Answering Your Questions About Schema With Terry Samuels

Oct 17

Returning guest Terry Samuels comes on today’s show to talk Schema with Jesse! In this episode, Jesse and Terry go over listener questions regarding the implementation of Schema, how to use Schema for site links, and more!

If you have a Schema question for a future episode, let us know! Visit our Schema questions page to drop Terry a question. Whether you’re looking for basic knowledge or a more nuanced deep dive, we’re here to help!

Thank you for checking us out, and enjoy the show.

Don’t miss an episode – listen on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Android Apps, or RSS!

What you’ll learn

What makes Schema so important.
How often your Schema should be updated.
Why doing site links through schema could pose difficulties.

Transcript For Answering Your Questions About Schema with Terry Samuels – 136;

YouTube link; https://youtu.be/yTlPar9Gy6k

Apple Podcasts link; https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/answering-your-questions-about-schema-with-terry-samuels/id1347029952?i=1000541603618

FB post on the Intrycks page; https://fb.watch/9ecZJw6Ip_/

LinkedIn post on the Intrycks page; https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6864930878519341056

Terry Samuels: It’s amazing how many times we get contacted by business owners and they haven’t checked their website in a year. And I’m like, “Dude, it’s your business. Google yourself, check your website, make sure that things are working. Make sure you’re not missing any leads.”

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan, here with our buddy and schema guru. I don’t know if you like the title guru or not, but I keep saying it, Terry Samuels here, schema expert and friend of the show here. We’re going to be talking about some schema with Terry. We’ve got a bunch of questions we’ve been compiling from all you listening.

Terry’s been on a few times already here, actually, I think your two separate sessions but the first one we broke into two parts, so three episodes, but two interviews. So Terry’s back for a third one. Before we start picking Terry’s brain again here to get some good nuggets, I want to talk about our free Instant SEO Audit Tool. I talk about this every episode and plug it. I’m going to do it again.

If you haven’t used it yet, go check it out. It’s just a great checklist for you to get started on your SEO. If you’re wondering how your website’s sitting or you optimize for a certain keyword and what’s going on, check it out. Go to localseotactics.com. Up in the top, yellow button, free SEO audit, free instant audit. Plug in your web page, just page by page, plug in your webpage and the keyword you want to check it against, see how well it’s optimized for and it’s going to give you a quick PDF with a great punch list, what’s good, what’s bad, what’s ugly with your website and get you down the road to start making some traction. So check that out.

If you haven’t already, you can use it as many times as you want. It’s totally free. Terry, thanks for coming back. Glad to have you.

Terry Samuels: Glad to be here.

Jesse Dolan: So let’s talk some schema, still a hot topic in SEO. If people don’t know what we’re talking about, I should pause real quick. Check out some of our previous episodes of Terry. We kind of start with the first one like what is schema? Why should it matter to you, kind of basic entry level. Pause this here if you’re not even familiar with schema, check those out. That’ll give you a great primer on this.

In episodes we have Terry on, I kind of asked everybody, if you’ve got questions for Terry, send them on in right. We’ll throw them out to Terry and get some answers here. That’s what we’re going to do today, talking some schema. Terry, would you say still one of the main things you’ve got to do, if you’ve got a website and you’re trying to do SEO, I’m paraphrasing, but if you’re not even addressing your schema, you’re making pretty big error, won’t you say?

Terry Samuels: 100%. Like I said, it’s the biggest… People ask me all the time what’s the biggest reason scheme is so important. It’s because it’s the codes in the head and so it gets crawled no matter what type of platform you’re on.

Bots run into problems is after the head starting to crawl the actual website itself. So it doesn’t matter if it’s WordPress, Squarespace, whatever, if you can get the schema in the head and give the bots, all bots, it’s not just Google, because they all came up with this schema language so to speak. But you’re telling now these bots what that page is about before it even gets to the actual content of the page.

That’s the biggest reason why I think that it’s become such an important process now. Schema has been around for a couple of years, two, three, four years even. But I don’t think a lot of people realize the power of it until especially around some of the crawl errors and stuff we get in WordPress in general.

But yeah, I still think it’s schema on page siloing, everything you have to do to your website, I still believe is the most important thing, including over links. Especially for local businesses that are trying to take care of local clientele. Schema gives Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex a better snapshot of who you are, what your services are, what your page’s talking about and just makes the whole system easier. Just doesn’t have it.

