Submit Your Website Through Google Search Console

The fastest and surest way to submit your website to Google is through a free tool called Google Search Console.

Whether you have a brand-new website or you’ve simply added a new page that you want Google to know about, Search Console will make submitting your website easy.

This post will walk you through the entire process, giving you a step-by-step walk-through that will allow you to submit your website and get your site indexed quickly and efficiently.

The best way to ensure that Google knows that your site exists and what pages it contains is to provide a sitemap. If you’re not sure if you have a sitemap on your website, this post will walk you through that step.

How Google Finds Websites and New Pages

First, it’s useful to understand how Google finds new websites and webpages and what it does with them. There are two ways that Googlebot finds new content: we tell it where it is through a sitemap or it finds the content as it follows links.

Google has a massive amount of servers that power a crawler named “Googlebot.” Googlebot crawls the web, following links from one page to another, from site to site, indexing the content on each page.

This process is usually expedited by providing a sitemap, but it is not always necessary. If your page has links pointing to it—whether from an external site or another page on your own site—Google will eventually find it.

Once the crawler finds new or changed pages, it sends all of the information it finds to Google’s index. Once it is in the index, Google analyzes the information it finds to determine what the content is about and its potential relevance to different search requests.

Create a Sitemap for Your Website

Before we get into signing up for Search Console and submitting your website, you need to create a sitemap. A sitemap is exactly what it sounds like—a map of your website’s pages. Think of it like a directory of the pages included on your site.

Creating a Sitemap Using Plugins

Given that about a third of internet websites are using WordPress, there’s a good chance that you are using it too.

There are plugins that generate XML sitemaps for WordPress, but given that most SEO plugins do the same thing, there really is no need for a dedicated plugin just to generate your sitemap. In the name of keeping your WordPress site as lean as possible, I’m going to recommend you simply use the sitemap generated by your SEO plugin.

There are a few really good SEO plugins that generate sitemaps for your website that I can recommend. Let’s get into creating your sitemap using three of the most common ones.

Yoast SEO

If you have already installed Yoast and want to check if your website has generated a sitemap, type in your url and add a /sitemap_index.xml to the end. If the plugin did generate a sitemap, you’ll see something like this:

If you don’t see it, then run Yoast’s setup wizard and you should be good to go.

SEOpressor

Once you activate the sitemap, it will show it below the “enable XML Sitemap Generator”

Once you’re actually created a sitemap, you can submit it to Google through Search Console.

Create a Search Console Account

In order to submit your sitemap, you need to create a Search Console account.

A new feature that Search Console released in Spring 2019 allows you verify your entire domain:

Verifying the domain is much better, since you won’t run into any issues with having the www. vs the non-www submitted, but it is more technically involved. Follow the instructions and verify the domain you want to submit to Google.

Once your site is verified with Google Search Console, you can submit your sitemap.

How to Submit Your Sitemap to Google

Once you have verified your website, you can log into the Search Console for that site in the upper-lefthand corner of your screen.

Below the domain name, you’ll see a tab that says “sitemaps.” Click there and you’ll see this screen:

Enter the URL where your sitemap is located (see above section if you have a WordPress site and you don’t know how to find the URL of your sitemap).

Congrats, you’ve submitted your website to Google!

How to Submit a New Page to Google

Assuming you’ve followed the instructions in the previous sections, Google will find your new page the next time it checks your sitemap. But what if you don’t want to wait for Google to “get around” to crawling your site?

There is a way to ask Google to crawl a new page or a page that has been edited. In the top of the interface, you’ll find this bar:

Enter the url you want to Google to crawl and you’ll see this:

Whether your page is in the index or not, you’ll see text on the right side of the “URL is on Google” box that says “REQUEST INDEXING.”

Click on that button and Google will prioritize crawling your new or changed page.

If your site is not showing up on Google, it is most likely for one of the following reasons:

• You have a new site and Google’s crawler has not yet found it.
• Google doesn’t consider your site to be sufficiently “trustworthy” or “relevant” to show it for the keywords you want to rank for.
  
