Update from Bill Hartzer: September 7, 2014

This past week, I really have only two updates: an update on moving to HTTPS from HTTP, and some info on viewing links in Google Webmaster Tools.

This week marks 4 weeks after I moved the site from HTTP to HTTPS. There have been a lot of talk in the search community about this being a total waste of time, that it doesn’t increase or help search engine rankings. There is even one search company who did “a study” and claim that it’s basically a waste to move your site from HTTP to HTTPs. Well, I certainly have had quite the opposite experience, to say the least.

Here’s my post this week with the stats behind what I’m seeing with my site. I compared the analytics data from August 8, 2014 (the day I moved to HTTPs) to September 4, with the previous 4 weeks before August 8th.

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/http-to-https-update-one-month-after-moving/

So, basically, I’m seeing positive results. Visitors are spend more time on the site, traffic is up overall, and they’re viewing more pages than before. Could be a sign that they trust the site more since it’s HTTPS now. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

The other update I have this week is the fact that Google Webmaster Tools is showing more than 100,000 links to my site. I consider this a pretty big deal, since even sites I’ve worked on in the past with 7 million links only would see 100,000 links in Google Webmaster Tools. Turns out that after talking with Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, he claims that they’ve been showing more than 100k links for quite some time now. That’s fine, but anyway I’m now seeing over 200k links, and previously I never saw more than about 65,000 links even though I know I have at least 250,000 links to the site.

Here’s my observations in the post:
https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/google-webmaster-tools-now-reports-more-than-100000-links/

On a side note, you may know that I do a lot of link cleanups and file reconsideration requests on behalf of clients. I look at a lot of links, and have analyzed millions or hundreds of millions of links over my career. A few things I’ve noted is that for link cleanups when a site has a manual action, it’s important to review the Google Webmaster Tools links. The links that Google has a problem with are in there–and may or may not be bad links that show up when looking at Majestic SEO or ahrefs.com links. So, the best bet is to combine all those links and remove the duplicates.

Also, if you don’t have a manual action from Google, it’s not necessary to try to get the links removed (although that’s always a good option). You can disavow the low quality links and as they’re re-crawled by Google they’ll take into account those links that you’ve disavowed. Once the Google cache date has passed for a link that you’ve disavowed, you can feel confident that they’ve disavowed that link.

That’s it for this week. Don’t forget to sign up for my Advanced Link Training seminar, which is going to be held the evening of September 25th, 2014 in Dallas. More info can be found at www.AdvancedLinkTraining.com.