Jesse Dolan: Not to bash backlinks or people that rely on their main SEO strategy being backlinks, but I’m in your camp of take care of your website first too. We talk business owners probably on a monthly basis that are saying, “Hey, we’re looking at doing SEO. These other guys were talking to… Here’s their backlinks that we’re going to get. These many this month at this price, whatever.” I’m like, “Well wait. So what about your website? Are they touching your website? Are you focused on your keywords? Are you targeting all of this?”

It just amazes me all the time that SEO can just be throwing backlinks at something. I know that can work in certain instances. But you’re missing the boat, man, if you’re not just taking care of your core stuff here first. Yeah, if you don’t know about schema, check it out. You’ve got to get on board with this. It’s definitely a main pillar of your local SEO that you can take advantage of if you’re not.

Just to frame it up. Terry is in my mind, one of the premier experts in schema. We rely on Terry ourselves for our needs and for some of our client’s needs and really leveraging the knowledge base he and his team have for development schema. In my mind, there’s nothing better. I am thankful Terry for you coming on the show, again, to spit some knowledge to our listeners and helping people out there. Let’s get into some of these questions we’ve been curating here over the last… I think it’s been a couple of months since we last talked.

We’re going to start right off the bat here, Terry. Question is, and I got this from a few different people here. I’m kind of paraphrasing. All of these, I’m going to kind of paraphrase. Anybody listening, if you throw a question at us, like I didn’t say it like that, I’m taking some liberties here. This first one is how often should we update schema? Terry, I’m talking very broadly, whether you’re talking sitewide or services or location type schema.

In general, can you speak to how often we should be looking to update this, add new things or things like that?

Terry Samuels: Yeah. The biggest thing is to think about it as you would updating your website. So let’s say, for instance, that you’re doing a new blog post. Once you do the new blog post, you should do the new article schema for that blog post. If you have a new service page or a new page you’ve added to, one thing we get a lot in our medical spas is they will buy a new piece of equipment. So obviously, if it’s a new piece of equipment, that’s a new service or treatment or whatever.

So schema comes in behind that.

As far as your sitewide schema, you would like if you are going to update, say this new piece of machinery you got for your medical spa, you’re going to put it in the main nav. Okay, so if it’s in the main nav, our typical rule would be we’re going to add it to the schema nav, because the schema nav is also following the main nav.

We just tell people look, as you do things to your website, one, does it need schema and things like a new form or a new thank you page or you’re updating your privacy statement or something. That you shouldn’t even have schema on those pages. But if you’re doing something that’s a new service, a new location, a new blog, yes, by all means, you should treat it just like you would your schema. And then we, as a company, we test schema all the time. Different types of schema, different types of authoritative sites, Wikipedia everybody uses when we try to go out and find what are the alternatives for this product or service or location other than Wikipedia, other than BBB or other than the most known out there.

Transcript For Answering Your Questions About Schema with Terry Samuels – 136;

YouTube link; https://youtu.be/yTlPar9Gy6k

Apple Podcasts link; https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/answering-your-questions-about-schema-with-terry-samuels/id1347029952?i=1000541603618

FB post on the Intrycks page; https://fb.watch/9ecZJw6Ip_/

LinkedIn post on the Intrycks page; https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6864930878519341056

As we find some, then typically, we will either email our current or past clients and if it’s made a big enough bump. We test this stuff. I think just scheme alone, we have about 16 different websites that we test with. If it causes enough bump, whether it be in the organic rankings or even the GMB rankings, then we’ll kind of initiate out that to everybody. And then we also have to implement it on all of our sites.

Again, we really take into account number one, is it worth the time to add this change in there that’s typically on a site-wide level. The individual pages, the service pages, about pages and stuff for that type of schema, you typically don’t need to go into except for the first time. But organization schema can change just because we might find something that’s a little bit more authoritative. It might push the GMB needle a different way. It might let us go to different areas of the geological location. That’s the type of stuff we’re changing all the time.

Just because you get a schema update on a site-wide level, that’s rare, but it does happen. I think we’ve sent out two emails this year on stuff that we found that really did quite well. We asked people either to implement it themselves and it’s typically one or two lines. It’s typically not a lot of work. Because I give everybody the text files with the schema that we install. So typically, we just tell them, “Hey, in this schema, look for this line and replace it or add these two or three whatever and then test it of course and then implement it.”