• You’ve blocked the googlebot crawler in your robots.txt.
• You’ve set a page or the site to “noindex,” ticked the “discourage search engines from indexing this site” box in WordPress, or you’ve set another page as the canonical version.
  
• You’ve incurred a penalty and Google has deindexed your site.
• There is a technical issue with your site that is preventing Google from crawling and indexing your site.

This post is going to help you to diagnose and potentially address the issues preventing your site from showing in Google search.

If Your Site is New, Google May Not Have Found it

Google crawls the internet by following links on websites that it has already indexed. If no websites are linking to your brand new website, it probably doesn’t know that your site exists.  The fastest way to get Google to know that your site exists and what pages it contains is to share a sitemap with it.  You can do this with Google’s Search Console.

How Submit Your Sitemap to Google

If needed, I wrote a post on how to submit your website to Google that will walk you through this in more detail.

First, you need to create a sitemap

If you have a WordPress site with the Yoast SEO plugin, it has generated the sitemap for you.  If you go to your website and add a /sitemap_index.xml, you’ll be able to view it (you can view our sitemap at https://sagapixel.com/sitemap_index.xml).  There are other plugins available to WordPress that will generate your sitemap for you, just check the WordPress repository and you will find them.

Next, you’ll need a Google Search Console account

The next step to submitting your site to Google is to create a Google Search Console account.

Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is the tool that Google provides to the owners of websites to allow them to know the index status of their websites.  In addition to providing data on the number of times that a site shows up in search, the queries it shows up for, and a ton of other data points, it also allows you to submit a sitemap and request indexing.

Submit your sitemap to Google

Once you create the account and verify your domain, you’ll see a tab on the left that says “index” and under it “sitemaps.”

You’re going to add a new sitemap and click “submit.”

Time to request indexing

Once you’ve submitted your sitemap, you’re going to want Google to crawl the site sooner rather than later.  You’re going to click on the “URL inspection” tool on the left sidebar.

You’re going to type the URL of your site in the bar that pops up across the top of the screen and hit enter.

If your page is indexed, you’ll see a screen like this:

If it is not, click on the “request indexing” button and Google will put your page in the queue to be crawled. 

What to Do if Your Site is in Google’s Index, but not Showing for Keywords You Want to Rank for

The Key to Earning Search Share is to Earn Trust.

It can be safely argued that the entire search engine optimization (SEO) industry exists for this reason.  It is extremely common for someone to put up a website for a business he has, only to have Google bury it on page 9 (or not show it at all).

Let’s look at it from Google’s perspective, however: why should it show your site to its users?

Is there something extremely unique about your business or website? Is there a reason that Google should trust you so much right out of the gate that your site should leap over other sites that have been up for months or years?

How to earn trust

This is one of the most contentious topics in SEO, with two camps arguing bitterly in support of their view.

White Hat SEO

White hat SEOs take an approach of earning trust by producing value for internet users. This is the way that Google wants us to manage our websites: do research to find topics that are relevant to our businesses and helpful to internet users and create unique, valuable content around those topics (something like the article you are reading right now).

Google takes notice when people seem to find what they are looking for on your website, or conversely, if they have to visit other websites to find what they are looking for.  Additionally, if you are creating unique assets that provide value to people, other websites are bound to link to them.  This is referred to as “earning links” or “linkbuilding.”

The combination of fulfilling search intent and earning links from other website demonstrate to the search engine that you should be trusted and it should return your website for the results when people search for topics related to your web pages.

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEOs force trust by getting links to their websites using a variety of methods.  The advantage of using these techniques is that they usually require less effort and work more quickly than white hat SEO methods. The disadvantage is that the engineers at Google are usually pretty quick to pick up on the methods they exploit, making them less than optimal long-term tactics for a business.

Did You Block Googlebot in Your Robots.txt File?

Your robots.txt file tells crawlers what pages it can and cannot crawl on your site.  If you accidentally block a page or a folder that has an important asset in it, Google will be unlikely to index your site.

