Google’s bumper ad tool, which shortens longer videos to six-second bumper ads, is now broadly available. Here’s more information on how to use it.
The tool, previously known as Bumper Machine, has been in testing since 2019. It allows advertisers to create bumper ads for video reach campaigns effortlessly.
Here’s how Google describes the tool now known as trim video:
“Trim video is a video ad production tool that helps advertisers make new bumper ads from their longer video assets quickly. Trim video uses Google Machine Learning to simplify the process of bumper ad creation by identifying the most important frames in a long ad and turning them into 6-second videos. It also has simple editing features that allow advertisers to modify the final output.”
The version of the tool released today includes improvements, such as an enhanced machine learning model that can better select clips and a more intuitive interface.
I tested the tool, and I can verify it’s easy to operate. It’s designed for anyone, regardless of their experience with video editing.
All you have to do is paste a link to one of your YouTube videos or grab one from your Google Ads library, and the tool will generate four different six-second ads.
You can compare the auto-generated videos, download the ones you like, or edit them by selecting different clips.
How To Use Google’s Trim Video Tool
You can access the trim video tool through the asset library in your Google Ads account.
In the navigation menu, click the tools and settings icon.
Under Shared Library, click Asset library.
Under Video, click Trim video and select a video.
Screenshot from: ads.google.com/aw/video/autotrim, October 2022.
It’s important to note that the Google help page I linked above says you can use a video from any source.
However, as shown in the screenshot above, the trim video tool asks you to paste a URL from YouTube.
I tested links to videos from different sources, and I can confirm only YouTube links work. Alternatively, you can use a video from your Google Ads library.
Note that the video has to be between seven seconds and 140 seconds.
After pasting a link, click on the Generate Videos button.
Screenshot from: ads.google.com/aw/video/autotrim, October 2022.
It takes a few minutes to generate the clips, and then you’re taken to a screen where you can preview or edit them.
Editing a clip is limited to selecting different timestamps. See an example below:
Screenshot from: ads.google.com/aw/video/autotrim, October 2022.
When you’re satisfied with your clips, click on the upload trimmed videos button.
Now they’re available in your Google Ads account to use as bumper ads.
A tweet that Google no longer delivers helpful results struck a nerve with others who felt likewise, causing it to go viral. The tweet received over 42,000 likes and nearly 6,000 retweets from others who are unsatisfied with Google.
The tweet compared Google to decrepit shopping malls where you can’t get “what you came for.”
The person tweeted:
Google search is becoming one of those dying malls. You still go there out of habit, but once you get there, none of it is what you want. You can remember when it was a useful place to visit, but now it’s weirdly hollow and you leave without getting what you came for
Yeah I keep seeing threads like this and I have no idea what they are talking about. Google still gives me almost exactly what I want the vast majority of the time.
But those expressing contentment with Google’s SERPs were overwhelmingly the outliers.
Most of the responses agreed with the original tweet, receiving over 42,000 likes, signaling that perhaps more people are unsatisfied with Google than are delighted by it.
Google Forcing Intent on SERPs
One of the trends in that discussion is that Google is forcing their interpretation of the search query.
But Google altering the intended meaning results in wrong answers.
This forces the user to try to reformulate their search query.
Those people complaining about this may not be imagining it.
A recent study by SEMRush discovered that almost 30% of search queries have to be reformulated.
The SEMRush study noted:
“There’s a great deal of keyword refinement at play here.
If we combine the number of Google clicks with the number of keyword changes, we see that almost 30% of people are either refining or extending their searches in some way.
…27.6% of searches eventually undergo some form of query refinement…”
Some of the forced intent can be explained by Google erroneously applying geolocation to the search query, interpreting a query as a local search.
The person who started the tweet also suggested that users should not be forced to use quotes or advanced search operators.
Some of the quote tweets are saying things to the effect of “if you know the tricks, it still works,” which misses the point.
1. A lot of the old tricks don’t work anymore 2. We shouldn’t have to try this hard to trick a search engine into giving useful results
Many people on Twitter agreed that Google SERPs are forcing the wrong search query interpretation.
I was just thinking the other day about how much less useful it has become. It seems like you can no longer force search terms but instead are stuck with related phrases Google thinks will be helpful.
I use it for researching some really really obscure things, so its determination that every search result must somehow have something to do with my current location in the middle of Pennsylvania is a bug not a feature.
I was trying to check import rules as an American returning to the U.S. from Canada, and because I was in Canada, it INSISTED on telling me what Canadians needed to travel to the U.S. or could bring home to Canada.
Another trend in the discussion spawned by the viral tweet is that the SERPs are polluted with scraped sites, bad recipe results that force users to scroll past useless content to get to the recipes and content that is generic and not helpful.
Scraped Sites in SERPs for Coding Queries
Yeah I’ve noticed this too with coding results – scraped GitHub issues pages and stack overflow threads that sometimes outrank the original thread
just one of many examples. anything on coding: results infested with warmed over and blended old stack overflow answers. And now the bots have taken this content to auto-generating thousands of youtube videos with text to title cards plus speech synthesis.
SERPs were described as so unhelpful that the experience was compared to walking through weeds:
I was thinking about this yesterday as I searched for something and knew full well that I would have to scroll through the weeds in the hope of actually finding anything helpful.
One of the saddest responses is that a sense of discovery is gone from Google:
I used to find the most interesting obscure pages on the web, searching on Google. It was a treat, helping me learn & discover new perspectives, but now I mostly get sponsored & paid-for corporation websites that lead me to commercial products or very vague generic information.
Is that Google’s fault? Or is it the fault of the content that’s online?
Part of the blame could be Google because it long ago appears to have decided to de-prioritize content from forums, which are communities where real people talk about topics of interest.
SERPs Filled With Content But Not Human Insight
Google has never explicitly said that it de-prioritized ranking content from forums. But as a forum community manager and someone who knows others who manage forums, it certainly feels like Google has pulled back from ranking content generated from real people.
A common complaint is that Google tends to rank content but not insights from real people.
I find myself including ‘reddit’ or ‘wikipedia’ in every search because that’s the only way to find relevant information written by human beings.
The old forums were all killed off by Facebook groups apparently as well. Entire dedicated communities are dormant or nonexistent. The internet is becoming less useful overall while connecting everyone better with video streaming. Data limits are really annoying too.
— IndustrialEngineeringDisrespector (@jdubrocketshirt) October 25, 2022
Some of the blame is thrown at the SEO industry for pumping out content written by writers but not necessarily experts.
There are tools today that scrape the SERPs and generate content briefs, outlines for writers to essentially rewrite content that is SEO optimized.
There’s an SEO theory called the Skyscraper strategy that promotes taking stock of competitor’s content and then researching the topic and rewriting it so that it’s ten times bigger and (hopefully) better.
Those tools and strategies encourage and help non-experts to write content and people are noticing.
The only time I ever even use Google search anymore is if I need to find some song that I couldn’t Shazam in time.
Because when I need actual answers all I find anymore are garbage articles written by people who know as little as I do. Or Reddit.
— Riko’s Maker Machine (he/him) (@themakermachine) October 25, 2022
So many articles that read like they were randomly generated by my search input 🙁
The Perception that Google is Dysfunctional or Corrupted
Lastly there is the old complaint that Google is motivated to shove ads in users faces and is corrupted. This complaint has been around since Google started showing ads and increased after Google went public.
Whether it’s true or not, the perception that Google is corrupted continues to this day.
No, they had that. They also had a functioning search engine back then. Nothing Google makes is functional, anymore. If it’s making ad revenue then they don’t care.
Thanks for the image, expresses very well what I’m thinking. It’s painful because it’s in a way a self fulfilling prophecy; Google abandoned its original mission of organizing the world’s information in order to become a virtual mall, and killed the Web as we knew it.
Days before the viral tweet was published I tool felt discouraged by Google search and posted about it on my Facebook feed.
I wrote:
“I just had to reformulate my search query in Google several times. Google kept insisting I was searching for something else.
And then had to resort to adding negative searches in order to stop Google from insisting I was searching for something else and finally I thought this is just silly.
So I went to Bing and I found what I was looking for with one search.
This does not happen every single time I search. But it seems like I’m increasingly having to reformulate my searches because Google keeps insisting I’m looking for something else.”
Chuck Price (LinkedIn profile), an expert search marketer, responded to my Facebook post, writing:
“I’ve been experiencing this for a few months now. When I asked here on FB awhile back if people found themselves using Bing more often, it was a resounding no.
Old habits die hard, but you can’t rely on Google any longer for the “best” search results.
I frequently find myself referencing Bing and even Yandex when I need answers.”
In my experience Google seems fine and even able to provide amazing results for queries that resemble questions posed to a human.
For example, Google shows the correct response (Cemetry Gates by The Smiths) for the query “what is that song about friends meeting in a cemetery?”
What is your experience with Google lately?
Do you have to reformulate your queries?
How often are you forced to use quotes in order to force Google to show the right results?
Whatever the reality is about Google Search, it’s notable that a simple complaint about Google Search failing a user tapped into a nerve and caused the tweet to go viral.
Shares of Google-parent Alphabet are down sharply after the company’s latest earnings report reveals the slowest quarter for revenue growth in almost a decade.
Google’s year-over-year (YOY) revenue growth is up 6%, the smallest increase since 2013, aside from one month during the pandemic.
It may seem like a good thing that Google’s revenue is up overall, but the problem becomes evident when you compare it to last year’s growth of 41%.
Google’s operating margin is down from 32% last year to 25% this year, and net income is down 36% YOY.
As Google fell short of expectations, revenue and earnings per share (EPS) were weaker than analysts predicted.
As the below data illustrates, the only category where Google beat estimates is cloud revenue:
EPS: $1.06 vs. $1.25 expected (according to Refinitiv estimates).
Revenue: $69.09 billion vs. $70.58 billion expected (according to Refinitiv estimates).
YouTube advertising revenue: $7.07 billion vs. $7.42 billion expected (according to StreetAccount estimates).
Google Cloud revenue: $6.9 billion vs. $6.69 billion expected (according to StreetAccount estimates).
Traffic acquisition costs (TAC): $11.83 vs $12.38 expected (according to StreetAccount estimates).
Before the earnings call, Alphabet was expected to post the slowest revenue growth in two years. It was the slowest revenue growth for any quarter since 2013.
Google & YouTube Ad Spend Slowing Down
The biggest news of the earnings call is the deceleration in Google’s digital ad revenue.
Google’s digital ad revenue grew only 2.5% in Q3. At least it went up, as the same can’t be said for YouTube.
YouTube ad revenue fell to $7.07 billion, down 2% YOY and missing analysts’ expectations of $7.42 billion.
This is the first-ever drop in YouTube ad revenue since Alphabet reported it in 2019.
Ruth Porat, Alphabet CFO, stated during the earnings call:
“On the second quarter earnings call, we noted a pullback in spend by some advertisers in YouTube and Network, and these pullbacks in spend increased in the third quarter. In Search and Other, the largest factor in the deceleration in Q3 was lapping the outsized performance in 2021. In the third quarter, we did see a pullback in spend by some advertisers in certain areas and search ads. For example, in financial services, we saw a pullback in the insurance, loan, mortgage, and crypto subcategories.”
YouTube’s ad revenue peaked at 84% in Q2 2021. A year later, it’s down to negative 2%.
The sharp drop in ad spending on YouTube and Google coincides with a similarly steep decline in the prices of cryptocurrencies.
This is worth noting, as Porat says crypto is a subcategory where advertisers are pulling back their spending.
Bitcoin reached record highs in 2021, right around the time when YouTube experienced its highest-ever recorded revenue growth. The cryptocurrency crashed in Q2 2022, which lines up with the decline in ad revenue reported by Porat.
What Now?
In today’s economy, it’s understandable that companies are slowing down ad spending. A looming recession means a shift away from capital expenditure to capital preservation.
If you run a monetized YouTube channel, your ad revenue may decline if it hasn’t already.
Now is the time to start thinking about ways to diversify your income.
On YouTube, that could include selling merchandise, offering channel memberships, or broadcasting live. Those are all ways to make money without relying solely on ads.
It won’t surprise me if creators’ livestream revenue starts outpacing their ad revenue. Anecdotally speaking, I’ve seen independent YouTube content creators pull in thousands of dollars per stream from money donated by viewers through Super Chats.
You can also start preparing for the monetization of YouTube Shorts in 2023. Getting comfortable with creating entertaining and informative short-form videos may help your channel bring in more revenue when Shorts ads roll out.
It may sound like something out of a “Black Mirror” episode. Still, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) now allow people to interact and hold conversations with loved ones from beyond the grave.
Several companies, including California-based HereAfterAI, are using technology similar to that which powers AI chatbots and voice assistants to create virtual versions of actual humans. Available as a mobile app, HereAfterAi uses photographs, video interviews, and voice recordings to create interactive avatars capable of conversation.
You, Only Virtual, also based in Los Angeles, strives to “recreate the relationship dynamics between you and your loved one through conversation– enabling authentic communication upon one’s passing.
Tel Aviv, Israel-based Hour One allows anyone to create a fully digital clone of themselves that can speak “on camera” without any input from live humans.
AI Overcoming Creativity Hurdles
Cloning human digital thought patterns has been considered the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence since Alan Turing introduced his eponymously named test in the 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”
One of the most critical stumbling blocks data scientists have encountered in developing artificial intelligence is separating creative thought into convergent and divergent thinking.