That’s typically the biggest thing. But yeah, I encourage all of our clients to blog at least weekly, if not biweekly, twice a week, just because in my mind right now, along with on page siloing, schema is also now the creation of new content. I think that’s the biggest thing that’s happened in the past few months is we need to feed the animal more and more and more than we used to. On our home construction sites or home service sites, I’m blogging weekly now to where I wasn’t blogging every couple of months a year ago. All that stuff is adding, moving the needle, giving us more opportunity, gathering more keyword structure. And then of course, we’re backing all that up with schema.

Jesse Dolan: Kind of an adjacent question here, how often does schema change? How often is… It’s like you’re saying, if you do new content, update your website, maybe think about that a time to update your schema where relevant as you said, let’s just say my website, it’s been sitting there for six months. We haven’t done anything to it. No new products, no new equipment for my gym. None of that. Does schema itself come up with new variables or new fields to inject? How often does that happen?

Terry Samuels: It does. And there’s also a ton of fields out there that are being used that probably at some point need to be. Schema is a huge library. It’s massive. Yes, they do come out with every once in a while, like new services. They haven’t come out with new services like roofing company, plumber, service, all those specific schemas for those particular type of pages. They haven’t come out with those lately. I’m assuming they will, because it really helps the search engines understand that especially nowadays in the home service world, that a roofer typically isn’t just a roofer, a plumber typically isn’t just a plumber.

I think the idea of this coding or transaction is to be growing that library from a schema.org base. But how often it happens, not enough to really keep an eye out on it, what does happen as we tried new variables of what’s already there. Those new variables will either sometimes be good or bad, especially when you stack schema. It’s very easy to get basically a schema that passes through the schema.org tool for testing variations. But now you start stacking it and you find out okay, well, this is a duplicate now and because of how through AD IDs, how it’s stacking the schema, that now comes into saying that, well, you’ve already mentioned this once, you can’t mention it again.

That’s the type of thing that we test all the time. But as far as the website has been sitting there for six months, you haven’t done anything to it, we tell people all the time, if you update content on the page, spin that paragraph a little bit and put it on the schema. But as far… If nothing had been done for six months, this probably needs to be a little bit more than schema. Like I said, at least some type of new content.

Again, schema backs up all that. I think we’ve talked about it before I have a website, that’s nothing but schema. There’s no public content anywhere. It passes all these algo updates. But I will go in and I’ll add a new paragraph to the schema just to see if I can move the needle or if it causes any… Because a lot of these rankings now are staggered because I haven’t done anything to this website in forever. I just check it to make sure that the algo updates didn’t affect it.

But I will go in there now that I’m kind of playing with this thing and I’ll add a paragraph to one of the inside pages in the schema, just to see if it moves that page because now I’ve got a pretty good track of where everything’s at. I think we’ve got six terms in the top three, which is pretty crazy. But the idea is, is that now we can continue to test.

One thing I don’t know and I got asked this question again yesterday is what is the prime number words of content for a schema? We always try to guess as SEOs. How many words should be on a page? When I started, it was 3-400. That was like seven, eight years ago. Now, it’s closer to a thousand, is the recommended amount. If you ask Google, they want more than 2,000. So you have 2,000 words on a page that are public on the public view, what’s the magic number on the schema view because we always try to put different content on the schema in the paragraphs than we do on the page.

Why would we put both? We might as well mix it up. If you Google gets a full crawl on the page, that now they just crawled 4,000 words of content, they should all be a little bit different. So it doesn’t sound repetitive. That’s the thing that we’re kind of testing now is how many words should that description, ambiguous description be. What’s the sweet point. There’s always a sweet point. That sweet point could be 500 words, it could be 1,500 words. That’s the kind of test that we do. And then when we find the results in that way, we can communicate it with everybody, “Hey, in our most recent test, we want to keep the description 500 words, we want to keep the ambiguous description at 750 words.” Or whatever because there’s always a sweet spot with everything Google does. That’s kind of a test that we run. That’s as far as we change it.

Jesse Dolan: I think as you’re saying this, too, I think it really underscores the fact that, again, the schema is A, something you’ve got to be doing in your site but B, it’s new. You are somebody who probably spends way more time in schema than most SEOs and you’re uncovering things, you’re testing things, you’re still trying to learn what the sweet spots are, as opposed to some more, “traditional”, air quotes here if anybody’s watching on the video.

