Why your Site is Not Showing on Google Discover 

Google Discover is a content distribution platform that Google uses to keep people engaged with topics they have shown some interest in. Their interests in a topic are determined based on signals from their search history, sites and topics they have bookmarked in the Chrome browser, social media activity on platforms their Gmail addresses are connected to,  and explicit interest signals sent on Google Discover cards. 

Discover is a massive traffic boost to publishers. Apart from traffic, it also increases the geographic reach of content, allowing sites to bypass the organic competition in several countries. But not every site shows up in Google Discover, and there are a number of reasons for this. 

So if your site is not showing in anyone’s discover feed, it could be due to any one of these reasons. 

(1) Content quality / Entity salience gaps

By content quality, I am referring to the average degree of entity salience your articles are able to achieve relative to the competition. Entities are described by Google as anything or a concept that is unique, singular, well-defined, and distinguishable. In linguistic terms, Google recognized entities are simply nouns. 

So any sports personality, economic institution, political system, or nation could be described as an entity. 

Google has developed natural language processing models that are able to identify the centrality of an entity or group of entities to any web document. And this model can make comparisons about the level of entity coverage or salience across pages on different sites that are covering similar topics. 

Discover works by identifying entities that specific smartphone users are interested in. It then selects articles from a variety of domains that have published highly salient copies around those entities of interest. So if your topical coverage and relevance to the concepts, events or entities is far lower than the threshold in your niche, your content will struggle to gain impressions on the discover platform. 

To improve your content quality as it relates to entities, you need to first know what entity salience is and how it is measured in Google’s natural language processors. 

(2) Domain popularity

Domain popularity here refers to the likelihood that an unbiased searcher will find your site by randomly clicking on links. This means that the more integrated your site is within the searchable web, the more popular your domain will be deemed to be and the more impressions you will receive on Google Discover. Domain popularity is a concept that is closely tied to PageRank. It simply means that the more the number of backlinks, the more likely it is for your content to be served to a random individual using an Android phone. So if your site is not yet being shown on Google Discover, it could also be due to limited amounts of relevance acquired from other publishers on the web. So, link-building efforts are required to overcome this challenge. 

(3) Performance on search results pages

If a site exists that doesn’t rank for any keyword, it obviously cannot break through on Google Discover. If there’s a site that ranks for millions of keywords but gets zero clicks, it would be able to break through on Google Discover. 

This means that there are backend thresholds of performance on search results pages that are required before any piece of content can gain impressions on Google Discover. If your site isn’t getting any impressions, it could be due to your performance being below these backend SERP performance thresholds.

(4) Absence of a knowledge panel

The absence of a knowledge panel is one of the main reasons why a site could be totally blocked off on Google Discover. The absence of a knowledge panel means that the site doesn’t exist in Google’s knowledge and entity graphs. This is a trustworthiness issue that puts the site on the wrong end of Google’s expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EAT) philosophy. If an artisan isn’t known, he can never get any word-of-mouth referrals. The same reasons apply to sites without a knowledge panel. To acquire a knowledge panel, it’s best to verify your site on Google My Business or get a Wikipedia listing. 

5 SEO Losses you Might be Incurring from Content Thieves

Content is the lifeblood of internet traffic. Be it commercial, informational or navigational surfing, every searcher is only online to find and consume content. 

What makes content visible is the extent to which it satisfies the underlying search intent behind sets of recurring queries, and this is why great content is the key to all SEO success. 

The SEO problems arising from content theft stem from the way search engines manage the relative visibility of websites in their index. The engines place a priority on the match between documents and queries, but this can become of benefit to content thieves since they can eat into your visibility by duplicating information that should be unique to your website. 

The losses from such duplication are of enormous ramifications, but for the sake of simplicity, I have classified them into five major groupings which are;

1. Lost Backlink Opportunities

Backlinks are critical to SEO success because of Google’s PageRank algorithm. Using PageRank, google determines the authority of a website based on the number of backlinks it has gained around a particular topic. Since backlinks are only acquired through content, a prolific content theft operation could cause backlinks you deserve to be ascribed to other websites. This can slow down the accumulation of PageRank and the growth of your sites’ domain authority. In this case, your competition would be gaining ranking power on your own efforts. 

2. Diminished keyword relevance

Google processes over 40,000 search queries per second and about 3.5 billion per day. All of those queries come with permutations of text that are mapped to different search intents. Your content is your tool for capturing keyword relevance based on the kind of topics you cover, but with content theft, you end up having to split this keyword relevance with a host of different websites, some of which may have a higher Domain rating that yours. When this happens, instead of ranking for 1000 keywords, you may end up only being relevant for 650. This is not a good situation to be in, but this is what content thieves can do to a website. 

