Podcast With Patrick Stox

Don’t Miss This: Ahrefs Product Advisor Spills SEO Secrets with Patrick Stox

Show Notes

Unlock the secrets to achieving a #1 ranking on search engines with insights from Ahrefs Product Advisor, Patrick Stox! In this step-by-step guide, we dive deep into SEO strategies for 2024, from technical SEO tips to the art of content refresh. Whether you're aiming to rank your website number 1 or drive more organic traffic to your site, this video is packed with actionable advice to boost your search engine rankings.

Discover the latest trends and behind-the-scenes developments that Ahrefs is pioneering, including groundbreaking tools like their AI content helper and Edge SEO innovations. Stay ahead of the curve with Patrick's expert guidance on crafting a winning SEO strategy that combines technical prowess with creative content development.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

00:43 - Patrick’s Journey in SEO

03:09 - Under the Radar SEO Trend

04:28 - Automation vs Content Quality

05:41 - Upcoming Features in Ahrefs

09:00 - How Ahrefs Prioritizes New Features

11:36 - Data Collection and Accuracy

15:31 - UR vs DR Explained

18:51 - AI and Machine Learning in SEO

22:16 - Technical SEO Strategies

27:10 - Indexing Best Practices

28:32 - Importance of Internal Linking

32:35 - Importance of Schema Markup

35:29 - SEO for Beginners vs Advanced Techniques

38:53 - Importance of Backlinks

42:15 - Content Refresh vs New Content Strategy

47:08 - How to Develop Topical Authority

51:07 - Google LEAKS Explained

53:16 - CTR Boost Techniques

55:11 - Where to Find Patrick Stox Online

Transcript

Introduction

0:00 welcome back to the agency Insider your onetop show for all things marketing today we are thrilled to have Patrick

0:07 stock with us Patrick is a renowned Su expert product adviser and doing technical Su at HFS he's here to share

0:14 his insights on navigating the ever evolving word of SEO and crafting winning strategies for the modern

0:19 marketers we'll be discussing some really exciting topics today from the latest Trend in SEO to some behind the

0:25 scene development and HFS [Applause]

0:35 [Music] Patrick welcome to the show hey how's it

0:41 going thanks for having me yes Patrick you have had such an interesting journey in the SEO world for

0:48 our listeners who may not be as familiar with your background could you share a bit about how you got started in SEO and

0:55 what led you to your current role in ahfs yeah uh a long time ago I was a web

1:01 developer one day they asked me about like how do I rank better and so I learned about SEO back then and that's

1:08 probably 20ish years ago at this point but full-time for SEO probably since like 2009 I worked uh with some like B2B

1:16 engineering companies went off did my own thing like Consulting for a few years worked at an

1:22 agency and I was in-house at IBM and now at

1:28 HFS Okay so so you work with IBM in doing the SEO work as well yeah yeah uh

1:34 lots of stuff related to technical content um had my hands like everywhere

1:40 it's a lot of things to do there okay that's interesting so what do you to focus on technical Su specifically and

1:47 how has your role evolved over time especially as the SEO landscape is changing

1:53 constantly well that's that's an interesting uh point I guess publicly I still say like Tech thinko that's what

2:00 I'm known for I I write a lot about it and uh that's what a lot of people will will know about me um but I also Focus

2:08 like content I do a lot of our like programmatic strategies at HRS because they are a little more technical being

2:14 that like they're data driven and everything yeah I I do actually like we have a lot of JavaScript on our website

2:20 too that's always fun challenges but there's not really a ton of technical SEO work to do at Adams I I do help on

2:27 the product side though so a lot of our new reports visualizations a lot of stuff with inside audit uh it's always

2:34 fun just coming up with like what should we build next okay obviously HFS is built SEO

2:41 friendly with their popular blogs which get of course so much traffic and that is why I'm wearing the same t-shirt as

2:47 yours because we all love hrfs my team loves it and we absolutely really go Gaga over using it

2:55 for all the Su work which we do here at P tra that's awesome that's great to hear

3:01 yes uh now you've been of course at the Forefront of SE with your work at hrfs

3:07 and of course contribution to the SEO Community I would like to start with a fresh perspective of course SEO has

Under the Radar SEO Trend

3:12 evolved significantly in the past few years what one trend is in SEO that you

3:17 feel hasn't been talked about enough and is still under the radar but could become pivotal in the next couple of

3:24 years uh I'm going to go with what is referred to as Edge SEO it's more really

3:29 like we call serverless basically you can edit the website on the server or like on the CDN

3:37 level typically before it's ever served to bots or users so there's a lot of

3:42 things that could be fixed um basically with the push of a button and we actually have a a product that's about

3:48 to launch related to that so I think uh people are going to be pretty happy with

3:53 that like a lot of the stuff that's in current SEO audits even ours as a tech SEO I'm like well mostly are time

4:01 wasters like people put interns to go rewrite 800 metad descriptions now we have ai like AI WR these 800 meta

4:08 descriptions click a button implement it on the website done it it shouldn't be something that takes you know hours days

4:16 weeks of someone's time to to do a lot of these things when now uh it can be automated and even the implementation

4:22 can be automated right okay and uh of course with so many

Automation vs Content Quality

4:28 algorithm updates happening how do you see search engines evolving in terms of balancing Automation and content quality

4:36 and how do these changes impact large scale content strategies uh I mean a lot

4:41 of the large scale content strategies didn't work out they they got hit by algorithm upate we're tracking a bunch

4:49 of these websites and I think we saw some decent recovery with the last update but now a lot have fallen again

4:56 so the people that are trying to automate this are not doing well and and

5:01 I think that in general has always been the case um like Google's just not going to reward something that you're not

5:07 spending a lot of time on putting effort in like improving we actually have some programmatic plays that that are doing