There’s a lot of best practices that are defined for on-page SEO. This is kind of still new territory for schema, which speaks to the fact that if you’re not doing it, man, get it on your site now. Because your competitors probably aren’t either. If you’re not aware, but new territory that can really, really give you a jump on everybody else.

All right, next question. Terry, thank you for that one. We’re talking here about sitelinks. Everybody doesn’t know what we’re talking about there just to frame that up. You do a Google search and you’ll have your title and some kind of a snippet or description there. But then sometimes you get some links, that it’s almost like a menu of your website right in the Google search page. Those are called site links. You can, theoretically, have those pop using schema. Terry, can you give us any insights on certain fields to use there. You don’t have to necessarily crack open a secret recipe here by any means. But what are some things people can do if they want to leverage schema to get those site links?

Terry Samuels: Well, typically site links are going to come after your main nav. If your main nav is about services, contact, whatever your main nav is, your site links are typically going to be showing up that way in Google and it does show up through knowledge schema, but how it crawls. The challenge with site links is you could get a site link you don’t want on the main thing. I caution people who are trying to go out and specifically get snippets or specifically go out and get site links or specifically do something to show something different because it could backfire on you.

The challenge of site links and doing it through schema is you could have your roofing company Dallas page show up on a site link. Now, somebody’s checking out. It’s all through the brand. You search your brand and everybody should do this. So search your brand, just kind of see how Google presents itself, your brand to people. Do it incognito, or do it through Firefox or something while you’re not logged into Gmail. And then just kind of look and see what Google is saying about you. So one of the reasons I do this is because Google will typically give you the priority of pages after the homepage.

You hope your homepage is the first page that shows up, you’re hoping if you do have site links there, it’s just your normal pages, about, service, web design, SEO, whatever. And then you just kind of go through the SERPs and go from the top of the page to the bottom and you kind of see how Google has an idea how it plays itself out, your website, and their SERPs. Because that’s when you start seeing wow, okay, my LinkedIn page is more important to my about page.

All this stuff’s important to know because it kind of gives you a snapshot as a business owner of maybe where you kind of spend some resources. My LinkedIn page is super powerful and I don’t do anything with it. I actually hate LinkedIn.

I call it the Insta Spam Network, because as soon as I fricking accept somebody, all of a sudden, I get a private message that they want to sell me something. I just don’t do much with it. But in the process of figuring out okay, where are my site links at? What’s showing, what’s Google showing? Google is also showing stepping now. What stepping means is that you have your homepage and call it the zero result or the number one result. What they’re doing now in the SERPs is are actually stepping things kind of like an outline does to show you about page and then they’ll show your contact page.

That’s a different thing they’re doing now. A lot of times, they’re doing that instead of Sitelinks. They’re showing people an overview of your website, then below that is your about page and your contact page, maybe a service page, and then you come in for ranking number four is your Yelp and then your whatever pages. But yeah, it’s not saying you can’t force anything. I heard some guy say, “I want to be able to force site links.” No, you can’t. It’s Google.

So it’s all based on the authority of your brand. The more brand authority you have, the more trust, the more all this stuff that we need at the brand level. The more you have that, the more you’re going to be able to see different things in the search. You can get some site links. I personally don’t want site links, just because of the fact I’ve got probably 16 pages out of 400 that are normal pages. The other pages are very geo-specific, very service-specific, not something I would put in the main navigation system.

So same with rich snippets. A lot of times, the rich snippets will give all the answers to the search query, but not enough answers to create a lead. A lot of times, people will realize that the rich snippet’s pretty, it’s pretty cool to show off. When I used to get them to show for clients, I kind of brag about them. But then you wouldn’t see many clicks going to that page when you look at the traffic.

Again, there’s hit and misses with all the stuff that especially Google does on their SERPs. But that’s typically what to do with site links. You just make sure that the same nav menu is in the schema and it’s typically on your site-wide schema, you’re not listing all the service city pages. You’re just listing. Maybe even your service pages and then you’re about contact, free, quote all those types of pages.

Those are fine to show up in the SERPs as far as… I used to call them a table of contents. It’s the same type of thing. But yeah, again, it’s hit or miss. It’s not up to you. All you can do is present it and see if Google likes it. Again, just watch it because you don’t want it to backfire. I’ve looked at one guy’s schema and he sent me a couple of weeks ago and he had every page listed in site-wide. You just don’t do that. Not only is it too hard for the bots to understand, but it goes against the grain of what the searches are ultimately going to show.

Jesse Dolan: And to be clear, there is no field or code for schema for site links. Like you’re saying, that’s just part of what Google show is based on adjusting your site and reading it. If you’re doing your stuff fundamentally the right way, if applicable, they’ll pop. Applicable in Google’s mind. But yeah, there’s no secret trick or secret coding to throw in there and pop some site links.

Terry Samuels: And people used to say, there’s… I can’t remember what the schema’s called. There’s a schema specifically for menu systems. Rankmath tries to use this. They’ll have a header schema, they’ll have a sidebar schema, they’ll have a footer schema basically it’s just a structural schema. It really doesn’t mean anything. It’s not like Google is going to better understand your website. They know you have a header, they know you have a footer and you probably have a sidebar, not a sidebar.

But the idea is that you’re not telling Google anything it doesn’t already know. All you’re doing is saying, “Hey, here’s what we would like you to show if you allow us, and here it is, matches the nav system. I didn’t put any… Oh, let’s see if we can throw in the Tucson page because I’m focusing on Tucson right now.” I don’t want to do that.

Transcript For Answering Your Questions About Schema with Terry Samuels – 136;

YouTube link; https://youtu.be/yTlPar9Gy6k

Apple Podcasts link; https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/answering-your-questions-about-schema-with-terry-samuels/id1347029952?i=1000541603618

FB post on the Intrycks page; https://fb.watch/9ecZJw6Ip_/

LinkedIn post on the Intrycks page; https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6864930878519341056

Again, just take it with a grain of salt, but there’s really no forcing the issue, you just need to present it in a way that Google will accept it. Some days, I have a rich snippet, some days I don’t. It’ll pop back in and out. I really don’t care. I don’t kind of track it anymore for different keywords. But the idea is I always check my brand. I check my brand probably at least three or four times a month and I spend time going through the first five or six pages of my brand just to make sure there are no surprises there. There are no Chinese pages or something that got thrown in through some kind of link thing that people are doing. We’re in a nasty business if you’re in a highly competitive market. But one thing I found in my Dun and Bradstreet, the listing was wrong. I wouldn’t have known that if I wouldn’t have searched my brands so I wouldn’t fix my Dun and Bradstreet listing.

Jesse Dolan: Some good lessons for business owners out there too listening, like we can get caught up in the vanity of things like the site links or the rich snippets. I got more exposure on Google. To your point, though, is if people aren’t clicking on that, getting your website and then converting and patronizing you, all that was more real estate on Google that you took up. You don’t want to give away the milk if you’re trying to sell the cow, one of these deals.

I think it’s really good feedback. I really like what you’re saying about the brand part too because we find that a lot with people. You can leverage those different ways for your SEO, but yeah, do some searches on your brand. See what’s popping up.

Terry Samuels: Especially… I do a lot of malware cleanup. It’s actually one of the biggest things I do. It’s amazing how many times you get contacted by business owners, and they haven’t checked their website in a year. And I’m like, “Dude, it’s your business Google yourself, check your website, make sure that things are working, make sure you’re not missing any leads, check your phone numbers.”

Me and you both know how many times business owners, a phone number will get changed in a GMB with somebody with a level 10 guide and you’ll never know. Now all of a sudden, Bob’s getting your calls instead of Tom. Unless you check yourself, unless you Google yourself, on your phone too, don’t just do it on the desktop, but take mobile take more ownership in your properties. This is your property.

If you ever go to sell your business, if your website is not a huge asset, then you did it wrong. Take care of that asset. I specifically will spend two hours every day on Saltair Properties. So it doesn’t matter if it’s at night, it doesn’t matter if I’m sitting in front of the couch watching TV, I’ll go out and start searching just to make sure that I’m not seeing something that I’m missing. Because it’s that important, especially when you’re relying on your website to bring in leads. If you’re not checking your forms, I get people all the time, “My forms aren’t working well.” “How long haven’t they been working?” “I don’t know. I never check.” Check your forms.

