Most people create a WordPress site and then try as soon as possible to get the site indexed by this search engine giant (Google).
However, without performing four initial steps, releasing your site and making it public can become a nightmare.
I created a series of four actionable video lessons that will walk you through each of the four steps that will help you avoid these problems.
Continue reading
What most people don’t know is that dealing with simple sitemap and Meta descriptions is a bit laughable when considering that those are just 2 ranking factors out of 200 ranking factors that Google uses to decide how to create the search rankings for every search that a user performs.
Continue reading
These are questions that you may ask while working on your WordPress SEO.
Since the content is video, it’s super short and very easy for you to follow.
The success stories are well worth reading because they show methods that made those customers successful.
In many of them, the customers talked about the exact features and tools from Squirrly SEO they used to reach page 1 of Google search.
Continue reading
The headline is one of the first things people see when your page appears in SERPs.
So, you should take the time to write clickable headlines so that more people end up on your page from Google Search.
Or you can use these tried and tested formulas to come up with awesome headlines in a gif.
Continue reading
Add an image. Use emojis. Mention an influencer in your post.
You’ve probably heard this advice over and over again. Don’t get me wrong, you should take best practices such as those into account when creating twitter messages.
But here’s the problem:
Those best practices don’t help with what’s typically one of the biggest problems with promoting content on Twitter in the first place.
Continue reading
Squirrly 2020 wants to give you an edge over the 60,000 or 60,000,000 other pages competing with your page for the same keyword. Those sites probably already have Yoast installed. If all you do is install that SEO plugin yourself, how will that help you be better than them? – No, to be competitive you need Squirrly SEO.
Continue reading
A few reasons come to mind:
let’s be honest: we’ve been blogging since 2012 at the Squirrly Company.
You’d think that some of our older blog posts are just begging for a thin content SEO penalty!
We’re Squirrly. We have a very good way for dealing with it, and because we love you, we’re making it available to you, for the first time ever, even if you’re not part of our exclusive and invite-only community: DMSuperstars. (<< even though I’ve basically just extended an invitation via that special link)
In the lines that follow you’ll see:
Thin content SEO penalties have been happening for quite a while now. According to Google algorithm updates, the penalty can be harsher or softer.
If you want to make sure you’ll never run into trouble, just use the Squirrly SEO plugin in WordPress and make your thin content invisible to Google!
1) In Bulk SEO Settings -> Select the pages you consider to be Thin Content.
Here’s what my Bulk SEO Settings panel looks like after I’ve done that.
You can see from the titles and the URLs that these pages are mostly gibberish.
They would provide no value to people searching on the Google search engine.
Therefore:
2) Make sure these Thin Content pages are set to RED Dot on their Visibility column
That means these pages are invisible to Google.
(technical: Google will listen to your guidelines and ignore those pages. These pages will not be considered at all when indexing and ranking your site.)
This makes us avoid any kind of thin content SEO penalty or issue.
As easy as that.
Now if you want to look deeper, this is exactly what we do:
3) No Index, No Follow, Remove from Sitemap
Why?
No Index: Hey, Google. Make sure you don’t index this page. It’s not to be found on search engines.
No Follow (Don’t pass Link Juice): Hey Google, keep all the SEO Authority of any page from my site linking to this page 100% INTACT. Don’t try to pass authority from those legit SEO pages to this piece of content.
Remove from Sitemap: Hey WordPress, let’s make sure that we generate a sitemap where this page doesn’t show. Since this is only useful for ephemeral feeds, it’s not worth adding to an evergreen sitemap. It won’t be useful soon.
Because with Squirrly SEO we easily avoid any type of SEO problem that could appear! We do love our tech.
Some of the reasons have already been shortly highlighted above. However, we do this:
If you’ve seen our Core Values, then you know that Excellent Customer Service is a must for us!
We take Service very seriously. Our purpose is to serve our audience.
You’ve always helped us grow. We’ve always helped you grow.
It must be the reason why we have people paying subscriptions without interruptions for 6 years (and going!). Read about that here in this thin piece of content.
Over 7 Years of running this company.
Our Journey was fueled by thin content. It helped us build a very personal, very intimate relationship with our audience. It’s like they were really part of our family. Just as we are whispering in their ear (via the SEO Live Assistant) while they’re typing their blog posts, they are reading our feeds and then voicing their opinions via our support channels.
We’ve always been open to communication. << It’s the #1 reason for our success. Listening to all the amazing feedback (don’t think the feedback was always good; dude: even, bad feedback is amazing. I talk about this at conferences) we could make Squirrly SEO evolve, we could push all of the boundaries, explore new horizons and reach new heights.
The fact that the Squirrly company keeps publishing all of these “Developer Updates” and “News about the Company” blog posts, our audience also opens up to us and becomes a hugely important part of our DNA.
There you have it. That’s why we keep publishing thin content.
Even before Squirrly received the initial Angel Investment… before we had a product created.. our audience loved the content we were producing, even though it had no SEO value.
This has always been clear for us.
For a while, in our history, because Squirrly SEO didn’t have the capacity to do what I’ve just shown you in this article today, I had to go and manually delete (and make 301 re-directions) older posts that meant so much for our company.
It was good for SEO.
It was bad for:
At that time, I didn’t really think we had such big fans. Turns out I was wrong.
It took me a lot of time to do content audits, to keep clear lists of changes made, to work with the “trash” functions and to redirect everything, so we don’t get no broken links.
Some of the posts were linked-to in some of our special emails, so we were now sending our audience to broken links.
We’ll never do that again.
We’ll keep pushing thin content. Because Squirrly SEO can handle everything awesomely now.
That’s what I decided. Little did I know that we would end up generating huge demand for our partnership programs by publishing this kind of content!
For the win: people in our audience kept reading all that we wrote throughout 2018 and seeing how far we’ve come along and how many new products were being added to our line-up, they could no longer stand aside.
They had to team up with us and become partners.
Some became affiliates, the others became members of our Web Dev Kits programs.
This big win for our company would have never been possible if we just stopped publishing the kinds of content that our audience loved.
Just because someone tells you: “Don’t do thin content.” it doesn’t mean you have to listen. Not 100% anyway.
There are work-arounds. You need to figure out what’s good for your company.
I think I’ve already convinced you that for Squirrly thin content is super helpful.
We deal with it our own way.
And we keep our SEO-oriented pages and content away from our feeds-oriented content in the eyes of Google.
It’s a big help for our SEO Strategies. The squirrly.co website is not the only place where we apply this.
Now that you know the full story, it’s time for you to decide on your own strategy.
Will you go with the elegant Squirrly SEO way of dealing with such content?
Or will you ruthlessly delete content from your site (with the risk of doing many wrongs and wasting lots of time)?
You decide!
I just wanted to show you that there’s a really good way for you to handle thin content SEO.
If your company doesn’t usually communicate and stays away from public launches, public events, public comments, then you don’t even really need to create thin content as part of your communication strategy. In that case you don’t need to create such content.
However, keep in mind that you’ll still have to use a clever system to make certain URLs invisible on your site. In some cases attachment pages (not in all cases, though), in some cases some custom post types, or custom taxonomies. You can still have URLs that could be deemed thin content. It’s good to prepare a strategy for dealing with it.
Keep Ranking! (both on Search Engines, and in Blog and Social Media Feeds!)