Convergent thinking is figuring out concrete solutions to problems using memory and logic. Divergent thinking is the process of exploring multiple possibilities to solve a problem and is much more free-flowing and spontaneous.
Previous generations of AI have performed poorly in divergent thinking, but theory and practice have advanced considerably. In 2016, a New York University AI machine named Benjamin wrote a garble script for “Sunspring,” a fictional short film.
Since then, AI technology has seen increasing usage and skill in creating everything from gaming to music to journalism. In a widely covered event in August, Capitol Music Group signed and quickly dropped an AI rapper named FN Meka after being criticized for racial stereotyping.
Technology Builds On Large Language Models
Building convincing digital replicas of humans relies on using large AI language models (LMMs), which can decipher meaning from prompts and respond with clear text. Two of the most popular are GPT-3 from OpenAI and Google’s LaMDA, which can be customized to mimic unique conversational patterns.
Paired with advances in voice cloning, this has led to the creation of Deepfakes, which are increasingly realistic but completely false versions of actual events and statements.
Ethical Concerns Remain
While the use of AI digital cloning has been proposed as a means of helping people deal with the grieving process, it raises issues about consent and privacy, both pre-and post-mortem.
Ownership of intellectual property and data falls into a legal gray area, namely, does content created by AI have the same legal rights and philosophical status as that produced by actual humans?
The use of this technology regarding memories, beliefs, and personal preferences is seen by some critics as a gross invasion of privacy. It can also be seen as exploitative, as evidenced by the furor surrounding the 1997 Fred Astaire Dirt Devil commercial, in which the dancer’s likeness was licensed by his estate for commercial purposes, despite Astaire’s death a decade earlier.
Technology Offers Digital Marketing Opportunities
Los Angeles-headquartered company, StoryFile, offers conversational videos, including an interactive version of William Shatner on its homepage, which showcases some of the possibilities this technology creates.
Marketing companies could run promotions with dead celebrities, but more enticing is the use to predict customer choices. They can cluster consumer demographics and historical information using big data to create increasingly accurate consumer models.
Likewise, in an expanded version of the personalization already in use by companies like Meta and Google, it could be used to create a digital clone of a person designed to mimic the choices you would make, increasing the relevancy of results or marketing campaigns at the cost of personal privacy.
Imagine you’re having a minor medical problem. Maybe every time you eat, your jaw audibly clicks behind your molars. It’s not painful, but it’s unpleasant.
To find a solution to this annoying problem, you turn to that all-purpose bank of knowledge, the internet.
As you comb through the search engine results, which source do you think is more reliable: the page written by an ear, nose, and throat doctor with ten years of medical experience or the one written by a guy who runs a Minecraft blog?
It’s an obvious choice. That’s not to say the Minecraft blogger’s page doesn’t have the correct information. Still, it’s unlikely he knows more about what’s ailing you than a healthcare professional with a medical degree, five years of residency training, and a decade of field experience.
It’s just a fact: Credibility matters. And this has never been more true than today when misinformation runs rampant on the internet.
And while most authors are genuinely trying to be helpful, there is a lot of information on the web that can be downright harmful. It doesn’t matter whether this wrong info results from maliciousness or ignorance – inaccurate or flat-out wrong content can do much damage.
That’s why author authority, or author rank, is considered in the search engine optimization process. Let’s take a look at how.
The Claim: Author Authority Influences Page Rankings
When determining the overall quality of a webpage and how well it answers a search query, Google emphasizes E-A-T. That is Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
But does this include the E-A-T of the author? Does it matter if the piece was written by a genuine expert rather than a recent journalism graduate?
Author authority is a concept that has been around for years. And the role it plays in site rankings has long been a debate between SEO experts and digital marketers.
Let’s take a closer look.
The Evidence: Author Authority And SERP Ranking
Google has never indicated that an article’s author directly influences rankings. But this doesn’t mean you can ignore it.
There is evidence that the search engine giant is interested in identifying authors.
Way back in 2005, which is an eon in SEO terms, Google filed a patent for Agent Rank. Designed to help weed out low-quality content, it allowed the search engine to use digital signatures to rank articles by reputation.
In 2011, Google confirmed support of authorship markup using rel=” author.” However, adoption of this tag was slow. A 2014 study found only 30% of authors were using this tag, and Google officially removed it the same year.
At a 2016 SMX conference, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes said the company is not using authorship but has systems to recognize who created a piece of content. This seems to reference the role authors play in Google’s Knowledge Graph.