5:14 well but it's they're done a little bit differently like we had a bunch of tools and stuff and um we have some stuff that

5:21 are like top pages but we're showcasing all of our data throughout all these pages so it's not that we're just like

5:27 putting this out there and trying to just automate a bunch of informational content I think that's what a lot of

5:33 people are doing it's just not going to work

5:39 okay right and uh I mean of course hrf is is one of the most comprehensive SEO

Upcoming Features in Ahrefs

5:44 tool out there and of course You've Been instrumental in shaping some of it in that direction can you give us a sneak

5:51 peek into some of the exciting upcoming features or tools at H that SEO

5:56 Community should be paying attention to well we just launched our AI content

6:03 helper not really like writing the content for you I don't know if we'll go that route with it not but it is a

6:10 little different than a lot of the content tools that are out there like you you can't just stuff the keywords like a lot of the tools are like use

6:15 this keyword 13 times this one seven times like even if they like use it once or whatever it helps the score ours

6:22 doesn't work that way like it it actually works similarly to our our search engine y.com so you actually have

6:28 to like write about the top cover the topic make good content if if you want that like score to increase and I think

6:35 that's that's throwing a lot of our users for a loop because they just expect to be able to like add some

6:40 keywords sprinkle them in and and to get a better score but they they we're really trying to push people to actually

6:46 make their content better I talked about the EDG SEO system that we have coming

6:51 uh that's called patches really soon I don't know when this goes live but uh might already be launched by then we

6:57 also have like an index now integration coming well it's it's there but like we

7:03 have another system that is real time crawling so we're gonna we're going to

7:09 be shifting instead of like you schedule for a weekly a monthly audit that we're basically constantly crawling the

7:15 website with a prioritization system so we're not like overloading servers or anything but yeah more important Pages

7:21 crawled more often less important crawled less often but it's going to switch how things are done because now

7:27 we have this index now protocol also where you can tell us when you make changes and we can then go crawl those

7:34 pages pretty much immediately like with a matter of seconds and then we can tell you if something's wrong you

7:40 accidentally Mark the page no index or you changed the canonical tag or whatever like we'll be able to see that

7:47 literally in a matter of seconds and send you alerts to say like this changed

7:52 this got messed up um you might want to go fix this like now especially I really

7:58 love the way you can go and compare the code and shows how many changes were

8:03 done I mean that change came recently and we all love it especially if you have to look at your website what the

8:10 best part I loved it that you can actually see competitor website when have they done the changes when that graph went up so that's actually a very

8:18 nice feature we already are enjoying it a lot I love that uh we have uh screenshots coming to that soon also

8:25 okay so you'll be able to see like visually like what what parts yeah so right now we can just see the code so

8:32 we will be able to see it visually as well yeah well right now you have uh like the code which might be the raw

8:37 HTML or could be rendered HTML if we rendered the page and then the extracted text but yeah we're we're internally

8:44 already like storing the screenshots and we'll have a front interface for it so

8:50 can't wait for that that would be much cooler because I mean of course for a non- Tei it's little technical to

8:57 understand but yeah that would be a great tool as well so one thing that always intes me is the balance between a

9:03 technical advancement in tool and usability for end users at a product adviser at HFS what's your process for

9:11 identifying and prioritizing new features we have multiple processes

9:17 which I guess it's a little complicated but we we have uh like hr. candy.io

9:23 where users can submit feedback they're always giving feedback to like our support team or people message like me

9:30 or Tim suo or or a bunch of people like to give feedback that way as well and we

9:35 do we end up talking to a lot of our customers then our own internal team we also have a way to suggest new features

9:42 like we're we're users of the tool too so we're like trying to do a process and we're like well I can't do this like how

9:48 can I get this data the answer sometimes is like you just can't um and so we try

9:53 and like build the things that like we actually need within the product itself but yeah feedback comes from everywhere

9:59 and then we have this it goes through this whole process of like prioritization based on like you know

10:06 how many people have been asking for this who's asking how important this feature seems we even have this idea of

10:12 like unicorn ideas which are it's not as simple as like can we add this filter can we add this data point but it's like

10:18 can we go build this other completely different thing uh page inspect was was one of those the one that allows the

10:25 code comparison and yeah they're they're a lot of times not easy projects um and and may take a while I

10:32 don't remember how long that took but several months at least of of development time to get everything set up for that but we we like to kind of

10:39 split that and like not just you know let's go with the things people are asking us for but like let's give them

10:45 something new something different something interesting yeah because this is one

10:50 tool where we see constantly new things being updated you guys constantly mailing your subscribers about the new

10:57 things so that's one thing we love about the how much you keep the community

11:02 involved yeah it's funny because we try and tell people with dashboard updates the newsletters we have product blogs we

11:09 have product videos Tim myself Ryan and some others we always like posting on the social media no matter how much we

11:16 tell like how many channels we use to tell people like it seems like though

11:21 not everyone knows about all the new features anyway we have change logs and everything but it's it's never enough

11:27 that everyone knows about everything but there's so many in the tool already I think it's hard to keep up with all the

11:33 new things yeah absolutely absolutely so can you share any insights on how hrfs

Data Collection and Accuracy

11:39 approaches data collection and accuracy especially given the vast amount of data you guys

11:46 hand where do I even start uh yeah let's let's go with prin

11:52 instance blink data I mean we we focus on data Ting more than any other tool and we have more data than any other

11:58 tool for the link data we're literally crawling the web we have one of the fastest Crawlers on the web you can check cloudfl radar a bunch of other

12:06 sources I did this whole analysis of public log files and yeah we we just crawl more than any other uh search or

12:14 search engine toolbot I should say so there's a whole like prioritization system there we're trying not to crawl a

