How to Research, Monitor, and Optimize for Questions

Posted by AnnSmarty

Have you been optimizing your content for questions? There are a few powerful reasons for you to start doing it now:

• Niche question research is the most powerful content inspiration source
• Questions are highly engaging: Asking a question triggers a natural answering reflex in human beings. Using questions on your landing pages and / or social media will improve engagement
• Questions are very useful for niche and audience research: What can't people figure out in your industry and how can you best help them?
• Question research allows you to understand natural language better and optimize for voice search
• Question optimization allows for increased organic search visibility through both featured snippets and Google's "People Also Ask" results.

Just to reinforce the latter point, Google is going a bit insane with understanding and featuring questions in SERPs. Here's just one of their recent experiments showing a multifaceted featured snippet, addressing a possible follow-up question (courtesy of Barry Schwartz):

Types of niche questions and how to group them

• Basic questions (these usually relate to defining concepts). In most cases you don't need to write lengthy explanations because people searching for those seek quick easy-to-understand answers.
• How-to questions (these usually relate to step-by-step instructions). Adding videos to better explain the process is almost always a good idea here
• Branded questions (those usually include your or your competitor's brand name or a product name). Like any branded queries**, these should be further categorized into:
• ROPO questions ("research online, buy online / offline"). These are specific questions discussing your product, its pros and cons, reviews, etc.
• • High-intent questions: for example, questions asking how to buy your product.
  • Navigational questions: those addressing your site navigation, e.g. "How to login," "How to cancel," etc.
  • Competitive research questions: those comparing your brand to your competitors.
  • Reputational questions: those questions relating to your brand history, culture, etc.

All branded questions may also be labeled based on possible sentiment.

** Most basic and how-to questions are going to have informational intent (simply due to the essence of the question format: most people asking questions seek to find an answer, i.e. information). But there's always a chance there's a transactional intent there that you may want to make note of, too.

For example, "What's the best CRM" may be a query reflecting a solid commercial intent. Same goes about "How do you use a CRM?" Both can be asked by someone who is willing to give the software a try, and this needs to be reflected within your copy and on-page layout.

Tools to discover questions

1. People Also Ask

"People Also Ask" is a newer Google search element containing related questions to a given query. It's not clear how Google is generating these (it might be due to enough people typing each question into the search box), but what we do know for sure is:

• Google is smart: It would only show things to a user when they have found enough evidence that's helpful and something their users engage with
• "People Also Ask" boxes present more SERPs real estate which we may want to dominate for maximum organic search visibility

With that in mind, People Also Ask results are important for content marketers on two fronts:

• They allow us lots of insight into what our target audience wants to know
• They allow us additional organic search visibility

To collect as many People Also Ask results as you can, give Featured Snippet Tool a try (disclaimer: This tool has been developed by the company I work for). It checks your domain's important search queries and generates "People Also Ask" results for all of them:

The tool ranks "People Also Ask" questions by the number of queries they were triggered by. This enables you to quickly see most popular questions on your topic.

2. Google / Bing SERPs

Search results give us lots of cues beyond People Also Ask boxes, provided you use smart tools to analyze them. Text Optimizer is a tool that extracts terms and concepts from SERPs and uses semantic analysis to come up with the list of questions you may want to include in your content:

I believe that is partly what Google is doing to generate those “People Also Ask” suggestions, but this tool will give you more ideas than “People Also Ask” boxes alone.

It supports Google and Bing. You can also copy-paste your text in the tool and it will suggest terms and questions to add to optimize your content better for either search engine.

3. Google Suggest

Google Suggest is another search-based tool for content marketers. Google Suggest auto-completes a user's query based on how other users tend to complete it. This way, we can safely assume that all Google Suggest results have a solid search volume / demand, simply because they ended up in the suggest index.

The problem with this one is that you need to know how to start typing the question to see it properly completed:

There's a workaround that forces Google to autocomplete the middle of the query:

• Type your core query and hit search
• Put your cursor back at the beginning of the query
• Type "how" and Google will suggest more popular queries:

Another way to discover more question-type Google Suggest results is to play with the following tools:

Serpstat Questions is a solid keyword research tool allowing you to generate hundreds of niche questions based on your core query. What's helpful is that Serpstat allows you to sort results by the question word:

...and filter questions by a popular term in the tag cloud, making it easier to make sense of those multiple results (and optimize for several questions within one content asset):

Ahrefs is another multi-feature SEO platform that allows users to research related questions with one of its recent updates:

If you end up with too many Google-suggested questions, run your list through Serpstat’s clustering tool to break those questions into meaningful groups based on relevancy.

