In this week’s Digital Marketing with Bill Hartzer Podcast, I talked about the new LinkedIn links in your profile, digital marketing news, and answered some SEO questions. If you’re like to join the Facebook Live every week, I’m live on Facebook via my Facebook page. And, if you have SEO or domain name related questions feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to answer them live.
The transcript for this week’s podcast is below.
Bill Hartzer (00:00):
This is Bill Hartzer. This is the digital marketing podcast with Bill Hartzer for Thursday, May 5th, 2022. It is Cinco de Mayo. So hopefully you have some, some tacos and ha or, and enjoying a drink. And this afternoon or this evening, anyway, so regardless of how you celebrate Cinco de Mayo happy Cinco de Mayo. So we are, as I mentioned, we are on Facebook live and you may also be hearing this as well. On any of the podcasts that you podcast you on the on iHeart radio, apple podcast, Amazon podcast, et cetera. But again, if you want to hear this live or see this live, or have questions, feel free to jump on the Facebook live. We are, I, I am live on every Thursday afternoon at 1:30 PM mountain time.
Bill Hartzer (01:01):
I’m currently in Colorado, so we’re doing mountain time. And it is a bright sunny day to day light winds. And we got snow last night and luckily because of the sun and because we’re closer to the sun I did some snow shoveling this morning and in fact we I’m looking outside right now and a lot of the snow is actually been melt has melted. So car, so digital marketing this week. So another Google search algorithm update, which is a, we’re getting to the point where those are regular. And there’s there’s been talk that there was a Google search algorithm algorithm update May 1st 2022, about five days ago. And now this is normal. This is normal now activity. We do are see, you know, we are seeing Google updates regularly. A lot of them are not publicly announced at all.
Bill Hartzer (02:00):
But they are, are on a regular basis. So we’re constantly seeing updates and that’s all, that’s why, you know, as an SEO you need in digital market and doing any kind of SEO or organic rankings or so forth you need to keep up with the updates and keep up with what’s going on and, and so forth to adjust your website if that’s needed. So there was a Twitter poll this week by someone named Brody Clark, I’m not familiar or do not know Brody Clark, but basically, you know, he asked a lot of SEO professionals about degrees and university degrees. So it was interesting to note that 67% have said that they have a university a degree that, that didn’t really specify how many years, whether it’s associates or in the us, you know, associates would be two years, four year degree ma master’s degree or doctorate. Anyway, so
Bill Hartzer (02:59):
33% said, no, they don’t have, they’re doing SEO, but they do not have a a four year or a university degree. So Moz, moz.com. What used to be years ago, SEO miles, but they rebranded as moas.com, moz.com. As we know has been around for years, they provide massive amounts of really, really good content not only videos, but in text content and guides and so forth. And I am a, actually a a comp a ma approved company for my SEO services. So anyway, so Moz is back actually in Google search results because someone filed a fraudulent DMC takedown. They basically said that Moz was copying their content. And that my basically Google in an automated fashion actually took down and, or removed Gaz from the Google search results. Obviously that can be pretty devastating for a site if your entire site is taken down.
Bill Hartzer (04:07):
So anyways, it was a fraudulent DMC takedown. Moz is actually back in search in Google search after about 12 hours and after someone Google was notified and that was taken care of. So anyway, so DMCA is related to copyright and basically when it comes down to it, if someone copies your content and copies an article or copies any part of your, you know, any pages on your site, essentially you can file a DMCA. DMCA is digital millennium copyright act. That basically says that in the, you know, which is United States only. So basically you can file this form essentially fill out the form and you tell them about the co you know, the copyright infringement, and basically it, you can send it to a search engine where, where basically the Google, for example, will take the request.
Bill Hartzer (05:08):
And if they just see demons, it is calculated then or copied, then they will remove that result those results from the, from their index. So Bing the search engine, also in a lot of other places on the search engines will comply with that. However keep in mind that, you know, if the content is actually hosted somewhere out of the, out of the United States, the web may or may not comply with the DMC take down. So basically when it comes down to it if someone keeps copies your content, what you’ll need to do is send it to the web host and you may, you know, also send it to Google and send it to Bing, but, you know, you know, using their forms and so forth, but basically it’s just, you know, you don’t have to have a trademark it’s just copied content.