For example, below is a screenshot of the New York Times’ robots.txt:

Any pages that are on this list will not be indexed. Check your robots.txt to see if you accidentally blocked a page you want to show up on Google.  This post isn’t going to get deep into robots.txt, but if you need help, reach out to us.  If you want to do it yourself, check out this article by Cognitive SEO on the topic.

If You Set Your Page to “Noindex,” it Won’t Be in Google’s Index (Imagine That!)

How to Tell if You Set Your Page to Noindex

A “noindex” directive tells search engines to not put a page in the index.  If you did this, it would stand to reason that your page isn’t going to show up on Google.

The most effective way to tell if your page is noindexed is to go to the page and view the source code (don’t worry, you don’t have to be a developer to do this). Once you’re looking at the page of code, do a CTRL+F or CMD+F and search for the word “noindex.”  If nothing shows up, you haven’t noindexed your page.

If you are using the popular Yoast SEO plugin in a WordPress Site, you should check to see if you noindexed the page there.  Go to the Yoast plugin, click on the gear on the left.

Make sure that they “allow search engines to show this page in search results” is set to “yes.” Also, be sure that the “canonical URL ” isn’t set to another page.  A “rel=canonical” tells the search engine that this is not the original content and not to index it, rather to index the “canonical” url. 

Your Website Won’t Show on Google if it Has Been Penalized.

If your website used to be in the search results and it isn’t anymore, confirm it by doing a search for site:yourdomain.com.

If nothing comes up, you might have a problem.

If you haven’t done so already, verify your domain in Google Search Console and check to see if you receive a notice about receiving a manual penalty.  Google will usually tell you if your website has been penalized and the reasons for the penalty. It also allows you to requests a reconsideration of the site once you’ve addressed the offending issues.

Penalties usually occur when a website does something that it shouldn’t have done, such as spam links, scrape content, or even get hacked.  Google tends to lift the penalty once you take care of whatever the issue is, but if it’s something big like link spam, you may have a lot of work ahead of you.

What to do if There’s a Technical Issue with Your Website

Unless you’re experienced with technical SEO, this isn’t something that you’ll be able to do yourself.  Especially when dealing with ecommerce sites, it can be very easy to develop a site that works for users but is not accessible to search engine crawlers. If googlebot can’t understand your content, it’s not going to be able to deliver it as a result.

If you think this may be something affecting your site, contact a technical SEO.

I Know How Frustrating This Can Be

You’ve put time, effort, and resources into your website and now you’re not getting any visitors. Your best bet is to reach out to an SEO consultatnt to help you out, or even check out some of the SEO groups on Facebook. 

I really hope this was helpful and please leave a comment below if it was.

How to Get Schema Markup on Your WordPress Site Without Plugins

So I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about structured data and Schema in particular, and this video’s going to show you how you can start implementing big boy Schema and not relying solely on plug-ins so that you have your structured data on your website. So let’s check it out.

The Structured Data Tool I Use

The tool that I typically use is on technicalseo.com. If you just Google Schema markup generator, I believe that this is one of the first results that pops up. All you’re going to be doing is generating, filling out fields using this tool and then just taking the code and putting it on the page that you want to place it on. So I know that we don’t have any Schema markup on this page for this blog, so we’re actually going to, I’m going to copy the name of the blog here, and we’re going to go down to Select a Markup.

Get Features into the SERP with Schema

Now some of these are going to allow us to have a lot more features on the search engine results page, like if you’ve seen for example stars and things like reviews and even dollar signs to indicate the price of a website, this is how you’re going to be able to implement that on your site.

Adding The Data

So, since this is actually a product review I’m going to go down to product, click on product name. I’m not going to leave in this title, get that out of there, and then really just follow the instructions from here on out. We’re going to take the URL, actually that’s the image URL, so we’re going to go over here and click on that. And then from here I’ll actually be able to get the image. Brand is Focusrite. If I want to put in, the Focusrite ISA220 is a channel strip, EQ compressor and [inaudible 00:02:19]. Okay, we’re going to go down here, going to add in the, so we don’t really have any sort of offers, so I’m just going to put in the review now so I think I put it like over here. Review’s name, I’m going to give this a 4.8, put a date of the review. This is an old review. This site is really, really old. This is probably May of 2015. Okay? I have all of the important information here. I’m now going to take this script that’s been generated. I’m going to go back to WordPress. Now I have this set to the visual editor right now. It’s not going to work. I can’t put it there. But if I click over to text, all that I’m going to have to do after this is paste it right there, update, and there is structured data on my page now. If I click through to the front end, it will not have affected anything at all, and the site or the structured data is good to go.