4. Quora and discussion boards

Quora is undoubtedly one of the largest sources of questions out there. In fact, it forces users to post new discussions in a question format, so everything you see there is questions.

Quora's search functionality is highly confusing though. It has an intricate architecture based on topics (many of which overlap) and it won't show you most popular questions over time. Its search ranking algorithm is a weird mix of personalization (based on your chosen interests and connections), recency, activity, and probably something else.

Because of this, I rarely use Quora itself. Instead I use Buzzsumo Question Analyzer. It aggregates results from all kinds of discussion boards, including Quora and Amazon Q&A. Furthermore, it analyzes your query and generates results for related keywords allowing you to expand your search and see the bigger picture:

5. Twitter questions

Twitter is an amazing source of content inspiration few content marketers are really using. One of the must-have Twitter search tricks I always use within my social media monitoring dashboard is Twitter's question search:

Type [brandname ?] (with the space in-between) into Twitter's search box and you'll see all questions people are asking when discussing your topic / brand / product.

If you want to get a bit trickier, monitor your bigger competitor's tweeted questions, too. This will enable your team to be on top of everything your potential customers cannot figure out when buying from your competitor:

Cyfe (disclaimer: this is my content marketing client) is a social media dashboard providing an easy way to monitor multiple Twitter search results within one dashboard. You can use it to monitor all kinds of tweeted questions around your core term or brand name:

6. Reddit AMA

Reddit AMAs offer another great way to pick up some interesting questions to use in your content. Unfortunately, I haven't found a good reliable way to monitor Reddit for keywords (while restricting to a particular Subreddit) but I've been using Twitter monitoring for that.

You can use Cyfe to monitor the #redditama hashtag in combination with your core term. Or you can set up an alert inside My Tweet Alerts. The tool has a pretty unique set of options allowing you to find tweets based on keywords, hashtags, and even words in users' bios. It sends email digests of most recent tweets making the alerts harder to miss.

For Reddit AMA monitoring, you can set it up to search for tweets that have the #redditama hashtag in them together with your main keyword. Or, to make it more targeted, you can only monitor those tweets published by Twitter users with your keyword in the bio:

Here's an example of the announced AMA on a related topic of my interest:

All I need to do is to open the AMA thread and scroll through comments in search for interesting questions to note for my future content ideas:

How to add questions to your (content) marketing strategy

Niche question research provides an almost unending source of content opportunities. To name a few, here are some ideas on how you can use questions:

• Create a separate FAQ section to address and explain basic questions
• Identify and optimize existing content to cover the identified questions
• Add Q&A to important landing pages (this may help get product pages featured in Google).

But it's not really only about content:

Different actions + teams for different types of questions

Keeping our initial question categorization above in mind, here's how question research may (or rather, should) involve multiple departments within your company:

You can download this worksheet with clickable links here.

Basic (what-is) questions:

• Types of content to answer these questions: Glossary, FAQ
• Specific SEO considerations:
  • Clickable table of contents (see sample)
  • Implement QAPage Schema
• Other teams to get involved: Customer support and sales team (including for training). You want those teams to use jargon your customers use

How-to questions:

• Types of content to answer these questions: FAQ (+ videos)
• Specific SEO considerations: Use HowTo Schema (Including Yoast for WP)
• Other teams to get involved: Include your CRO expert because these could be transactional

Branded ROPO questions:

• Types of content to answer these questions: Blog content (+ video tutorials)
• Specific SEO considerations: Optimize for as many related branded terms as possible
• Other teams to get involved: Include your product management team for them to collect answers (feedback) and implement required product updates / improvements). Add these to your editorial schedule as high-priority

Branded high-intent questions:

• Types of content to answer these questions: Product Q&A
• Specific SEO considerations: Implement QAPage Schema
• Other teams to get involved: Include your CRO expert and A/B testing expert for optimum on-page conversion optimization

Branded navigational questions:

• Types of content to answer these questions: Product-specific knowledge base (+ video tutorials)
• Specific SEO considerations: Implement QAPage Schema or use a Q&A-optimized solution (like this one)
• Other teams to get involved: Include your design and usability teams to solve navigational issues

Branded competitive research questions:

• Types of content to answer these questions: Create specific landing pages + videos to explain your product benefits
• Specific SEO considerations: Optimize for as many related branded terms as possible
• Other teams to get involved: Include your product management team for them to collect answers (feedback) and implement required product updates / improvements. Include your sales team for them to know how to best explain your product benefits to clients

Branded competitive reputational questions

• Types of content to answer these questions: Create specific landing pages + videos
• