SEO In 2016 Q&A With Phil Frost of Main Street ROI

This interview with Phil Frost of Main Street ROI, is part of the Convirza Webinar Series. The following is the Q&A portion of the presentation. 

Shemmah: Now, it looks like we’ve got quite a few questions here, and we’re going to get to get through as many of them as we can. The first question is do panda, penguin, and hummingbird gets updated frequently still?

Phil: That’s a great question. So what Google has been working on is being able to have real-time updates for panda and penguin. So hummingbird was an algorithm overhaul. So the analogy there is they took out the engine, put a new one in. So that was done. That’s kind of set. And then they are obviously continually tweaking the algorithm, and rolling out what we call these updates. And what they’ve been trying to work on for a while now is real-time updates for panda and penguin.

And that is, as I understand, still in progress, and should be launched pretty soon. In which case that would eliminate there’s that waiting period where they do an update. There’s a big shift in the results, and then if you got moved up or down, you would then wait for the next update to then see if any of your changes had a positive or negative impact. So if they did real-time updates that would eliminate that waiting period which would be good news in my opinion.

Shemmah: All right, we have another question here. How does Google know which sites are relevant to have links from and which ones are not relevant and potentially spammy? Some may be obvious, some may be harder to spot?

Phil: That’s a great question. So basically if you look at each website and you analyze each website, you can look at who’s–let’s say you just look at our website, mainstreetroi.com–you see who is linking to us. You analyze our website and say okay, we are not a spammy website. And then we link to another website and you can analyze all the people that are linking to that particular website and kind of go case by case and isolate any of the quote bad neighborhoods. And Google does that. They do complex calculations to actually…they can figure out if you…if there’s a high likelihood that you actually own a lot of the websites that are linking to your website just based on the way that they’re linking to each other. Kind of the web that you’ve created or your internet footprint. That was unclear; I can try and clarify it again.

Shemmah: Ok is it possible do you think to get a list of sites ranked by Google authority?

Phil: No I don’t, I don’t believe you can get a list of sites ranked by authority. They actually removed what was called page rank, and that was essentially a measure of authority. It was on a scale from zero to ten. You could go to any…you used to be able to go to any website, or any webpage, and calculate the page rank which was Google’s score. You simplify it and call it the authority of that page, whereas eight would be really authoritative, and a one would be lower quality. They removed that, so we’re kind of flying blind in terms of being able to measure what Google thinks in terms of any given pages’ authority.

Shemmah: All right. Here’s another one. How can we know if an inbound link is helpful or detrimental to our site?

Phil: So it’s pretty obvious when you go to a site that spammy. You want to make…you just want to go to the website or go to the page that is linking to you, and just make sure it is you know a legitimate website. It’s a legitimate business directory. You don’t have to worry about that it.

So another place to look where it can become obvious is the blog. So if you’re getting linked to by website and it’s a blog article, I would recommend looking at the main blog page to look at all the different articles. And if it’s just totally random about every single topic under the sun, that’s probably a spammy type site that only exists to link to other websites. And that’s basically called a link network.

Shemmah: All right. And we have time for one more. Can we always see the updates after they occur? So I’m thinking they’re asking how soon can you’d see the results after an update?

Phil: That’s a great question. And Google tends to roll out their updates. And by that I mean they won’t just do a change across all of their servers across the world. They will just do it in batches, kind of gauge how it’s going. That’s really to mitigate risk on their end, make sure the results are the way they expected it. And then they’ll start rolling it out to more and more areas. So an update typically takes more than one day to kind of rollout. Could be a week or two. And then once it’s totally rolled out then you should at that point see how you’ve moved up or down.