12:21 bunch of junk we actually keep a specific index size which is usually I think around 350 billion pages or so

12:29 sometimes a little more sometimes a little less like sometimes we want to see like for Quality reasons I think one time we bumped it to I don't know 400

12:36 420 430 billion pages but like all the extra that we got was was basically spam

12:42 it was junk and we were just like no let's like rain that back in because it's just creating noise in the reports

12:47 at some at at a certain point uh so we try and crawl like most of the good part of the web keep that updated I think our

12:55 goal is to crawl to update everything at least every 6 months if if not we just

13:00 drop that uh because if if our system basically said like this wasn't

13:06 important enough to crawl the last six months then it's probably just not important to keep in the index okay makes sense there's so much I

13:14 don't know like there's so much data keywords and stuff it's funny you a lot of these tools they they count things in

13:21 kind of different ways than we do we actually we we start we start with how

13:26 many I have to look at our big data page but something like 116 118 billion keywords that we know about and we

13:34 filter that down like we remove a lot of the noise a lot of the low search volume like something we saw in our data like

13:40 once or whatever like it's typically not that important and I think our final number that we call that down to is like

13:47 28 billion but a lot of these other tools like their their full data set is less than that and that includes the

13:52 junk terms of the zero volume thing so that that's interesting I think for

13:57 people that when they realize like we actually have so much more data than people than

14:03 others right now I I certainly so with the AIO of course are you guys doing

14:09 something keeping that because there are very less tools out there which could tell about the AIO I know it's very nent

14:16 stage right now but do you guys have any anything in the road map for that yeah

14:22 uh so the data is being recorded right now we're working on the front end you'll probably see it in just a few

14:28 days days like next week probably at the latest wow okay because I was doing the presentation on AIO and when I was

14:35 researching I mean they were only bright Edge and couple of tools zip there so there were only couple of tools out

14:41 there doing it so I thought good time to ask yeah it's uh it's not as

14:46 straightforward as people think like zip tie they do it with logged in users and

14:51 stuff but they're they're specifically doing this for the AI reviews like

14:57 they're not I think they're not really like doing it for rank tracking too and like you kind of run into this issue

15:02 where you for rank tracking you really need unpersonalized logged out

15:07 results but for AI overviews they're not shown to logged out users like that so

15:14 you run into this issue of like this data quality issue that we had to solve I know some TOS like launched this but

15:20 if you if you go look at their data it's like 3% of what it should actually show

15:25 because they're they're not actually like tracking this stuff properly right right right so one of the question

UR vs DR Explained

15:32 which came from my team is specifically who do the lot of Link building so this

15:38 they want to ask that we all know what is a Dr for domain rating and why it is important now can you throw some light

15:44 on Ur and why should we be caring about that as well because we are or link

15:50 builders in general just look at Dr so is there any purpose they should be looking into a UR and is there something

15:57 good into Ur or just should ignore it so it's an interesting problem because you're right like the link building

16:03 Community focuses on Dr because if you're building something new like you're not really going to have a UR

16:09 score for them but really if you're trying to build links on existing Pages Ur is the metric that you should be

16:16 using like it is it is basically like an updated version of page rank which Google still uses for a lot of things

16:23 that is the measure of actually how strong the page itself is rather than the overall domain so like the Dr you're

16:29 like I'm going to build a page but it might be it might be a weat page on a good domain whereas you are is

16:35 specifically like you can tell if it's a strong page or not but it if again I

16:41 think different metrics for different things the new pages like I said you are just doesn't exist for them so like you

16:46 can't just automatically assume this is going to be whatever a good thing or a bad thing so that's where like Dr is

16:52 useful but if you're if you're trying to get the links on existing Pages you are is the metric to go for Okay so but

16:59 let's say in a s case where we have seen if a Dr is 60 the UR of a homepage the

17:05 UR is still in lower digits like 20 or 18 so what what does one take from

17:14 that I mean 18 or 20 on Ur is a pretty decent score that means that page is

17:19 fairly well linked either either internally or externally because it takes into account both like we we see

17:25 all the internal links on the website too and so all that is like how calculated in that and I would say a

17:31 page on a UR 1820 absolutely I I would be trying to get a link from there okay

17:37 so it's not Ur needs to be like 80 900 I think you would be hard pressed to

17:43 find very many that are that high okay okay because sometime we would talk and

17:48 we say you got the Dr increased but why is you are so low and now I get ANW I

17:53 mean I would I would focus more on like relevancy than either than than the metrics but are you Ur like 18 to 20 is

18:00 is a pretty solid page I all right that's a relief even our

18:06 website has a you are in less than 20 so I always think is there something wrong

18:11 with the backlink profile well it's it's a logarithmic scale so it gets increasingly harder to get higher

18:18 numbers I think you know uh most Pages probably sit in the like 10 to 30 range

18:25 above that is going to be pretty hard like you're going to need a lot of links to spefic specifically that page again from other websites or internally on

18:32 your own website but it gets harder and harder so yeah if you're aiming for like 8090 you might like homepage of Google

18:39 and stuff those but I don't think you'll see too many outside of that okay so

18:44 that's good to know for everyone I'm sure they most of the people confuse these now let's talk

AI and Machine Learning in SEO

18:52 a little bit about the AI and machine learning in SEO of course Ai and machine learning and llms are becoming buzz word

18:59 in SEO but they are also transforming how we approach SE what role do you see

19:04 AI playing in SEO strategy especially in terms of ranking factor and content

19:11 development uh I mean in my personal opinion the llms are not good at writing

19:17 the content but they are good at like rewarding or summarizing or trying to help you get your thoughts together so

19:23 they are useful for some parts of the writing where I think it's a little top

19:29 but like people have been working on this stuff for years automation is is like the big play