How to Add Voice Schema Markup to Your Website

Google recently announced the beta of Speakable, a schema markup that allows you to identify sections of your content that is most suitable for text-to-speech audio playback. This new schema markup will help you to deliver news content over Google Assistant, the voice assistant used by Android devices, including Google Home.  Use of voice assistants is growing significantly and this structured data markup will help Google Assistant and Google Home devices to deliver voice content from news website to users. It is important to note that as of July of 2018, the speakable schema will only have an effect on news sites.  Google has stated clearly that a website will have to be part of its news publisher program in order to deliver voice content using speakable schema.

How is Voice Schema Structured?

Naturally, there are a few different ways to implement your speakable schema markup.  It is important to consider the application and what would make the most sense for your content. Here are two different ways to implement your speakable markup: { “@context”: “http://schema.org/”, “@type”: “WebPage”, “name”: “Jane Doe’s homepage”, “speakable”: { “@type”: “SpeakableSpecification”, “cssSelector”: [“headline”, “this is a summary of the data”] }, “url”: “http://www.janedoe.com” } TYPES: speakable PRE-MARKUP: An example of ‘speakable’ markup (JSON-LD only, initially). MICRODATA: TODO RDFA: TODO JSON: { “@context”: “http://schema.org/”, “@type”: “WebPage”, “name”: “Jane Doe’s homepage”, “speakable”: [ “#myhead1”, “#thesummary”], “url”: “http://www.janedoe.com” }

Test Your Structured Data

Google provides a tool to test whether you’ve implemented the speakable schema properly.  You can find the tool here.

A Few Tips to Optimize Your Content for Voice Assistance

Remember to “Keep it Short”

It is important to ensure that the content that you mark up with “speakable” microdata be concise.  Amazon provides the following advice at https://developer.amazon.com/designing-for-voice/what-alexa-says/

One-breath test When writing what Alexa will say, read aloud what you’ve written. If you can say the words at a conversational pace with one breath, the length is probably good. If you need to take a breath, consider reducing the length. For a response that includes successive ideas, such as steps in a task, read each idea separately. While the entire response may require more than one breath, make sure you only take breaths between and not during ideas.

Make Sure It Makes Sense and Feels Natural

Do not mark up sections of your content that won’t work well with voice assistants. Imagine listening to Google Assistant as it reads a timeline, or goes through a bunch of photo captions on your site.  Read aloud what you are marking up and ask yourself if it sounds like something that a human being would say in response to a question.  If it doesn’t read naturally, expect people to stop the playback and move on.        

Google Advanced Operator Cheat Sheet

Advanced operators are extremely useful set of commands that every SEO should know.  These operators can help you to gain insights into the competitive landscape in which you are competing as well as help you to gain insights into Google’s view of your website. I’m going to share a few of my favorites, then give you a chart with a number of the advanced search operators that are most useful to SEOs.

The Most Useful Advanced Search Operators for SEOs

1. How to check local search Google results in different cities

This is a somewhat underused technique that few SEOs know how to use. Using this feature, you can see how the search engine results page changes from city to city.

1. Open up your browser in incognito

By opening a browser in incognito, you’ll automatically depersonalize your results. This will keep any past searches from affecting the search results that you see on the page. Remember to start from google.com afresh every time you search. Failure to do so will further change your search results based the previous search you performed. Now click on the url bar: Now replace everything past “q=divorce&lawyers” with “&near=Other City” Hit enter and you’ll see the search engine results are now personalized for a city: There are some results that are being delivered due to my ip address, (namely, the Adwords placement in the 3-pack and one organic result below for a divorce lawyer with “locations” in Cherry Hill and Boston (don’t ask how he managed that).