3. Lost potential for Organic & Referral traffic 

 This is a consequence of the two points listed above. Organic traffic is traffic that you get from search engines, while referral traffic are the visits you get from backlinks. If you lose keyword relevance to content scrapers, you would also lose search engine visibility and your organic traffic will drop. In the same vein, if you lose backlinks to valuable content that you’ve worked hard to create, you would also lose out on the visits you should have gotten through those links. All in all, the number of web visits would decline steadily until you do something about the plagiarism campaigns being launched against your site. 

4. Risk of Algorithmic penalties

 In 2011, Google launched an algorithm (Panda update) that enabled it to penalize websites with thin content, autogenerated posts and plagiarized work. While this is a positive development, it also comes with certain risks for websites with content that is widely duplicated on higher authority domains.  So if your site is relatively new or just started publishing around a topic, depending on your site health and crawl budget utilization, scenarios could arise where Googlebot is unable to index your content first even though you are the original owner. This can cause your site to be marked as a plagiarizer by the panda algorithm, leading to ranking problems for all other types of content published on your domain. 

5. Slower aggregation of positive user engagement signals

In 2007, Google was assigned a patent called “Modifying search rankings based on implicit user feedback”. The user feedback Google uses to modify rankings are click through rate (number of impressions/number of clicks on a search results page), the bounce rate, time on page, scroll depth, pages per session, direct visits, bookmarks etc.. 

If you are losing keyword positions, organic traffic and referrals, you will lose a slice of visitors who would not bounce, who would scroll far down the page, who would spend time on your site, who would bookmark your pages and become direct visitors. This means that all of the positive engagement signals they could have contributed to your rankings would be perpetually lost to those who are stealing your content. This is why you must take action against content thieves.

How content theft occurs

Now that you know the implications of content duplication across domains, you may be curious about how to stop it. The truth is that you cannot stop theft with a one size fits all approach, rather, your content protection strategy must be tailored to the different tactics that can be used to pillage your intellectual property. The different content duplication tactics are of three main types which are;

1. Manually theft
2. Automatic theft and
3. Indirect theft

Manual content theft is done by right clicking and copying content on a page, downloading videos and saving crisp images. This type of content theft is equally hurtful, but it’s slow pace diminishes the scale of impact because of the time gap between when the content is produced, when it is copied and and when the infringing actors are able to republish it. Manual theft is the most common type but it is also easy to mitigate against. For example, you can disable the right click button on your front end using plugins like Right click disabled for WordPress or WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click

Automatic content theft

This is usually the most hurtful because it enables your posts to be duplicated as soon as they are published. This is incredibly risky because of the likelihood that the plagiarizer’s site is more crawlable than yours. In this scenario, the search engines will index the plagiarized version before the original on your website. If this continues to occur, Google’s panda algorithm might penalize your site, and you will just wake up to a sudden loss of traffic. Such advanced content duplication is carried out by using scrapers that mine a target website for useful information. To prevent content scrapers from stealing your content, you might consider blocking the bots in your htaccess files or by blocking out their IPs altogether. To detect the scraper bots as user-agents or through their IP addresses, you may need to conduct a log file analysis on your server. 

Indirect content theft 

This usually occurs through your RSS feeds. This allows a recipient site to access your content and automate it’s republication. In some instances, AI powered content spinners like Chimp Rewriter or X-spinner are used to rewrite the stolen copy in order to make it more unique. To prevent this from continuing to happen, you could switch to a summary RSS feed. This will prevent the full availability of all posts on your site to the plagiarizer. 

7 Ways To Increase your Crawl Budget For Better SEO Rankings

The web is a transfinite space. It is incredibly large and just like the universe, it is continually expanding. Search engine crawlers are constantly discovering and indexing content, but they can’t find every single content update or new post in every single crawling attempt. This places a limit on the amount of attention and crawling that can occur on a single website. This limit is what is referred to as a crawl budget. 

The crawl budget is the amount of resources that search engines like Google, Bing or Yandex have allocated to extracting information from a server at a given time period, but it is determined by three other components which are;

1. Crawl rate: The amount of bytes that the search engine crawlers is downloading per unit time
2. Crawl demand: The crawl necessity due to how frequently new information or updates appears on a website
3. Server resilience: The amount of crawler traffic that a server can respond to without a significant dip in its performance

Why did I list those three components above? I listed them because the crawl budget is not fixed. It can rise and fall for a website, and it’s rise and fall affect the ranking and visibility of all content that the website holds. 