19:35 in my opinion so I mentioned like the edge system and stuff that let's rewrite 800 meta descriptions title tags uh

19:43 there's a lot of things that you can do um I I'm hoping to personally launch

19:48 this uh I'm going to say next year but like years ago I wrote a script to map

19:54 redirects for people to say like what is what content is relevant to the content it used to be there I want a button that

20:01 basically is like yeah run this and and give people the output and say like this is where we think you should redirect

20:06 these Pages like we have the data to say here are the pages with links that are just like 404 and like where on the

20:13 current site matches the content that used to be there well we see the content that used to be there we're storing that

20:19 or there's always archive.org I think the original scripts I all use like archiv NW work or common craw data for

20:26 that but yeah you can crawl the current webs and then just match the pages and say this is the most relevant or here

20:32 are the top three most relevant pick which one you want to redirect it to Output the redirects Implement them

20:37 automatically even uh a lot of this stuff is just going to save people time

20:42 time on the analysis time on the implementation uh it's it's a whole new

20:47 era and like there there's some cool stuff coming I think okay do you foresee

20:53 any significant shift in how SEO professionals should adapt their technical audits or the keyword research

20:59 in response to AI driven search engines like Google's anticipated

21:06 advancements maybe not necessarily for the search engines but for the models

21:12 themselves or like the AI overviews a lot of that is like a summarization so I

21:17 kind of personally view it similar to what we did for Featured Snippets you want to be in the featured snippet write

21:23 something similar maybe add some value in some way so you have to be more targeted with specific like paragraphs

21:31 or sections to then try and like be included in that and it's going to be the same with a lot of the large

21:38 language models when they're coming up with this well they work a little differently like the the search engines

21:44 actually summarize like what's already there in the results uh at least that's how the one for Google works whereas the

21:50 large language models they kind of write their own thing and then they try and like reference things that said something similar to what they

21:56 said but either way it really needs to be like more targeted really summarize

22:03 or write well specific items within your content if you want to be like

22:08 referenced or included in those things okay so now let's jump into

Technical SEO Strategies

22:17 something you are known for technical Su let's do a deep dive into technical UE

22:23 you have spoken of course at various conferences about common mistakes companies make especially around HF Lang

22:29 and canonicalization what are some of the trickiest technical issues you have

22:34 encountered lately and how did you go about solving them or helping people

22:40 solve them you know I I hit one um with hrfs

22:46 the other day well this it's been maybe a month ago or so now but it was fascinating because like we couldn't

22:52 crawl this robots. text file and I saw like nothing I was like there's no

22:58 reason there's no block or anything like we just weren't it's not that we couldn't crawl it's sorry it's we

23:03 weren't processing it correctly and what it ended up being was

23:09 a what is called what is it um like a zero width

23:14 space and so like it's this invisible character that you can't really see okay

23:20 just like a space but it's not even a space like that's just it it took me a while to

23:27 even figure out how do I put this in a file so I could test it but I was using

23:32 I think it was Will crit he has a robot subex tester that Parts is just like googlebot does and yeah I was flagging

23:39 it and I think the one on technical seo.com also flagged it but I'd never seen this literally invisible charact

23:46 I've seen other ones but like this particular invisible character like the the whole thing was like disallow this

23:52 or whatever but there was a that character in there which made it not disallow so we were crawling and they

23:58 were like why are you crawling this it says you shouldn't but it's because of this this invisible character that was

24:04 there okay and and outside HFS so do you see some other tricky

24:12 technical SE issues most of the time it's either uh people usually hit me up with issues on

24:19 JavaScript or H rep Ling javascripts in particular there's so many things that

24:24 can go wrong I mean even we we're building some of the new sections on our it was like we hit almost every major

24:31 JavaScript issue that that you're going to hit where contents like hidden instead of being displayed by default or

24:38 like the links worked for users but they weren't there for search engines even some interesting things

24:44 around like multiple uh like canonical tags and title tags and stuff JavaScript

24:50 is just always one of those things where I think it's hard to get right especially if devs have never like had

24:55 to run through it's great though like once you solve the issues for any future framework anything built with that it's

25:02 going to be fine but if they've never like had to go through with SEO they don't know what to look for ETC it's

25:08 it's always a process to get the framework to a point where you no longer have a bunch of these issues and like we

25:14 had even gone to uh you know a pre-render solution for a bit and even

25:19 that they had some issues but I think we're back to where we're actually serers side rendering it all ourselves

25:25 but then some stuff was missing from the render on the server and it's it's a number of different issues HF Ling is

25:32 always complicated we tried to make that easier actually we built this awesome it was like first of its kind I think still

25:37 the only one out there it's a visualization of the HF Lan cluster so it shows you like what's actually

25:42 linking to what what's referencing what and like we flag in red if like one of the references is missing or nothing's

25:49 linking to that page or that page has an error so I I personally love that view I

25:54 wish you know when I was trying to show people these these issues like we just basically all use spreadsheets and we're

26:00 like this is missing and blah blah blah but it was so hard to explain and now this visual is like just go look at that and look where it's rare and solve that

26:08 so this tool hrf Lang is it with the hrfs is this under because I really didn't knew about this it's been out

26:14 over a year now I think it's under side audit uh there's like an H length section under the the what do we call I

26:22 think page inspect under there right and it's got the whole graph and it's got a whole table below it and tells you

26:28 exactly what's wrong with it right because because we use in our website HF Lang we have three different websites

26:34 for UK India and the us so we do that but if a client sometime comes and my developer says what kind of H length to

26:41 use I say the best example is go open apple.com and see how they are doing it I find that's the best example for using

26:47 a just copy whatever they are doing is that what I advise you interesting I