2. How to Find Websites with Keywords in Title

This one is particularly useful for finding guest posting opportunities if you don’t have access to Ahrefs, SEMrush, or a similar content explorer. The most useful way to use it is like this: This way, you’ll get search results for pages about “SEO” that have the keywords “guest-post” in the URL.  This can be used for any number of things, including finding job pages, bios, or whatever you may need.

SEO-Favorite Search Operators

Search Operator	Example	What it does
inurl: OR allinurl:	inurl:seo-tips	Displays webpages w/ keywords in url
intitle: OR allintitle:	intitle:adwords	Find sites w/ keyword in the page title
intext: OR allintext:	intext:pizzerias	find competitors ranking for keywords you select
inanchor: OR allinanchor:	pizzerias inanchor:brick oven	find websites using a given keyword in its anchor text
&near=City:	https://www.google.com/search?q=lawyers&near=Philadelphia	check search results from specific cities. Read paragraph above for more details.
region:	region:Pennsylvania/td>	This will give you search results from certain cities. It differs from the previous technique in that it delivers you region-specific websites, as opposed to the search results for a given city, which may have high-ranking non-local websites.

Advanced Search Operators

Search Operator	Example	What it does
cache:	cache:sagapixel.com	View Google’s cached version instead of current version
filetype:		lawyers info:.pdf	Find files in a specific format with a filename containing the keyword you enter
daterange:	intext:pizzerias	find competitors ranking for keywords you select
site:	site:sagapixel.com “content marketing”	find pages on a site containing specific keywords
&near=City:	https://www.google.com/search?q=lawyers&near=Philadelphia	check search results from specific cities. Read below for more details.
region:	region:Pennsylvania	This will give you search results from certain cities. It differs from the previous technique in that it delivers you region-specific websites, as opposed to the search results for a given city, which may have high-ranking non-local websites.

Find Topics That We Can Rank For

The Impact of Voice Search on B2B SEO Is Overstated

The impact that voice will have on our daily lives is undeniable.  It will change the way we shop, the way we organize our lives, even the way we communicate with one another. One thing that it will not greatly affect will be b2b search. Whenever a new technology comes along, everyone gets super excited.  Remember when the Segway was going to rack up $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history? In the case of voice search, the predictions will be half-right.  People will use voice search when it is more convenient, but for a number of reasons, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri will not enter the office.  Voice search will be a part of our daily mobile lives, but for those of us that are tethered to a desk all day, there will be a number of reasons that we will not start yammering at our devices all day long.

Digital Assistants Are Not Right for the Office. (Bye Bye B2B Voice Search)

There are many reasons why digital assistants won’t become the default  in many workplaces.  Here are a few:

1. The Cacophony of People Talking to Devices Would be Unbearable

Can you imagine the chaos of your office full of people talking to their digital assistants?  <shuddering at the thought> Voice search would become so disruptive of a typical office that “no voice assistant” policies would likely be put in place. While this could possibly be less of an issue in private offices, the typical office full of cubicles would not be conducive to having a few dozen employees performing internet searches on voice assistants. I expect that some offices will adopt a “no voice assistants” policy.

2. B2B Consumers Sometimes Need Various Options, not Just One

Few b2b purchases are low involvement purchases. Let’s take the example of a local insurance agent and the typical purchases that she may make.

• Need to reorder business cards? A voice assistant could help with that. 
• Need to find a company to order business cards for a new venture? A voice assistant is not going to let you efficiently look at all of the different options and compare costs.
• Looking to find a developer to build a new website? You’re going to want to look at a few different portfolios; a voice assistant won’t allow you to see the work.
• Need to hire an IP attorney? At the very least, you’re going to want to see her website and read about her a bit. 

While voice search excels at handling small tasks, it will always be an awkward way to do research.  Any sort of involved b2b purchase is likely to involve traditional desktop or mobile search.