So what are ranking the implications? you may wonder. The SEO implications of crawl budget changes are profound for many reasons, some of which are;

Large crawl budgets increase the ease with which your content can be found, indexed and ranked

The only content that can be indexed is content that can be found, hence the more quickly your content can be found, the more competitive you become in expanding your keyword relevance relative to your competitors.  It is only content that is found that can be ranked so when the news breaks, the site with a larger crawl budget is likely to be ranked higher than others because its content gets out there first.

Crawl budget increases lead to resilience against the impact of content theft

The more crawl budget a site possesses, the greater the likelihood of its being able to get away with content theft, content spinning, and the more immune it becomes to the harmful effects of content scraping. This is because a site with a large crawl budget can steal content, but may get this content discovered and indexed before the original website. 

Lastly, search engines compare websites based on their crawl budget rank

This is why related information is explicitly available in search console and Yandex SQI reports.  The crawl budget rank or CBR of a website is given as:

• IS – the number of indexed websites in the sitemap
• NIS – the number of websites sent in the sitemap
• IPOS – the number of indexed pages outside sitemap
• SNI – the number of pages scanned but not yet indexed

The closer the CBR is to zero, the more work needs to be done on the site, the farther it is from zero, the more crawling, visibility and traffic the site gets. 

How to increase your crawl budget

You can increase your crawl budget by increasing the distance that a web crawler can comfortably travel as it wriggles through your website. There are six major ways by which it can be accomplished and these are;

1. This can be achieved by eliminating duplicate pages
2. Eliminating 404 and other status code errors
3. Reducing the number of redirects and redirect chains
4. Improving the amount of internal linking between your pages and shrinking your site depth (number of clicks needed to reach any page in your site)
5. Improving your site speed
6. Improving your server uptime
7. Using robot.txt files to block crawler access to unimportant pages on your site

Conclusion

Crawl budget optimization is one of the surest paths to upgrading your rankings and website visibility, this is why special attention should be paid to your overall site health. Your site health is the most reliable indicator of the scale and location of your crawl budget leakages

The SEO Implications of these HTTP status Codes

HTTP is an acronym which means hyper text transfer protocol. It is the defined framework for the communication between clients and servers. In the context of the internet, clients are request generators, while servers are request handlers. For example, if you go to a library and request a book, you are the client.. while the librarian who offers you the book is the server.

This same analogy applies to the internet. If you want a document, a video, a picture or any other resource, you would make a request via the browser on your phone, tablet or laptop. These devices are the clients. When the request reaches the server, it then communicates the status of the request back to the clients.

These server-client status responses are of SEO relevance because they impact search engines and human visitors to a site. Search engines use these status codes as indicators of the page quality of a website. These http status codes exist in 5 major groupings which are;

• 1xx status codes – informational responses with no SEO implications
• 2xx status codes – success codes with SEO implications
• 3xx status codes – Redirection responses
• 4xx status codes– Refer to client errors. These are server to client responses that do not meet the clients expectations
• 5xx status codes – These are server errors.

There are lots of status codes, but some occur so frequently that they necessitate a thorough understanding of their SEO effects on a website. Let’s start with eight specific types

200 status codes

These are the best possible codes that you can get. Whenever you don’t get a 200 response, this indicates that there was an issue either on the server or client end. When you get a 200 status code, all is well with the URL.

301 status codes

These refer to redirects that are of a permanent nature. This means that one URL is actually pointing to another URL usually of different anchor text. This response is of consequence for SEO because of the effect it can have on crawl budget and the transfer of PageRank. It can also have an effect on the user experience on a website due to the occurrence of an information mismatch between the requested URL and the page it is permanently redirecting to.

302 and 307 status codes

These usually indicate that a temporary redirect has taken place. These are of real SEO consequence because neither of these two redirect methods can pass PageRank to a new URL. This should only be used if the content missing under the old URL will be replaced at a later date.

400, 403 and 404 status codes

The 400 error indicates invalid syntax in the request sent from the client. This could happen if the client is sending a file that is too large, or if it’s request is malformed in some way (expired cookie, sending request via invalid URLs etc.).

The 403 error is a forbidden response from the server to the client. This indicates that the server is not going to allow the request to be fulfilled due to the unauthorized status of the client.

The 404 error on the other hand indicates that the requested resource is missing completely on that url or location.

Understanding the SEO impact 

These are all client side errors and their main impact is in the UX experience signals that they send to both humans and search engines. With humans, frequent errors of this nature will lead to bounce rate spikes, low time on page metrics, and drop offs along the conversion funnels of a site. For search engines, this can lead to the deindexing of URLs that were relevant for high value keywords.