26:52 don't even know what their setup is but yeah apple probably do well they have a very good setup because they have the

26:58 largest number of websites of course and how they rank and everything so I always look up to Apple for that okay yeah okay

27:08 and uh so what are some technical issue aspects that marketer should be aware of even without being ex an export I

Indexing Best Practices

27:16 probably the biggest one is just indexing I mean is the page indexed or not like it doesn't matter what else you

27:21 do if the pag is an index like improving your title tag or your content isn't going to matter well sort of if it's

27:29 Mark no index it's not going to matter but if you're not indexed because of the quality of your content then improving

27:34 the content can help with that yeah so so an interesting thing what happened few days back we were working for a

27:40 client and his site was not indexed in Google we tried everything we tried

27:45 submitting into index it will take all submit but the site was not getting indexed in Google and it took us like

27:51 almost six seven hours and then one of my guy went into the Google search console searching and somehow client has

27:59 accidentally blocked his homepage and there was no way no alert coming even when you submit in the index it was

28:06 taking the index okay that was one thing I learned so we always say okay if the page is not indexed see if it has

28:13 somebody blocked it yeah the URL removal tool too has caused like so many issues

28:19 like I've seen well there's been some major case studies what was the last big one probably LinkedIn I think like

28:24 accidentally removed their entire website from Google for like a day just because someone misused the tool from

28:31 right right right right right internal linking in is is an area you have stressed before could you elaborate on

Importance of Internal Linking

28:38 its importance and share a couple of advanced tip that might help our listeners improve their internal linking

28:46 strategy yeah uh I mean internal links external links as far as page rank is

28:51 concern it doesn't matter like people think like links from other sites count more but really it depends on like what

28:58 you may have more relevant pages on other websites but you could easily have relevant pages on your own

29:04 website uh so getting those internal links you control the anchor text what it says like you're sending the relevant

29:11 signals you're sending like the context everything along with these they're super important i' I've seen this time

29:17 and time again every time we add internal links we go we want to go boost something we either like go add some

29:22 content we go add some internal links it works like every time as far as how to

29:27 do it we actually built a tool inside audit that is an internal link opportunities tool it replaced my old

29:33 process that involved like scraping Google and crawling websites and a bunch of stuff now it's just like go in there

29:41 you can filter by the page you're linking from like if you're going in there to update an article or whatever you can go look and see like these are

29:47 the opportunities to link out or if you're building a new page you can go and say like these are the opportunities

29:53 to get links to that page uh it makes it really really easy I think another way

30:01 if you're doing bulk if you got a lot of content on a Blog I always recommend like a related post section it's an easy

30:07 way to kind of like get stuff and we even did that from my I ran a study on that because I I wasn't sure like we do

30:13 a very good job internally linking our content already and so I was curious would we actually see any uplift if we

30:20 added this related post section and the answer was yeah we did and when I looked at it it was because a lot of the stuff

30:27 that get recommended is actually related content but that it wasn't natural in

30:33 any way in the article to link over to these like it was such a like a similar

30:38 topic similar post but like there wasn't any natural way reason to promote or

30:44 link to those and so a lot of these actually came into the related post section instead and and got a bump which

30:50 was which was great because I I didn't expect um I didn't expect to see much

30:56 just because we actually do such a good job with the internal linking so so is there a thumb of how

31:02 many internal links should I pass from a let's say a block post to my other Pages

31:07 money Pages or other blogs there's no like hard and fast rule I mean it's your website you can kind of

31:14 do what you want even Google has said that obviously at c a certain point um

31:20 it just looks bad I think in the in the text like if you got this paragraph you

31:25 know like three sentences and you've got like seven internal links that are all highlighted or whatever that doesn't

31:31 look great for users in my opinion uh but you can always like break that out a little different if you've got some

31:36 related things and just put a section below the the the content that actually is like promoting certain articles or

31:43 whatever but I think that that would be my only concern is that how it actually

31:48 like looks for users you don't just want everything to be highlighted like the link is where does one start where does

31:54 another stop Etc otherwise yeah it's it's pretty much your side you you can

31:59 just do what you want even the anchor text I know a lot of people like to vary the anchor text and stuff it's not

32:05 something I pay attention to I'm like this is what it should be so you can have different anchor text

32:14 pointing to same page is what you or should we always go with the same anchor

32:19 text you you can do what you want is is my point a lot of people will vary that sometimes like I will sometimes I won't

32:26 there's no real like writer wrong there when we tried to look at that like I I just can't see a difference

32:33 basically okay okay and I mean of course technical Su doesn't complete if we

Importance of Schema Markup

32:39 don't discuss schemas so how important are schemas in today's SEO world and

32:45 which are the most important schemas Web Master should pay attention to or should have on their

32:52 website as far as importance uh I mean they're not a ranking Factor but

32:58 they can get you Ser features so it's not going to like make you rank higher

33:04 but it can put you in places where you would be eligible as for the ones that are important Google has what they call

33:09 the solution gallery for schema markup and it's basically all the schema that they

33:15 support so usually the ones in there are going to get you something like the cing search box or a specific listing in like

33:23 the product things or videos or or all that kind of stuff uh

33:28 I typically will only do the ones that actually like give me something like I'm I'm not going to be like Mark up

33:34 everything and do this other markup like if they're not using it maybe they will in the future or something but it seems like extra work with no benefit so I'm

33:42 I'm only going to do the ones that I are actually like going to get me something in the search

33:49 results now for those who wants to learn more about the technical side are there any resources you

33:56 recommend anything I wrote on HS that and uh Google has pretty solid

34:02 documentation I wouldn't have said that a few years ago but they they've been uh they've been doing a lot on that end and

34:09 uh definitely read through all their their developer documentation their SEO documentation like it's actually pretty