If you’re not familiar with the Knowledge Graph, it’s a massive database of facts and entities (i.e., things or concepts that are singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable). Authors are officially recognized entities by Google, though the search engine doesn’t know every content creator.
Author reputation matters, but be careful not to conflate “reputation” with “expertise” and “authoritativeness.”
Google uses expertise and authoritativeness to evaluate reliability on a given subject. Reputation, on the other hand, is a more subjective evaluation based on how readers view the author.
Reputation is determined according to Search Quality Raters Guidelines: a set of guiding principles used to train human raters who evaluate the search engine’s quality and sometimes test proposed changes to search algorithms.
One of these guidelines states that a low content creator score is enough to give the piece a low-quality score. However, Google has been transparent that these human-generated ratings are never used to affect query results.
In March 2020, Google filed a patent for Author Vectors, which helps it identify who created unlabeled content. It does this by evaluating writing styles and levels of expertise and interest in different topics.
The Verdict: Author Authority’s Impact On Rankings Is Unclear
There has been a lot of back-and-forth about author authority’s role in Google search results; unfortunately, there’s no clear answer.
However, even if it doesn’t directly impact your organic rankings, it’s still intelligent to follow Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.
Users care about the reputation and relevance of a piece’s author. And this alone is reason enough to seek out the best possible authors and identify them in each article.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
In an industry that often relies on fairly turbulent traffic sources such as breaking news stories and Google Discover, appropriate content tagging can provide the safety net in which traffic consistency can be somewhat more reliable.
I’ve been working with several large news publishers across entertainment, football, gaming, music, and healthcare this year, some of which attract tens of millions of users each month. They all seemed to be lacking in one particular area: content tagging.
Why Content Tagging Is Important For News Publishers
When used appropriately, content tagging can help to boost a publication’s organic performance massively. However, many publishers are getting it wrong. Three of the main motivations for optimizing content tagging are as follows.
Stronger Topical Authority
We know that with Google’s various updates, there’s a big focus on ensuring that websites that are a genuine authority for the user’s search query are ranked higher. For news publications, becoming an authority relies on a number of factors, such as author specialties, relevant backlinks, and expert content.
With content tagging, you can pull all your expert content on a particular topic into one place, making it easier for Google to crawl, find the connections between different articles, and understand just how authoritative your publication is in this area.
This means each article is directly supported by a tag page and multiple other relevant articles, giving Google more confidence in its topical authority.
Safety Net Of Consistent Organic Traffic
Tag pages can do much more than pull all of your articles together, though. They can actually become strong landing pages that rank for high-volume, generic keywords.
Due to the nature of tag pages being a central hub that can answer various questions on a specific subject, Google is more likely to rank a tag page within the normal organic listings (rather than Top Stories, etc.) for a high search volume generic query.
For example, when someone searches for “Love Island,” there isn’t a huge amount of context behind what the searcher is looking for about Love Island. By serving a tag page, Google gives the user a wider variety of content to consume, therefore increasing the likelihood of satisfying their search intent.
Using the Metro as an example, a quick look in Semrush shows tag pages potentially pulling in hundreds of thousands (and in many cases millions) of organic users each month.
Screenshot from Semrush, September 2022
And most of this tag page traffic, unsurprisingly, is coming from the high volume, generic keywords such as”‘Love Island”:
Screenshot from Semrush, September 2022
When the Metro also ranks in Top Stories for “Love Island,” they’re doubling the chances of capturing the click.
If they do happen to see a drop in organic performance for their Love Island articles, their site still has the safety net of the tag page to pull in the traffic from high-volume, generic keywords.
That is, if the tag page maintains rankings, of course.
What Can Happen Without A Tagging Policy
Having started working with a few large publications which haven’t properly implemented a tagging policy, I’ve seen firsthand how messy things can get when a tagging policy isn’t in place.
When not properly trained on the ins and outs of content tagging and how it relates to SEO, writers have added endless random tags to articles, creating masses of tag pages that offer no real benefit to the website.
From an SEO perspective, these are the issues this causes:
Wasted crawl budget: When large volumes of articles are created daily, alongside masses of new tag pages, this results in Googlebot (and other bots) wasting resources by crawling low-quality tag pages rather than the articles themselves.