3. People Want Privacy

In an office environment a worker can research different vendors without having to worry about prying coworkers. We’ve all worked with these kinds of people… “Did you hear Tom asking Alexa to find a janitorial company this morning?  He wasted so much time on it; why didn’t he just get a couple numbers and make some calls?” Some people don’t want their coworkers listening to their searches all day (I fall into this category).

4. Desktop Search is Faster; You Can’t Skim Alexa

As I mentioned above, it’s a lot faster to do a quick Google search and browse a few websites for options for a b2b purchase. Asking a digital assistant to perform the search will force us to sit and listen to all of the results.  

“But It’s New Technology!” You Protest…

I’m the furthest thing from a Luddite when it comes to technology. That said, just because it’s new doesn’t mean that it does everything better than the current alternatives. A perfect example would be the smartphone and b2b SEO.  Mobile devices have largely taken over internet traffic, but for a b2b website like Sagapixel.com, the vast majority of our traffic still comes from desktop users.  Apparently, business owners don’t take our their cell phones to look for a web design or SEO company; they use their desktops, just like they do for their payroll, paperwork and virtually everything else. Just because the smartphone took over web traffic for the majority of the internet doesn’t mean that your traffic is going to be mostly mobile.  The reason that mobile traffic has increased is that the smartphone is more convenient for someone on the go. We can get what we want right now, a benefit that outweighs the less-than-optimal experience of awkwardly tapping and reading a 6 inch screen. At the same time, someone sitting at a desk is unlikely to forego using the 27″ screen right there in front of him, opting to squint at a 6 inch smartphone screen while searching for a WordPress developer. He’s even less likely to ask Google Assistant to find a developer for him.

Overall, Voice Search Will Take Off, Just Not In The Office

 

Be sure to view in full screen!

Video Transcript:

Find easy topics that you’re likely to rank for

Hey everybody, this is Frank, rocking the Sagapixel t-shirt today and I’m going to be showing you how we use the tool Ahrefs to identify blog topics that are going to be relatively easy to rank for, but that actually drive some search traffic to a website.

So let’s check it out.

Start with keyword research

Here we have a topic that I’ve selected for a client of ours, that we did an eCommerce website for a few months ago. He basically sells different products to help you bind your own book or report or presentation at home. He’s been struggling to rank against some really big players in the market, but players that have not really done virtually anything in the ways of content marketing.

Let’s start with book binding and what we can find. The number two topic right here is this DIY book binding. I expanded it out into the keyword explorer and clicked on the search engine results page and found that most of what is actually ranking right now is social media stuff, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, there’s a DIY book binding page and DIY Network is the top related result here.

What other keywords does the page rank for?

What I found was interesting was that there are 687 other terms that this page ranks for. I think that that will be really helpful in helping our client to organize his thoughts and the topics that he’s going to be covering in his complete guide to DIY book binding for the total newbie or something along those lines. We’re gonna see there’s some decent search volume behind some of these queries, like how to bind the book, DIY book binding, some of the other ones that I saw in here, bind your own book, photo book binding, not super high volume but this could be something that we throw maybe a little section within the guide.

Earn some trust signals

But basically, have this be a blog post, a 2000 word everything that you need to know guide to basically the product that this guy sells so that maybe one of them is gonna be something he starts driving some traffic through and eventually he’s able to earn some trust signals that then tell the search engine that this post, people that land on this post after they search for how to make a book by hand, that they land on that page, maybe this is a little less difficult to rank for, and maybe the search engine will learn that people that come to the page for this term seem to like it. Maybe we should throw this page as a result for some of these other queries such as how to bind pages. If he’s going to then start sending some trust signals for these searches, then maybe create like a snowball effect where he is now ranking for a whole bunch of different terms that are related to this topic.

I have used this tactic to great success for a lot of our clients and even our own website at Sagapixel.com where I have a whole series of reviews and tutorials that I’ve done, such as this one, just talking about SEO tools that have driven a lot of search trust signals and I’ve seen that a lot of our posts that only started off ranking for a couple terms here and there over time started ranking for a lot of other things that were kind of like secondary topics that we touched upon in the post that afterwards ended up driving a decent amount of search traffic to the website.