34:15 pretty solid now okay and uh so of course now Google

34:22 remove the cash cash option you have to go and look at the cash option and we are now seeing with where those options

34:28 cash colon is also not working for many of the website uh recently I I don't know if they they introduced way back

34:34 also for what reason God knows so so those are the things which it becomes

34:40 challenging for a Web Master as well because uh especially with the server side rendering I would

34:47 say yeah well the server side rendering like it was never a good option to use the cash anyway the T technically there

34:55 is people's content security policy actually wouldn't allow resources to be loaded on other websites where Google

35:02 was loading their cash was another website so in a lot of cases like the cash would look broken anyway because it

35:08 it wasn't actually getting the resources it needed to load the page properly so that was that was never a

35:14 good way to test that one but yeah it's getting more complicated to test these setups even the testing tools now

35:20 they're are different user agents it's last year and just a few more like hurdles and stuff to jump through to

35:26 actually test things okay now let's talk about SEO for

SEO for Beginners vs Advanced Techniques

35:32 beginners versus Advanced with your extensive experience what would you what advice would you give to someone just

35:39 starting in Su today given how face how fastpaced and data driven the industry

35:45 has beg just be a sponge you know you you

35:50 really need to like read or if your preferred method is listening watching go to YouTube go to podcast you don't

35:57 you don't know what you don't know and unfortunately like in our industry you're probably also going to get some outdated information or some wrong

36:04 information at some point but to start with you just have to absorb as much as you can learn as much as you can it's

36:11 it's a funny path people take because they they actually start off usually pretty simply like let's write good

36:17 content let's make some links and then like the people get into this like crazy nonsense of and detail about every

36:25 single thing and they spend a lot of time on things that don't really matter

36:30 and then finally they learn to prioritize and stuff and they go back and they're like well we should just work on content at links again it's kind

36:37 of the path most people would know taking anyway right right and uh for those who

36:43 are bit more advanced maybe managing large website or an Enterprise SEO what should they be focusing on in

36:50 2025 uh to stay ahead of the game whatever issues that you have uh

36:57 people really always want to go advanc you know 99.9% of SEO is just do the

37:03 basics do it well it's it's hard work I think to actually put in the time and

37:08 effort like you can spend all this time analyzing figuring out all this other stuff but again content and links like

37:14 that for the most part is going to have more difference than go and Implement schema stuff or like focusing on a bunch

37:22 of these there's a ton of technical things that are flagged by auto tools where I'm like that doesn't doesn't

37:27 matter I just don't care we can do this it's a best practice it's not going to make a difference in our ranking so it

37:34 really is like learning to prioritize those things and like what what you should be working on that's going to

37:39 have an impact and it's very hard I think for seos in general to get there

37:45 but especially if you're inh house or at an agency a lot of times is you actually have to sell the work and people will

37:52 sell stuff they're like we need to do this it's best practice and we do it and

37:58 the dev spent time on it and everything and there was no impact so that when you go to make your business games of like

38:04 we should do this the next time it is less likely they're actually going to do it so really bringing forward the the

38:12 ideas that move the needle I'm so what you always need to focus on we we created a whole report in HS called the

38:19 opportunities report right it's all the things that we've seen over the years like from our own experience and stuff

38:26 like if you work on the things it's actually going to help you so for anyone

38:31 new or even even if you've been in there for a while in the industry for a while I would honestly take a look at that and

38:37 say like okay yeah I probably should go do these redirects and I probably should go like work on this content and let me

38:43 take a look at that cannibalization that's going on over here and it it really is the things that we think will

38:49 help the most people okay and how important are links

Importance of Backlinks

38:55 as a ranking factor in 2024 we are running a new study on this right now

39:01 actually I don't know that much has changed I'm I'm waiting on like the historical data from that just see

39:07 because we're running a whole like correlation study and all but in general almost every like SEO Factor always ends

39:13 up with a weak what's called Spearman correlation which means yeah it has an

39:19 impact but it's not necessarily like you can't just build links and that's all you do like it's one of the things and

39:27 it will make a difference you know if unless it's a completely

39:32 uncompetitive Market you can build links and like rank for something uncompetitive but for something competitive you usually need links and

39:39 content like you got to have some on page stuff right it's it's never just one thing so I I what I expect from this

39:47 study is that yeah we'll once again see that it is somewhere in what is considered a weak Spearman correlation

39:53 but that doesn't mean that it's not important it just means it's one of many things that you need to do to actually

39:59 rank so let's see link from a lower traffic relevant blog or link from a

40:06 higher traffic generic blog which one is you prefer I have

40:12 both uh I would probably go and I'm talking for a new website let

40:19 me sweeten it up I'm talking for a new website it's a really tough call

40:25 honestly you're you're weighing different signals like like you now have like relevancy factors versus like

40:30 strength factors there and both are kind of important some combination of both on different websites generally I would

40:37 just take the relevant one it's probably easier to get like if it's something in

40:43 your industry you may even know the person can just message them or or your client does like hey hey hey Jim over

40:50 there like I see your got a Blog about this like pick up the phone call someone people would to do that anymore but like

40:56 that kind of stuff works those relationships even even in the SEO industry now if I send people a message

41:04 on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever um like hey can you link over here they're likely to do it but it's it's because of

41:11 that established relationship over many years right because generally what we

41:17 have seen is in our personal experience for a new website of course the link

41:22 from a very high domain is not it tends to be counterproductive but if the site is let say somewhat aged a link from a

41:29 higher side like for for example fobes is much more gives much more push to the rankings rather than a link from a lower

41:36 Authority relevant sites I mean just what we have seen with our experience maybe yeah I some of those

41:45 sites though that you would think like they pass a lot of value I would say

41:50 that some of them might surprise you that they they don't actually pass value like Google's realized they link out or