Diluted topical authority signals: When tagging is overdone, you can end up with multiple tag pages which essentially focus on the same subject but spread the articles and topical authority across multiple tags. An example of this would be writing an article about Cristiano Ronaldo breaking his nose, then creating a tag page for “Cristiano Ronaldo,” “Cristiano Ronaldo nose,” “Cristiano Ronaldo broken nose,” and “Cristiano Ronaldo nose injury.” Really, we only need the “Cristiano Ronaldo” tag here, as the article itself will be targeting the “nose” related keywords. So, not only does the main “Cristiano Ronaldo” tag page have to compete with three other related tag pages, the article itself does, too.
Index bloat: When niche tag pages are created (such as “Cristiano Ronaldo nose” and “Cristiano Ronaldo nose injury”), they end up having just one article tagged, resulting in thin, low-quality tag pages being indexed, which end up being almost exact duplicates of each other.
Hardly any traffic or rankings for tag pages: When writers don’t know how to effectively tag content and optimize tag page performance, the tag pages just end up being a wasted opportunity, as they likely won’t rank or drive traffic.
When improper tagging has been done for a long time, the clean-up job is quite time-consuming and requires detailed analysis to ensure nothing of value is removed. Prevention is definitely better than the cure!
So, tag pages can act as the glue that holds relevant content together and as consistent, evergreen traffic drivers when article performance declines.
But how do you ensure your writers are united in an approach to tagging which benefits the site as a whole? Through tagging policies, of course!
How To Implement Tagging Policies For Writers
Every news publication that publishes content on multiple topics should have an appropriate tagging policy in place, but what should be included? And how should it be written? Below are the items I would advise publishers to focus on.
Create An Introduction To The Policy
Start with a one-paragraph explanation of why the policy is needed and what it aims to achieve. If tagging has been a historical issue for the site, then this is an opportunity to give examples of where things have gone wrong and why. This helps writers to understand the purpose of the policy.
Rule 1: Make Tags Generic Yet Relevant
As mentioned earlier, tags have real potential to rank for high search volume generic keywords, so they should ideally target just that!
You also prevent the risk of diluting topical authority signals through multiple niche tag pages, which all compete for similar keywords.
Rule 2: Use A Maximum Of X Tags Per Article
A good target for tagging is to have one or two tags per article (though this does vary for each publication).
That way, writers will be less likely to create multiple, similar tags, which helps to control index bloat and crawl budget efficiency.
Rule 3: Use Existing Tags Where Possible
Hopefully, your publication creates more than one story per topic, so ensure writers are searching for an appropriate existing tag before they start creating a new one.
Rule 4: Use Lowercase Text And No Special Characters
Depending on the system being used, tags that writers input with capital letters or special characters can end up being applied to the tag page’s URL, which isn’t ideal – and can, once again, result in duplicate tag pages being created (e.g.,/Cristiano-Ronaldo/ and /cristiano-ronaldo/) or just generally unoptimized and messy URLs.
Rule 5: Add Internal Links To Tag Pages From Articles
This one is important. While all of the other points relate to the creation of tagging pages, internal linking from articles is how you start to build up the authority of the tag page itself.
Writers should be linking to the article’s main tag page within the first paragraph if possible, and to other secondary tag pages within the rest of the article where possible.
Ensure You Are Providing Context
One of the main reasons writers end up not adhering to general rules around content tagging is that they simply haven’t been given the context behind why they should be doing things a certain way.
A publication’s SEO strategy relies on writers understanding how their efforts support that strategy, so ensure training is done to help them understand why tagging needs to be done a certain way (feel free to point them towards this article!).
The policies themselves should be simple documents that just outline the basic rules of tagging, almost like a checklist. Training should be provided with the introduction of these policies to provide the context, which can be done in video form to ensure everyone gets the exact same training.
General Tag Page Setup
Beyond the writer’s responsibilities, publication owners need to ensure they have the right technical setup to support the growth of tag pages, too. The following areas should be adequately addressed to support the writer’s efforts.
Convert Tag Pages To Landing Pages
Simple things like indexability need to be considered when setting up tag pages, as well as basic optimizations such as meta titles and descriptions, headers, and intro text.
Providing more detail than your competitors’ tag pages (bio information, introductory text with internal links to related tag pages, etc.) and ensuring that many tagged articles are made immediately available on the first page will also give you an advantage.
Break Content Up Over Multiple Pages
Pagination is an important consideration, and although Googlebot can crawl and index pages that utilize infinite scrolling, my preference would be to break content up over multiple pages, using pagination to make things simpler for Googlebot and avoid any potential issues with rendering, etc.
Add Tag Page Breadcrumbs To Articles
Although writers and editors are responsible for ensuring internal links to tag pages are included within the article’s body text, the technical setup of the page should ensure that the main tag page is linked to by default.