Find keywords that we might be able to rank for

For him, basically we’re going to go through this tool, we’re gonna look through all of this different stuff to identify first of all things that have a keyword difficulty that’s going to be in a reasonable range where we’re going to be able to rank. I don’t think he’s gonna be able to rank for a 33 key word difficulty, but maybe he will for a 12. Once we’re actually in there, finding a whole bunch of different topics that other websites have been able to drive some search volume for that we’re also going to be able to target kind of as secondary topics.

Grab a trial with Ahrefs

Hopefully you’ll be able to grab Ahrefs. They have a seven day, seven dollar trial that you can use. I recommend that you give it a shot. Use the keyword explorer, check the organic keywords, look for stuff that has volume of at least 50 or 100 and that doesn’t have key word difficulties that are not going to be something that you are potentially going to be able to rank for on your site.

Make a mind map

Pro tip, before I go, if you have a hard time finding what parent topics you think you’ll be able to cover, I highly suggest you do a mind map of your entire business. If you are in the basement waterproofing business, so you could start off with basement waterproofing and then have some lines coming off what we’re talking about, okay, well with the basement waterproofing you have French drains, you have sump pumps, you have those leech runs, the things that go … I forgot the name of them, they run along the exterior of a basement.

Then from there, there are all kinds of other topics, like from sump pumps you can then get into the topics of how much does it cost to get a sump pump installed? What are the different types of sump pumps? What kind of sump pump do I need for this sort of … If I have a floating slab, what do I need if I have something else? Then using that to prepare yourself mentally for the different topics that you can then throw into Ahrefs like this. This is perfect when you’re running into a wall as far as like, “What the hell should I be throwing in here in the first place?”

Hopefully this was helpful. I really recommend that you subscribe to our YouTube channel or our blog so that you can keep up to date with these different types of tutorials that I’m showing you.

 

User Review of the New Moz “Link Explorer”

Does the new Moz “Link Explorer” address the problems with Moz’s Open Site Explorer and its problematic Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) metrics?

For many years, Moz’s Open Site Explorer and its DA and PA metrics have been widely used to estimate a site’s likelihood to rank for a keyword or its ability to influence rank through links.  Despite its continued popularity, any SEO that’s been paying close attention has realized that it’s been largely unhelpful in accomplishing either of these tasks.  Tools like Ahrefs and Majestic have become preferred by many SEOs and a visit to any SEO forum will uncover comments like this: Moz does an exemplary job of marketing its products and its thought leadership is second to none.  If it weren’t for its excellent content marketing, Open Site Explorer may have died long ago, since most of its features lag far behind alternatives on the market. Moz is a wonderful company and most of the SEO community really does want to see it remain relevant, so most of us are happy to see that it is making an effort to improve its Open Site Explorer.  The company announced that it is dramatically increasing the size of its index, allowing much more data to be used to calculate its proprietary DA and PA scores.

It’s much better at finding links and it features a very clean interface, but lacks a few features

The index is BIG

The new index that is powering Link Explorer can clearly rival that of Majestic and Ahrefs. I have yet to find a case in which Link Explorer could not find as many links as another tool that I have access to.

Domain Authority (DA) is a lot more reliable

Moz now relies on a much larger index to calculate Domain Authority (DA) and is much more usable as a result.  No longer do I find sites that dominate the search engine results showing a DA of 10-15.  Additionally, the score updates so frequently that a site owner or SEO can now see changes in the score within a few days of building new links.

Is the spam score better?

As far as picking up on spammy linkbuilding, my experience has been that Majestic is the best at picking up on it.  Below I give an example of a site that has built its backlink profile almost entirely through comment spam and it has a solid DA.  It would be nice to see the DA decrease from such tactics.  The new “spam score” has not yet been deployed, so we’ll see how it performs when it is released.