41:57 certain sections of that like okay forbes.com yeah the Forbes Marketplace I don't know or

42:03 the contributors where you have to pay to write the articles there I would

42:08 almost be willing to bet like Google doesn't count the links from there at all right right right right now let's

Content Refresh vs New Content Strategy

42:16 talk about content strategies for 2025 and of course for now as well uh of

42:22 course content Audits and updates are key to sustained success in SEO specifically when your content gets

42:28 still people talk about doing blog uh content refresh and everything what's your take on refreshing content versus

42:35 creating new content and how do you balance these two approaches well I'm going to throw in a a wrench to this one

42:42 because I am a big fan of not just like refreshes but testing on your content uh

42:49 so there are certain blogs on HFS that I really wanted to rank and uh one of them in particular like I think I was ranking

42:55 like 20th or 25th after publishing wasn't great uh but instead of like re scrapping and rewriting the whole blog I

43:02 was kind of like well what if I did this and I just go add a section or go change the title or run a bunch of tests I

43:09 added some data to it in fact I was like What if I throw some ATF dat in here like what happens so I ran like 20 some

43:16 tests on this one blog over the course of like a few weeks luckily like we're crawled fast so like I could just do

43:22 this see if it was crawled and like check the ranking updates and yeah a few

43:27 a few tests over a few weeks and I got up to third so I'm more of a fan of like why scrap something a lot of people like

43:34 that's what they do they write something two years later they're like well this doesn't work they completely rewrite it that unfortunately was like a lot of the

43:40 hrfs process for a while too we just go completely rewrite the topic new take

43:46 whatever when some of it doesn't need to just be completely scrapped like the information is there it's good maybe I'm

43:53 just missing something so having another pair of eyes on that or or even a fresh set of eyes like you wrote something two

43:59 years ago you can probably go back and look and say like well look at the content that's out there now and what

44:05 are they talking about that I missed and just go update that instead of completely

44:10 rewriting as far as new versus updating it depends on how important it is you

44:16 know we're at the point where I want us to actually be doing more updating than creating new content because we've

44:22 written about most SEO topics on our blog but that's that's a pretty unique

44:27 position to be in but it's always a matter of how important it is to us and

44:33 that that's not just traffic but like business value we rate every single post

44:38 as far as a business value is this like showcasing a bunch of our our product in here is it like going to do well for

44:44 traffic like all that gets taken into consideration when we say we're going to write something new or we're going to go

44:50 update something uh because we we want things that are going to matter it's not

44:55 content for Content say it's its content to kind of push the product and educate

45:01 at the same time I'm and of course you must have heard about the Cavin indies's

45:06 new study where it says that uh if the index of if you have too many pages then

45:12 that's what helpful content update also hit you need to so he saw that a lot of

45:17 pages which were not craw not index were also an issue trimming those down helps in ranking what is your take

45:25 on maybe in some cases in other cases maybe not I've seen a lot of stuff about

45:31 helpful content related to internal links and over optimization and everyone's got these theories I saw

45:36 something about like brand versus something I can't even remember did that

45:41 study recently yeah I I take all of that with I mean there's some truth in all of

45:48 them obviously more pages that are lower quality not great for overall sight signals brand stuff I mean there's some

45:55 stuff as far as like EA and stuff that would indicate yeah maybe it makes some difference but is that the main thing or

46:02 or you know the the one on um like the over optimization that could have been

46:07 like a selection bias it was the same time like all the affiliate stuff get hit so how many affiliate Pages were it

46:14 could be that the Affiliates yeah they were optimized well but they all got hit anyway it doesn't not necessarily

46:19 because they were optimized well but because of the type of content they were so all all these all this data and all

46:25 these studies I think have some selection bias and some story that the person themselves wants to tell uh it's

46:33 just the way it is I do the same thing honestly in a lot of my study I'm not saying it's right or wrong but I would

46:38 take most of them with with a grain of salt it's not just start deleting a bunch of pages you tell that to like a

46:44 news site when now you're deleting history uh and that's not great like there was a whole thing about that like

46:50 the web is disappearing yeah especially for new sites you don't want to be deleting a bunch of old stories and

46:56 stuff it may not be popular but like someone five years from now may want to find that if you deleted it well it's

47:04 gone okay now in relation to content strategy how should Brands approach clustering

How to Develop Topical Authority

47:11 content then then developing topical Authority for the long so

47:18 I I'm going to throw another wrench I don't know that I really believe in topical Authority I mean somewhat but

47:24 you go look at Forbes they write about everything they for everything do they have topical Authority and everything no

47:30 there's a lot more than just again it's one of many things like it came out in the leak that yeah like the distance

47:36 from uh for what they call it exactly but let's just say like distance from topic or distance from like where this

47:42 what the site typically talks about is a thing but like that's one of 200 plus

47:48 raiky factors and all have like 50 things involved with them so it's one measure one thing it doesn't mean that

47:55 like if if I I have this argument all the time and we should we should run this test like if I write about hot dogs

48:00 on HS like our site isn't about hot dogs but I guarantee you I could rank for hot

48:05 dogs so you could go off topic and still rank for things yeah it's one of the as

48:13 far as like what content to create your competitors is a great place to start you know you can look at content Gap or

48:19 when doing research like everyone clusters now we have clusters by parent topic by keywords uh there like two more

48:25 ways we might add do clust stream but might confuse people too but it's it's great because you kind

48:32 of get to see like what is typically like ranking for these things what your competitors are already ranking for like

48:39 I send people typically like business folks top pages this is your competitor's most successful content go

48:46 do that like if they just start somewhere that would be the place to start what's your main competitor okay

48:52 go to top pages look this is what's driving value for them are these important things to you yeah okay go