Bill Hartzer (06:03):
That is, you know, DMCA is for content. And so they sent the web, sent it to the web post and they will most likely, you know, probably if it’s associated in the us, they’ll probably take it down. So regardless if it all, if that content is noted out of the, out of United in the United States, then they may, they may not comply the way post may not comply with that takedown crust cause they don’t have to. So anyway that is different than any kind of thing, really trademarks and, and domain names. The DMCA is, is different than any trademark issues with somebody violating a trademark, you know, domain name that is that needs to be taken care of with the, with the URS or the UDRP system, most likely the U D R P domain disputes.
Bill Hartzer (07:01):
You have any questions. I am very, very well versed with about UD R PS and, and in intellectual property, on the internet. I’m not an attorney. However I do run a company called DNProtect that is that we, that we do have domaining attorneys on staff. If we get to that, but I can typically tell you the, you know, essentially the rules and how things work if you have any questions about that. So anyway, so LinkedIn, LinkedIn is now allowing you to add a link to your profile. And so this is kind of this is very new this this week. And so basically that link, whatever you choose to, to, you know, to use it appears below your name and the description on your profile. So previously, you know, the, the, you go to someone go to a LinkedIn profile and mine is linkedin.com/in/bhartzer.
Bill Hartzer (08:08):
So if you go to the profile and it has your, your photo and so forth and a header image, and it has, you know, your name your company name and so forth, and maybe description, there’s a link there that says contact info. When you click on that content contact, contact info, you know, you may have whatever you filled out, you may have websites listed there. That’s actually different now that that still, that still exists. Okay. But you have to click on cost IPO in the case where this new link appears. There’s actually, if you edit the profile and you go the, where you have your name and your description, et cetera, there’s a place that has a place for a link and has a like description that is actually the anchor text. And that’s quick, more anchor text. So basically when someone goes to your profile under your photo and your little description, there, there is actually a link now that you can add to your website.
Bill Hartzer (09:10):
So that is new this week. What I, what I have, what I have seen, and I’ve looked at it based on what I can tell and looking at the link, looking at the code and so forth, it’s a, it’s not a no follow link. So basically it looks like it is a good link. What’s interesting is that actually link does not appear in the source code of the page. They’re pulling it somehow a differently, but when you render the page and when you actually pull it up in the browser you’ll actually see the link and the search engine will see the link and there’s not, and no follow meaning that there, that is in theory, a good link that will pass a good, you know, page rank or link due or link credit, whatever, through, from your LinkedIn profile to your website, that’s important because this is new and if you have a lot of followers or connections, if you will on LinkedIn and I have, for example, 29,000 connections, well, all those essentially link to my profile and the more I publicize my profile, more connections I have, et cetera, that that link will count and, and pass on.
Bill Hartzer (10:33):
Well, like I said, page rank or the you know, link credit or whatever you wanna call it to my website. So what I do recommend is going to link pro LinkedIn profile and adding that link. I just used in the anchor text of the link, I just used www cher.com. I could have used some kind of thing to describe my business or so forth. But regardless I, you know, I added the link anyway, so next next item for this week. So goad is ending support for their link. Shorteners I’m not sure if that’s just for the x.co domain or if there’s other domains involved, I’ve written about this on my blog post today on bill harger.com, however, you know, keep in mind that it’s a link shortener. And so there have been traditionally, you know, over the years issues potential issues with link shorteners, if you do not own the domain name.
Bill Hartzer (11:38):
So if you own the domain name and you have, you know, like a you know, they call a domain hack, which is, you know, maybe you have a word or your name that ends in ES or something that you know, that’s like a CC T L D you know, like you know, harsher.it, or you know, H a rz.er, okay. Or, or something similar to that. So make, to make that URL shorter, you know, if you’re using someone else’s, you know, like for example, you, you know, you’ve been using x.co/whatever, as a link shortener for years with GoDaddy, for certain links and GoDaddy decides, well, we want that domain and we’re gonna sell it to somebody else, or we’re just gonna stop using that or providing that service. So when that happens, the link, your link that you use in that link shorten is not gonna work anymore.
Bill Hartzer (12:37):
I mean, it’s just not gonna be valid. So the link will go down. So if you do not have control over that domain name of the link shorten, then it could be an issue. Somebody else could get access to it, and then change the link where you think you’ve, the link is good, but it’s actually going to somewhere else. Now I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen people hack link shorteners basically and direct the links to somewhere else. That can be an issue. So regardless, you know, when you do, when you put a full URL into LinkedIn, for example, and you make a post, that link ends up being a shortened link. And same thing with Twitter is t.co/whatever they just make automatically make. That’s an issue. You know, because of the fact that basically, you know, Twitter at and LinkedIn, they’re doing that essentially because of the fact that they want to look at the analytics and see how many people are actually cooking on the links and so forth.