Jesse Dolan: It’s literally why we’re trying to get ranking is to get form fills or phone calls, things like that. Yeah, you’re spot on and I like what you said too about the GMB type stuff. Is your phone number the right phone number? Are you closed on Wednesdays or you just didn’t realize it because somebody went in and change your hours? That’s the good, the bad side about some of these things of Google is it’s great for us to be able to feed the beast with information. But a lot of its so much public or like you said, some high-level guides that get a lot of power. Man, if you’re not paying attention, the earth can shift right underneath your feet.

Terry Samuels: Yeah. And now all of a sudden, you’re sitting there going, “Oh, crap.” Always in this business, I’m getting ready to have a call later this afternoon. It always in this business takes 10 times longer to fix than it does to figure out the first time. It’s Google. I tell people Google’s like the gas company out here in Phoenix, they will shut you off immediately.

But once you go and pay your bill to get turned back on, it could take them a week to come out and turn it on. It’s like it took us 30 seconds to turn it off. Google is the same way. I tell, especially when it comes to redirection and remodeling your website and all this stuff that we all go through, but if you all of a sudden see a downward turn and it’s headed downhill fast, not only do you need to stop it quickly, but you also need to be prepared. It’s going to take twice as long to come back.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. There’s momentum in play and going uphill is harder than going downhill.

Terry Samuels: Exactly right.

Jesse Dolan: Next question for you. Talking about an oldie but a goodie, review stars showing up in the SERPs. Definitely a trick that many in SEO were leveraging a couple of years ago. People don’t know what we’re talking about, you can get your star rating with your GMB. How many reviews do we have and what’s our rating. You could pop that once upon a time in the actual SERP results for your individual web pages. It’s kind of going for the most part, but Terry, can you tell us is there any hope of it coming back? Any trickery we can do or is it just lost and gone forever?

Terry Samuels: I really believe it’s lost and gone forever just because of the emphasis that Google’s putting on the map system and that review system. Typically, what happened is it just got, like everything else, it really got abused. I had times that I might have been eighth, ninth, 10th on the first page, but I would be the only one with my star showing up. It was a manipulated number. It didn’t connect to the Google number. It was just whatever I wanted to put in.

Jesse Dolan: You just had to know how to code it in there, right?

Terry Samuels: Yeah, exactly. And it would pick it up. It was very heavily abused, including me, even though I tried to stay right in line with the number on Google. But I believe it’s gone just because of the emphasis on the maps, because if you still look at your brand, Yelp still shows them, Amazon still shows them, if you’ve got Amazon products. The stars still show up, but only from third-party platforms. I still put it in there, I still put the code and everything. It’s the same old code, the code didn’t change.

We’re hoping someday it does come back on the service pages and the product pages if you have products. But I really don’t believe they will. Because again, I just think it got to abused people. Especially lead gen sites. I do a lot of lead gen sites, but in reality, a lead gen site isn’t a good representation of a company and so Google wants the consumer to match up with companies, not lead gen that’s going to sell the lead to a company.

I think that’s all part of why they haven’t flipped the switch again, it’s just because of if people want to know about Saltair’s reviews, and you search Saltair, hopefully, your GMB will show up with your reviews there. But yeah, we still use the code, we still put it in there. If it ever does pop, we’ll probably be one of the first ones to know. But the ones that we do still see, they have a plumber in Texas and his competitor still has them. Well, up until I think Google comes back to this website and crawls it again because I’m sure his website hasn’t been crawled in months, they’ll disappear eventually.

They’re not something that you can force by any means. Matter of fact, it is the only penalty that we still get from the schema is reviewed penalty. If you don’t do the code right, you will get an email from Search Console saying that you’ve got a structured data element error or whatever the email says. That’s typical because you tried to force the review stuff in.

But we still do that. We still put them on the product pages, we still put them on the service pages, so if they ever do pop, they’re there. They’re just pretty much ignored right now. We had them sitewide, we had them on the contact page, but we had them everywhere. I can kind of see, but as Jesse and I were talking before this, you and I were talking. I saw one with over a million reviews. Hey, it’s like, “Really? Mr. Plumber, you really have a million reviews?” That’s kind of like what Google was just saying. That’s enough, we’re done.

Jesse Dolan: A little outrageous. This question does come up with an example you kind of touched on there, which is like well, hey my competitor still has stars. So it must be possible. How do I do that too? I think your point to summarize is hey, Google just ain’t crawled his page in a while to rediscover it. Once they do, those stars are going to come off. Maybe his ranking won’t change or anything, but the stars eventually, people don’t like to hear this answer but the stars are probably going to come off. It’s just a waiting game. There’s nothing you can do to pop yours.