Add breadcrumbs to the top of each article that links to the main tag for that particular article. Article pages will often include a breadcrumb link to the main category (e.g., “Music”), but breadcrumbs also present a fantastic opportunity to promote tag pages.
Add Tag Page Breadcrumbs To Article Schema
Along with the physical breadcrumb link on the page itself, breadcrumb schema can be used within the Article or NewsArticle schema on the page to link to the tag page, giving Google another indication of the connection between the two pages.
Create A Tag Page XML Sitemap
Big news publications inevitably end up with multiple XML sitemaps, including a Google News sitemap and multiple other sitemaps for the masses of older articles, all stored within a sitemap index.
There is also a great opportunity to group tag pages together within their own sitemaps, which can be split out according to their category.
For example, “Artist” sitemaps for music publications, “Team” sitemaps for sports publications, etc., give Googlebot quick and easy access to these important pages.
Create HTML Sitemaps For Priority Tags
To make tag pages even more accessible to both crawlers and users, creating HTML sitemaps is a great way to ensure there are easily accessible internal links to all of your priority tag pages, which essentially become topic indexes.
Again, this might come in the form of an ‘Artists’ or ‘Teams’ page.
Conclusion
Publication owners need to lead by example when it comes to tagging, so by creating a technical setup that prioritizes tag page visibility and sharing a tagging policy that helps writers to understand what they should be doing – and why they should be doing it – everyone can work towards the same goal together.
Your website needs traffic – the more, the better. And to do that, you need to be ranked highly in search engine results.
How do you do that?
With search engine optimization, of course.
So what happens after you’ve gone through your content, added keywords, and beefed up your technical SEO, and you’re still not ranking how you want?
What do you do then?
There’s one key area you need to focus on: building backlinks.
But how do you do that? And what are backlinks, anyway? Are all backlinks good backlinks?
To find out the answers to these questions and more, read on.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are simply links from one website to another.
Sometimes called “incoming links” or “inbound links,” backlinks are one of the most important parts of search engine optimization.
Useful tools for webpage creators, backlinks make it easy to cite statistics, source claims, add context, or make recommendations, among other things.
There’s also another type of link called internal links, which are links between pages within the same website. These also play a role in SEO, but we won’t go into that here.
If it’s something you’re interested in learning more about, follow this internal link to an excellent Search Engine Journal piece on the best practices for using internal links in SEO. (See what we did there?)
Why Are Backlinks Important?
Now that we’ve covered what exactly a backlink is, it’s time for the $10,000 question: Why do they matter?
The most basic answer to that question is that your site’s backlinks pass PageRank, and search engines then use this in their algorithm (along with many other factors) to help determine the quality of your website and where it should rank in results pages.
Backlinks also play an important role in your discoverability, as both users and search engine crawlers will follow links from external sites to your page.
“Great,” you may be saying right now. “Let’s get out there and start generating as many incoming links as possible, so we start rocketing up in search results.”
Slow down. You didn’t really expect that to be all it takes, did you?
If search engine optimization were as easy as all that, there would be a lot of SEO professionals looking for a new line of work.
First, let’s talk about good versus bad links.
What Makes a Good Backlink?
Back in 1998, when Google was just getting started, it implemented an algorithm named PageRank. One of the things this took into account when deciding on how well a webpage matched a user query was backlinks.
But even in those early days, not all backlinks were created equal. And while the quantity of your incoming links is factored into your search ranking, the quality also plays an important role.
Let’s break it down: Quantity-wise, the more sites that link to your webpage, the stronger the signal to Google that your content is valuable and, therefore, worth linking to.
And generally speaking, if your page has more backlinks than a similar page, it will appear higher in organic search results.
This is because each time a site links to your content, it is essentially vouching for its accuracy and veracity.
But don’t for a second think that just any site pointing to your webpage is a good thing. Not only can some links do nothing for you, but some can actually hurt your search ranking. This means you need to be concerned with the quality of your inbound links.
It’s the internet version of judging someone by the company they keep – which makes sense if you think about it.
For example, which site would you trust more: one linked to by a governmental agency, a reputable university, or a well-respected foundation – or the one that’s only linked to by your Uncle Joe’s conspiracy blog?
Obviously, the former is going to carry a lot more weight, not just for visitors but for search engines as well. Thus, it should be no surprise that a page with fewer links from high-quality sites will outrank a competitor with more links from disreputable sources.
And speaking of disreputable sources, if your site gets backlinks from link farms or other unnatural links, you actually risk being penalized by Google. If you have spammy sites linking to your pages, the best thing you can do is disavow them to avoid being seen as guilty by association. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.