Bill Hartzer (13:44):
And so that can be an issue. So, like I said, if you don’t own the domain name of the link shortener, and you’re creating your own link, shortener service for your own links, I would just go ahead. And what I recommend is just using the full links, lot, some questions this week. Couple people email me. One question was about URLs with trailing slashes. So you have a site for example. And so let’s say, er.com/about, okay, well that is a, that is a URL, a link, or, you know, a URL. And I may link to that. But that actually should be, if you have your web server set up properly, that actually should 3 0 1, redirect your hearts.com/about/with a trailing slash at the end, if it does not, if you, if you can go to the version without the trailing slash and with the trailing slash, then that’s actually a duplicate of two URLs.
Bill Hartzer (14:47):
And what ends up happening is that you have a duplicate content issue and you should be going back to your web developer or go to your web server and make sure that that setting is set up, your web server is set up properly. So that there’s that 3 0 1 redirect from one or the other otherwise what’ll happen is, so what I’ve seen happen specifically is that a site’s rankings, all of a sudden, just tanked and went down. And the reason why was the fact that they are actually using on the site, they’re using relative links, you know and not actually absolute URL links. So basically the absolute URLs is where, when you have a link on your site so let’s say in the main navigation and the dropdown in the code actually says, HTPs slash slash www dot your, you know, your domain.com/about or slash content flash contact or whatever.
Bill Hartzer (15:50):
Well, in some sites, when you have a staging site and you move that over to the, to the new site what’s gonna happen is that you’re you’re, you actually don’t have that full URL, the CTBS slash slash www what you know, on the domain. So what happens is that it just says slash about, for example. And so what happens is when, if somebody makes a mistake on your site and you make, they make a link to ser.com/about, or just to slash about without the trailing slash what will happen is, is that whole site will now get crawled and indexed without the trail, all URLs without the trailing slash making a complete copy of your site. So now the, now you’ve got Google or being that has a copy of the site with the trailing slash, but also all the pages without the trailing slash. So they may decide some pages might have without, with the slash some might not have without the slash.
Bill Hartzer (16:57):
And that’s BEC that’s because your web server was not set up to redirect the non slash to the slash version. So that, so just by one battle link or one link can actually completely tank and completely have a, a huge effect on your surge engine rankings. So again if you can go to both, then that’s a problem and someone should redirect to the other, and it’s a very easy server setting to fix that issue. So basically that’s, this person came to me and said, Hey, you know, why am I being able to see, you know, one version with and one version without? And so the answer is basically your server’s not set up properly. So there’s questions about stupid content. So basically I know this is pretty basic, cause I want, you know, this this actual same individual asked me about, you know, pages that, you know, in their site, there’s several different ways to get to the same URL.
Bill Hartzer (18:00):
So let’s say, you know, let’s, let’s, you know, so this is actually this particular site has, you know, millions of pages. And so there’s there was an issue related to that, but let’s take WordPress, for example when you make a blog post, let’s say a basic blog, you know your blog, you know, your latest blog post that blog post is that’s the main URL. That is the main URL of the Blogg post the page. That’s the one should rank in the search engine results. Okay. Well, it turns out just by using WordPress, there’s a possibility or very most likely that there’s going to be several much. You hit publish. There’s going to be several versions available of that blog post. For example, you go to er.com/blog, well slash blog slash that’s gonna have a version of the, of the blog post.
Bill Hartzer (18:56):
Hopefully you’re going to use that more tag, and it’s going to split that post and only show the slash blog. It’s only gonna show the first paragraph, okay. Or the first few sentences at that blog post. But if it doesn’t, then you’re gonna have the whole blog post on slash blog. That’s one location. Now you have a, now you have duplicate, you have one on the main blog post. Now you have one on slash blog. Then what, what if you added a category that blog post will be here up here also in the category. Okay. It’ll also appear in a tag or any tags that you tagged on that page. So there’s several different versions already just by hitting the publish on the WordPress. Not to mention the fact, if you have links to your archives of your blog, say like, you know by month by date by year, et cetera, et cetera, you have easily five version versions.