48:58 let's go create those super simple but you can do that for a whole industry like I've written about this where

49:04 literally I'll go and pull top content for hundreds of companies and then cluster it together and say like here's

49:10 literally the most valuable content within an entire industry like it's talking about these topics and then like

49:17 do I have those if not go create those nothing nothing complicated other than

49:23 like the scale of the data but again you don't have to go that way just one competitor start with one competitor

49:29 like what are they doing better than you and is so do you believe is topical

49:34 clustering a real thing or no well it depends on how you look at it

49:41 now if you have related pages and you're linking to other related Pages you're

49:47 probably getting a little more value from that doesn't mean that like you only need to some people are fans of

49:53 like siloing and the way they view it is like never link out sign The Silo I would say those sites are hurting

49:59 themselves like if you actually look at the way Page rank passes if you got Silo here Silo here Silo here and you start

50:06 interlinking between them you can actually look model the page rank flow and typically it's going to bring

50:11 everything up not like it's going to hurt you which is a lot of what a lot of people think so it depends on how you

50:17 look at it now should you create content relevant to your Niche your topic yes is

50:23 it everything that is it so important like people hitch it to be I I'm a

50:29 little more skeptical there because what exactly page rank is if you are giving back page rank is like

50:35 a currency if you are linking back to too many pages you are actually just spending all the currency because the

50:41 power keeps on going lesser and lesser so will that Silo not help when you are linking to lesser Pages the page rank is

50:49 not getting leaking away I would be less concerned with it

50:55 leaking to other Pages generally more internal links more internal linking between sections it's going to bring the

51:01 scores for like the entire website typically okay and so what is your take

Google LEAKS Explained

51:09 on Google League how much of it do you think is

51:14 true uh probably all of it I don't think it was intentionally put out there I know I've seen some some conspiracy

51:21 theories about that but I don't think that's stuff that they really wanted us to see I don't think they NE necessarily

51:27 cared that we saw it either there wasn't too much like new or like tell me how

51:32 you changed your strategy did you do anything different from it the only thing was the The Click

51:39 through was CTR was an eye opener because we thought of course we knew that it's serious I mean Google takes it

51:45 into account but that's something I also interestingly tested when you know that

51:50 Google how many times you refresh the page so we continued we built a new page so Google has let's say 10 page in the

51:56 index before it refresh it to force refresh the whole content so we tried that a bit didn't worked out very well

52:03 honestly so we every day we would do one change and submit to Google to index and see does it move the nle so we did it

52:09 for 10 12 days and we thought maybe it's going to force it to crawl the whole page but I don't think any success out

52:17 of it but one thing which we knew of course Google has two type of indexes one it immediately indexes the page which is not exactly a ranking factor

52:24 and then it runs the whole analysis and then after a few days is the actual ranking stabilizes so that's but I think

52:30 yes you are right most of these factors were known it just confirm what we knew yeah the I mean the clickr a lot of

52:37 that came out in like the doj trial and everything here in the US like all the nav boost stuff but the the stuff in the

52:44 leak like we don't even know how it's really used like they are using some Chrome data but they've said time time

52:50 yeah they use it for ranking and it's probably true honestly like they probably use it for like content dis

52:56 covery do I need to crawl this two pages why is it popular let's let's go grwl and Index this so without more

53:04 context to the data in the league like we can't really assume it could be for crawling it could be for indexing it

53:09 could be for testing for QA like not necessarily just for

53:15 ranking right what is your take on the CTR boost or CT hack you don't need to

CTR Boost Techniques

53:23 that if you don't feel like yeah that that one's complicated I'm

53:29 pretty mixed on it to be honest uh I've run tests actually to try and manipulate

53:34 the the ranking results uh I did this probably a decade ago in fact with like

53:40 I was using the tour Network rting through another friend uh who did this with like residential IPS like we were

53:47 trying all kinds of different things all kinds of we were using like virtual machines and just trying to manipulate

53:54 like click behavior and simulate like normal search behavior all kinds of different stuff and all kinds of

54:00 different cadences or volumes and we never actually were able to impact it

54:06 and their entire like click Networks trading networks and stuff I think if they work the way that people seem to

54:13 think that you would see some case studies on this working but to my knowledge there's never been a single

54:20 case study that shows this actually works besides the ones from Rand fishkin

54:25 which were very tempor like usually the results are for a day and Google explained that before that uh like

54:31 basically they're looking for trending things or things that are hot so yeah like they can move something from page

54:37 two to number one or whatever for a day but then it goes back to the normal ranking it it doesn't work long term in

54:44 any study that I've ever seen anyone I know that's ever tried yeah the these entire networks of buy clicks or trade

54:52 clicks and everything um you never hear anyone talking about these they're out there they've been out there

54:58 for years you would think there would be one SEO at least like pushing these or

55:03 or showing case studies if they actually worked and uh there hasn't been right right right right right all

Where to Find Patrick Stox Online

55:11 right uh with that Patrick it's been a fantastic having you on the show today

55:16 your insights as always are invaluable before we wrap up where can our listeners follow your latest updates or

55:23 catch your upcoming talks uh yeah on Twitter LinkedIn at Patrick stocks on

55:28 both uh talks I'll be HFS evolve we're running a conference here in Raleigh

55:35 actually uh this like Tech SEO specific called Tech SEO connect okay I don't even know what else

55:41 is on my schedule right now I'll be in Miami at a legal SEO conference in December I think I'll be at Brighton Us

55:49 in San Diego all right and uh of course thanks again for being here Patrick and

55:54 thanks to our listener for tuning in don't forget to subscribe and share this episode with anyone you know who is

56:00 trying to up their SU game specifically Technical and stay tuned for more expert

56:05 interviews until next time keep optimizing