficult to rank for anything because yeah, you know, it's dominated by people who are out link building using both, you know, above board measures and some very dark measures, including hacking websites and dropping links into other people's content without telling them in a whole raft of other things, buying old websites that are more or less defunct but have loads of authority and repurposing them. That's, you know, hard yakka, but it gets. It also works. There's so many things, broadly speaking, called Black Hat, that you can do that work. And, you know, I understand why people do it. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just all you're doing is trying to fool Google. You know, Google isn't God. Google's just a business that makes billions of pounds. And so, you know, like, you know, if they set the rules, then yeah, I'm going to try and break those rules. Well, not me personally, but I understand why people do. Um, we don't mess with people's businesses and build dodgy links because they can come back and bite you.
We can't afford to, can you? Ultimately, it's your reputation.
If it's your own business, if you're trying to build an affiliate site or something and you don't care if it crashes and burns, then you're going to try anything and everything in order to get that site ranking. So it makes you a few bob for a year or so. And then when it crashes and burns, you don't care. You just move on to the next scam. Um, okay, so if you've been enlightened, let us know if you want to come on the show. Let us know and if you like what we're doing here on the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast, let us know and give us a vote.
Some praise would be nice.
Yeah. Well, please, we never really ask for people to to rate it.
It's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable, isn't it? You know, and also, I don't want to see a load of one star reviews.
Yeah. That's right. What's what's below one star. Well that's what we're getting at the moment. Ignored. Yeah. Which is a shame really, because we're actually quite good, aren't we. I think we're quite an entertaining.
If you don't say so yourself.
We are quite entertaining. I think we, you know, we try and impart good, honest advice to people and make it fun while we do it. I think I think we make a good job of that. Do you know what? I actually listen to these podcasts in the car and sometimes I chuckle. It's terrible, isn't it?
I don't know.
It's a narcissist, narcissistic thing to do.
Surely a bit self masturbatory.
Yeah, it sounds a bit like that. Yeah. Right.
And on.
That.
Note.
Yeah. On that note, um, I've been good. Thank you for listening and we'll be back with you very soon.