Bill Hartzer (19:51):
Now, when you go to slash blog, harder.com/blog, you have all the latest, latest blog posts go down to the bottom. You have page one, page two, page three, page four, et cetera. You have more versions potentially of that blog post. Well, what I’m getting at that, that blog post needs to have the, you know, the original B needs to have the canonical tag. You gotta have that canonical tag in. So basically when a copy is made on the slash blog or in the category or in the, and, and, and on the, on, you know, page one, for example, that search engines know that the original version and the version that you want indexed has, you know, based on the canonical tag that, that particular blog post URL, that’s the one you want to sew up in search results. Okay. So basically you don’t wanna really restrict indexing of other pages.
Bill Hartzer (20:46):
You want to have it use a canonical black canonical tank. Another example would be actually, if you have products of the same, you know, the same thing. So I bought this t-shirt online and I bought it in gray, dark gray, light, gray, blue, green et cetera. So there’s different colors, it’s essentially the same product, but a different color. So essentially what we want is actually to have, in that particular case, we want the product page, the main product page that shows the different colors. That’s the main product page on the product page of the green version or the one, the green version that’s in Excel or the green version. That’s one that one is in small, medium Mars, there’s four or five different versions of the gray version itself. Then you add on, you know, five different colors. Okay. You also have, you know, easily 10 different, 20 different pages, you know that are duplicates again, that canonical tag on those pages, those other duplicate pages are gonna point to the main product page.
Bill Hartzer (21:58):
That product page is going to be in this, in the search engine results. And that’s what it’s going to essentially rank in the search engine results. Okay. Even though you have other versions and Google knows about the other versions, now let’s take it one more step. What if somebody links in social media or whatever they link on their website and they say, you know what, this is a great t-shirt. I like it in, in medium gray. And I U you know, I am in a large, I use a large, and they link to the URL that is for the medium gray large, well, since you have the canonical tag and that’ll link actually will be helpful because that link because of the canonical tag will be combined with the, all the other pages. Okay. And it will that, that link from that guy’s website where he link to the, the Heather, you know, the gray version in March page, that URL, that link will still count because it’ll be combined with the actual main page that you’re, you know, canonically too name, product page. So the canonical tag combines all that. And, and just says, Hey, Google, we know what we have all these duplicates. We want this product page to be the one that you show.
Bill Hartzer (23:21):
So those are the questions for this week. Personally, I want to mention Starlink because Starlink is what actually the internet connection that I have right now that I’m using right now. And starlink.com essentially this, is small dish that automatically changes itself to the proper direction of the satellite in the sky.
Bill Hartzer (23:45):
You know, it actually shows all of the you know, to the thought points to the satellites and redirects itself, et cetera. So regardless so have Starlink and you know, that is like great for us. We’re up in the mountains and in Colorado. And and you know, to be honest with you, that internet access is not great. But again, we have good internet access now over a hundred Meg per second which is great. And so, and also want to mention that they just started allowing roaming so that if you do have one of the dish and the equipment you can, and, and you go on vacation. For example, you can take that equipment with you and set it up, and it will actually for an ex extra $25 a month on top of the a hundred dollars a month, you can actually get that roaming feature enabled, and then you can take it with UI on the road and wherever there is star satellite you are actually going to be able to use it whether you’re not, whether you’re at home or whether you’re not on the road.
Bill Hartzer (24:52):
So anyway, so worth mentioning and, and so forth. So at this point this has been the digital marketing with Bill Hartzer podcast for Thursday, May 5th, Cinco de Mayo 2022. And of, of course you can find me online billhartzer.com, hartzer.com twitter.com/bhartzer, and or just Google my name. And you can find me happy to happy to provide any answers questions that you have and about SEO, internet marketing, digital marketing, or domain names, because I do run a company called DM protect that, where we recover stolen domain names. And I do a lot of domain name, forensic information and for walk legal cases as well as recovering stolen domain names for our clients that said um’ll you again Facebook live next week, one 30 mountain time is the time. And also this will be on YouTube and the video will be on YouTube as well as this basically the podcast will be and the audio will be on every, just about every podcast wherever you get your podcast. I heard radio to op apple mu apple podcasts. And, and now on Amazon as well, Amazon music or Amazon podcasts Thursday, May 5th, 2022. Thanks for joining me this week. We’ll see you next week.