What About Server Errors?

All 5XX errors are server related and point to issues with the web host. The implications are by far the most severe because it indicates that the requested resource cannot be offered by the server. Whenever Google encounters errors of this nature, ranking losses and deindexations of URLs are usually not far off.

In Summary

This was a brief overview of common SEO errors and the implications for organic traffic generation. Search engines are the conduit between web surfers and your website. This means that direct access to your audience and customers can be augmented or sabotaged based on the type of status codes that Google’s algorithms are getting. These algorithms are autonomous learning systems which is why negative signals must be avoided at all costs. To succeed at SEO, you must do your best to ensure that 200 status codes dominate on the most important sections of your website.

How to detect and resolve Google analytics errors on your website

Google analytics is an amazing tool that helps to collect data about users and their activity on your website. You can learn amazing things about your online audience such as their demographics (gender and age distribution), how much time they spend on your site, the type of pages they are most interested in, the number of pages they read before leaving and so on.

All of Google’s really cool data is only useful if it is reliable, and there are many reasons why the data that Google collects may be wrong. This is why it is necessary to ensure that your Google analytics codes are properly installed, and properly audited. Even without an audit, you can tell if your tracking code is faulty when you have:

1. An unusually high or low bounce rate
2. An unreasonably high or low number of page views, especially when ad revenue does not match the rise and fall in views
3. When you have static data like time on page that doesn’t improve or diminish over several months.

All these are indicative of a faulty Google analytics implementation and these faults are due to certain errors which are fairly common.

To detect these sort of errors, tools like Google Analytics debugger and tag assistant come in handy.
The analytics debugger helps to analyze JavaScript events coming from your Google analytics tag right within your chrome console. The tag assistant extension usually looks like this.

Google tag assistant is a lot easier to work it as it gives a snapshot overview of all detected tags on a page and color codes them based on four characteristics which are:

• When the tag is green, then this means that there are no implementation issues associated with it.
• When the tag is blue, it means that there are minor implementation problems along with suggestions to correct those issues.
• When the tag is yellow, this means that there are risks to your data quality and the tag setup is likely to give unexpected results.
• When the tag is red, this means that there are outright implementation errors with the set up which could lead to missing data in your reports.

When using tag assistant, here are some common errors you could find

1. Invalid or missing web property ID

This usually happens when the property ID in your analytics code is either missing or wrong. The property ID is like a phone number that tells Google analytics the exact account it should send all the data it has collected to. So if the property ID is missing, data will be collected but won’t be sent to your analytics account.

Solution: Ensure that the web property ID on your page matches the ID in your Google analytics account. To be safe, just ensure that script on your page matches the script that is generated in your account.

2. Same web ID property is tracked twice

Source of the problem: This error usually results from multiple installations of your Google analytics property ID. This happens when Google analytics is reporting to the same web ID from the global site tag, googlr tag manager and Google analytics. It can also happen when Google analytics code from the same web property is installed through an external file and through a direct installation in the HTML of your website.

Solution: The solution is to ensure that the tracking code of each web property ID is only installed once. So you can look through your site’s source code. Use ctrl + F to find all instances of the web property. Identify the tags through which it’s injection into the page is being duplicated, then proceed to eliminate all but one of them.

3. Missing http response

This error indicates that while Google analytics has been detected on the page, it isn’t sending any responses to Google’s servers. Without a http response, data isn’t being transported to the server and hence, cannot appear in your analytics account.

Solution: Reinstall Google analytics in the head section of your website since this error usually results from faulty installations of the tracking code.

4. Method X has X additional parameters

Each method in Google Analytics has a set number of allowed parameters. You can find out the number and type of allowed parameters for any method by reading the documentation.

This error denotes that you have exceeded the number of allowed parameters for the given method.
Exceeding the number of allowed parameters will either cause Google Analytics to drop any parameter over the limit OR cause Google Analytics to fail to record data associated with the given method.

Solution: Review the documentation and parameter allocation for the respective Google Analytics methods and ensure that your implementation follows the documentation appropriately.

You can check Google’s documentation here

5. Leading or trailing whitespace in ID

This error indicates that your Google Analytics ID is not properly set within the setAccount function in the Google Analytics JavaScript. The error explicitly states the existence of a whitespace or empty space either before or after the account ID that is preventing the correct ID from being identified or collected. Your account ID is important because it indicates the account that the collected data is to be sent to.

Solution: Ensure that there is no space before, after or within your Google a analytics ID. Also check to ensure that the ID in your source code matches with the ID in your analytics account.