It has a really clean interface and does most basic SEO tasks very well

Given that it finds about the same amount of links that Ahrefs and Majestic find, what advantage is there to Link Explorer and Moz Pro? My impression is that its very simple interface and limited features are perfect for a novice SEO or blog owner that just wants to use a tool for link prospecting.  Logging into Ahrefs is a bit like stepping into an airplane cockpit. Someone that is new to SEO is likely to feel overwhelmed by it, but not Moz Pro and its Link Explorer. A more experienced SEO is likely to prefer a tool like Ahrefs, since it offers so many more features for virtually the same price.  

What Changes Has Moz Made to Open Site Explorer?

Technically, Open Site Explorer (OSE) is no more.  It is being deprecated and Moz is now launching its Link Explorer.  Rand Fishkin goes over the changes in infrastructure that have allowed for the “improved” Link Explorer in this article, but I’ll give you the rundown.

What Moz has announced as being “new” in the “new Moz Link Explorer:”

1. The Moz index is now significantly larger than it was before
2. Domain Authority and Page Authority update much more frequently (daily)
3. Moz Spam Score replaces MozTrust
4. The interface is much nicer
5. Link distribution can be viewed by Domain Authority

How Does Moz Stack Up Against Competitors Now?

This is not going to be an exhaustive study.  I am going to simply compare the number of links found by Moz with the links found by Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Majestic and see how the larger Moz index is making it a more usable tool for me. After a few weeks of trying Link Explorer, I can confidently say the results that I found with these sites were pretty consistent with what I’ve found through using the tool

Site 1, Legal Niche

In the case of this site, Moz can finally hang.  It found just about the same number of active links as the other tools and did a good job of not reporting dead links as active (as in the case of SEMrush).  Overall, the tool that indexed the most links and correctly identified the dead links as no longer active was Majestic, but in the case of this website, Link Explorer is showing some promise Moz: Ahrefs: SEMrush: Majestic:

Site 2, Home Improvement

Moz: Ahrefs: SEMrush: Majestic:

Site 3, Dentist

Moz: Ahrefs: SEMrush: Majestic:

It Looks Like Moz Can Finally Hang with Other Linkbuilding Software

Although this is a small sample set, it is reflective of what my experience has been with SEO tools.  Typically, Ahrefs and Majestic have found more of the links that we’ve built for our clients, SEMrush would lag a bit behind, and Moz Site Explorer way behind the pack.  It appears that Moz has finally built an index that rivals those of Ahrefs and Majestic.  I still will not be adopting it as my main tool, since it doesn’t have the wide amount of tools available to tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush (namely, the content explorers and keyword planning tools) but it is certainly a usable tool for backlink research.  With the wide adoption of their tools, Moz will finally be able to deliver a much better tool to its subscribers.

1. Best Blog to Learn Strategy and Fundamentals

The Moz Blog

Moz has a huge mix of really great SEO topics that it covers in its blog.  I’ve found that it is an invaluable source for strategy and learning fundamentals.  I’ve also never seen any content on the site that differs from what I’ve seen or that doesn’t make strategic sense.  Its Whiteboard Friday videos are particularly good (I watch them as I run on the treadmill).  If you’re interested in learning SEO, the Moz Blog should be at the top of your list.

2. Best Blog to Learn Linkbuilding and On-Page Techniques

The Ahrefs Blog

If you’ve ever heard me speak at any events or simply talked shop with me, you know that I’m a huge fan of Ahrefs.  It finds more backlinks than most of the other tools that I’ve worked with and as a result, I trust it more than most. Aside from the actual tool, the Ahrefs Blog is a “hands-on” blog that focuses on best uses of the tool to complete actual SEO tasks.  If you’re looking for lessons on how to use their tool to find linkbuilding opportunities, content ideas, or any of the other basic skills that an SEO needs, this blog is what you’re looking for.

3. Best Blog to Stay on Top of SEO News

Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land is CNBC for SEO.  If John Mueller or Gary Illyes say anything of any import to the SEO community, it will be reported on this blog.  I rely on this blog to stay abreast of new announcements and algorithm changes. The non news-related articles are also very informative and valuable in increasing an SEO’s grasp on strategy and fundamentals.

4. The Best Blog to Keep Up with Technical SEO