Terry Samuels: There’s kind of tricks you can get for Google to find that page. I could do a blog and put that page link on my blog and Google’s definitely going to crawl it and find it. But we typically don’t do anything like that. But the whole idea is that your website will get static. If you have a six-month-old website that you haven’t touched, a year-old website, you haven’t touched, you haven’t blogged, you haven’t gone in and updated plugins, you haven’t done anything. And then typically, the Google bot or any bot doesn’t come back to your site to see if something’s changed.

That’s not the way the bots work. Bots, basically come back when you add a new piece of content and somehow you can… There are ways to get that trigger. So you can share it on Twitter, you can share it on Facebook, you can let the world know which obviously will let the bots know that there’s a new page here.

But if you don’t ever do anything, then Google’s biggest problem right now is bandwidth. We see that on the SEO side. I tell people right now, your blog that you load today is probably going to take seven to 10 days before Google even realizes it’s a new blog. That’s today’s Google. Old days Google, Google will know about tomorrow, because there are that many resources to crawl these websites but there’s not anymore.

I tell people all the time, either if you have a stagnant website, it’s not being crawled, if you have a website that’s got a lot of technical errors, it’s probably not being crawled. Because Google just doesn’t come back and keep knocking on the door. It just doesn’t do that. It’s not the way it works. It just takes you out of the queue and never goes back. Unless somebody like me or somebody just kind of forces them to come back. But in reality, Google’s not going to go back just to see if something’s changed. That’s not… There’s not enough bandwidth for that.

Jesse Dolan: Well, you just think about the billions and billions of web pages. Why would they invest their hard-earned money? Well, I guess hard-earned money might be a stretch. But why would they invest their money into doing that just to see if Terry or Jesse has updated their webpage? That’s kind of ludicrous when you frame it up as a business owner-like proposition. So that does make a lot of sense.

Terry Samuels: Yeah. That’s the same way. Because I get a lot of people, especially around my med spas. I’ve got one right now that she’s got a new product, a new service, she bought a new machine. And she’s two weeks in for us to have this new page there that just got indexed three days ago. She’s asking me, “Well, how can we force the issue?”

Well, you really can’t and her website is blogged every week. The bots come back all the time. I think what we had to do and I can’t prove this, but I actually did a blog about it with a link to the new service page and that’s when I think it got picked up. You also have to understand too that there’s a difference between pages and posts. Post typically change and they come in, they come out. If you have a post, I tell people that every 18 months, you should be regurgitating your content. Because the posts just get forgotten about.

They’ll probably be indexed, they’re probably not doing anything, which is okay, because you don’t want Google wasting your crawl budget, coming back to a two-year-old blog. You want them to come back to the new stuff and the new services. It’s one of those things I can never prove but I think that posts are crawled a lot more than pages. I’ve got websites, instead of adding a new water heater on page two, all I added is as a poet, and I’ll have a better result.

We’re kind of just playing with this. But this is how Google bot works now. For Google just to show up and say, “Man, Jesse. Awesome. Your website hasn’t changed in six months. But we see these stars, we’re going to go ahead and remove those while we’re here so we don’t waste our budget.” I tell people to search console has kind of made it a little harder to even find out how often they come to search. We used to have some killer tools that we would know not only when did the bot come, how long did they stay, how far the page did they crawl? We don’t have any of that anymore.

About Salterra Digital Services

Salterra was started in 2011 by Terry and Elisabeth Samuels; nothing fancy and nothing pretentious. Quality work at a fair price. Starting with a web design focus, they both quickly learned that while having an amazing website to highlight your business is a great start, marketing is intrinsically foundational for our clients. When several clients were not seeing results through the search efforts of other companies, Terry took it to the next level. While digging into SEO and marketing, he found something he was very passionate about. His inner geek pushed him to focus solely on the data and analytics side of the business while Elisabeth built on her creative and visual strength and expanded the design side. In the industry, it is not always common to have both designers and digital marketing so closely connected, but to them it made perfect sense. Salterra’s World Headquarters is in Tempe Arizona

Terry and Elisabeth are the Hosts of Roundtable SEO Mastermind Series and SEO Spring Training Conference.