6. Move the tag inside the head

This error indicates that the analytics ID is not in the ideal location within your sites HTML. The ideal location for the analytics scripts is the head section because it is it the the head section that the tracking beacon is guaranteed to have fired before the visitor has left your site. If the tracking code is in the body or footer, it may not have fired, recorded a visit or any other event before the user would have left the page. It could also miss certain page events leading to missing and incorrect data in your reports.

Solution: Move your tracking code to the head section of your sites’ HTML and place it just a above the closing head tag
<head>
Place the code just above the closing head tag
</head>

Detected both dc.js and ga.js/urchin.js
Remove Depreciated method ‘XXXXX’

6. Missing JavaScript & Missing JavaScript closing tag

Without a closing tag, the JavaScript functions required to collect data from your page and transport it to Google’s servers would fail to execute.
When this happens, no data will be collected or reported in your account.

Solution: Ensure that your Google Analytics script contains the full request to google-analytics.com. Ensure that all functions are declared in full just as stated in the tracking code you were given. To be safe, just ensure that script on your page matches the script that is generated in your account.

7. Tag is included in an external script file

This message indicates that Google analytics isn’t present on the page source code but is firing from an external file. While data may still be reported, this sort of set up is fragile and could be responsible for data discrepancies. It might also make your site vulnerable to competitor spying or negative SEO attacks.

Solution: Check through the external file that your code is firing from and ensure that it is working properly. If you had prior problems before you discovered that an external file was hosting your tracking code, it may be best to install Google analytics in the source code of your website and remove it from the external file.

Conclusion

Data collection is extremely important in the optimization or day to day managing of a website. The data you collect can be analyzed to find what works, what doesn’t work, why it doesn’t work, when it doesn’t work and for whom it doesn’t work. This info can change the trajectory of your website for good only if the information your have is reliable. This is why Google analytics auditing is necessary and is something you should embark upon from time to time. If you have any further questions you would like to ask me, feel free to get in touch.

How to Avoid Being a Victim of Domain Squatting & Homograph Attacks

If you had a site that was doing well but suddenly, things just went downhill, it could be worth exploring to see if you have been a victim of a negative SEO attack. Negative SEO attacks are in many forms and each type has a different degree of impact on a website. Of all the negative SEO attacks I’ve experienced, one of the most devastating is a Domain squatting attack. These types of attacks exist in various forms which are:

1. Typo squatting attacks and
2. Homograph attacks

What is domain squatting

This is a family of negative SEO techniques which are deployed in order to harvest web credentials, steal direct traffic, harm an organization’s reputation, achieve affiliate marketing monetization, install adware, transmit malware or to achieve other malicious objectives. 

How these attacks are initiated

These groups of attacks are initiated by registering a variation of a legitimate domain and building a mirror website of that domain. This enables the attacker to deceive people into mistaking the fake domain as the legitimate URL of the website they were trying to visit (which could be a bank, a fintech solutions provider, or an online store)

When this happens, visitors will interact with the fake domain by clicking through or trying to login. This is what enables the attackers to achieve whatever objective they had in mind. The techniques vary which will be discussed individually under their respective classes which are:

a. Typo squatting attacks: An attacker registers a domain similar to the target domain in spelling. They do this based on the likely keyboard typos that can occur whenever the target domain is being typed into a search bar. They also pick variations of the target domain based on TLD’s (replacing abc.com with abc.ng) with the goal of stealing traffic that people accidentally direct to the target domain. For example, the attacker could replace ab.cd.com with abcd.com or biz.com with biiz.com. 

b. IDN homograph attacks: The International Domain Name protocol allows for the display of Tamil, Arabic, Chinese, Amharic, etc. characters in domain names. Some characters, like the Greek “p” (meaning Rho in their language) appear identical to the English “p”, and can resolve to entirely different servers. 

This is what attackers exploit when initiating a homograph attack. For example, websites like “picnic.com” could be registered such that the p in picnic is actually not an English but a Greek or German letter. This will allow two domains called “picnic.com” to be registered for two different but identical sites (one fake and one legitimate) on two different servers. 

How to protect your website

Any domain can be squatted and this is what makes these types of attacks very common and effective. To protect your website, you might consider the proactive registering of similar variations of your domain name. This is usually an expensive option but if you can snatch of the most similar versions of your site, you can reduce the likelihood of a successful domain squatting attack ever being initiated against you. You can also consider other mitigative measures such as:

1. Trademarking your assets
2. Informing your staff, site visitors and other relevant stakeholders
3. By monitoring domain registrations using tools like swimlane or CipherBox
4. Use the Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act or ICANN’s Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) to take hold of the domains or have them taken down.