But it’s not just domain reputation that tells Google that inbound link A is more valuable than inbound link B. It also looks at the referring site’s relevance to the topic.
Why Are Backlinks Important?
If your Fantasy Football blog has an inbound link from ESPN and one from Crochet.com, Google will make a (logical) judgment call that the first link is more valuable.
We can follow several wormholes about link placement, anchor text, and the impact of nofollow links on your search rankings, but let’s leave that discussion for another day.
For a detailed explanation of determining the value of a backlink, be sure to read this piece.
How Many Backlinks Do I Have?
Now that you know the importance of inbound links and their value, it’s time to start thinking about the ones you already have. How do you know which sites are directing traffic your way?
There are two ways to do this: one that only tells you who’s linking to your site, and one you can use to snoop on the competition’s inbound links.
Checking Your Links With Google Search Console
Google Search Console should be your best friend if you’re a webmaster. It’s packed with all sorts of useful tools and reports to help you track performance and fix issues – and it’s free.
Once you have created an account and verified your site, you can use it to track your backlinks. In the sidebar, there’s an option called “Links.”
Screenshot from Google Search Console, October 2022
If you click on that, it will show you details of both your internal and external links. The external ones are the ones we’re interested in right now.
Under external links, you can run three reports: top linking pages, top linking sites, and top linking texts. Using these, you can determine who is linking to you and from where.
Checking Links With A Third-Party Tool
The only downside of using Google Search Console’s link tracking is that it only allows you to see details about your site.
But by using third-party backlink checkers like Majestic SEO, Semrush, and Ahrefs, you can see what your competition is doing, as well – and maybe steal some of those links.
Now that we’ve discussed what backlinks are, why they matter, and how to track them, let’s jump into what you’re really here for: building backlinks.
How Do I Get Backlinks?
There are several ways to get other sites linking to yours, but most of them require a bit of effort on your part.
The first and easiest way to get links is to pay for them. But before you pull out your credit card, pay attention to this one important caveat: if Google catches you participating in a paid link-building scheme, you will be penalized.
Buying links has been a matter of some debate for SEO experts for a long time, and some will swear by it, while others insist it’s not worth the risk.
You make your own decisions, but our advice is that you give organic link-building a try before considering if paid links are a path you want to explore.
The next way to create backlinks is by creating them. This generally means submitting your website to business directories or commenting on blogs and forums with a link to your site in the signature. These links can be of varying quality. For more information, watch the video below.
A better way to generate inbound links is by earning them. But, of course, this is a little trickier.
To earn backlinks, you must have useful content that provides value to others.
For example, you may have a webpage that lists your five favorite immersion blenders. This page can provide value not just for blender manufacturers, who will appreciate the shout-out, but also for people shopping for a new blender or kitchen appliance websites.
Statistics content is always a good way to attract quality backlinks. Statistics are a great way to prove a point and overcome objections.
By providing relevant statistics about your niche, you’ll establish your site as one of authority, and generate a lot of inbound links. Or, you can run surveys and publish the results on your blog as news.
Then you can promote your news via social media, where others may find your survey data useful and link to it from their articles.
If your content is good and it speaks to a niche, it will slowly begin to generate backlinks all on its own.
But what if you can’t wait that long? What if you want backlinks right now?
Promote your content via social or paid campaigns to the target audience. Someone may find your article useful and link to it.
Or use one of the third-party tools mentioned in the previous section to find a relevant page with many incoming links. Then create better content than the competition’s, and ask the linking domains to direct their links to you instead.
You can also look for broken links or those that redirect to a 404 page. Once you’ve found one of these on a relevant site, send the webmaster an email notifying them. And don’t forget to suggest they replace the broken link with your page on the same topic.
For more in-depth information on these strategies, plus others you can use, be sure to read this article.
Start Building Those Links
So, there you have it: a crash course on link building. By this point, you should have a good idea about what backlinks are, why they’re important, and how to build them.
Just don’t forget that, like all things SEO, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You’re extremely unlikely to see results overnight.
But remain patient, create great content, and look for opportunities to build links; you’ll have loads of incoming links in no time.
Screenshot from: ads.google.com/aw/video/autotrim, October 2022.
Screenshot from: ads.google.com/aw/video/autotrim, October 2022.
Screenshot from: ads.google.com/aw/video/autotrim, October 2022.
![Ranking Factors: Fact Or Fiction? Let’s Bust Some Myths! [Ebook]](https://ecommerceedu.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/rf-ebook-download-banner-62e8c6126ffe8-sej.jpg)
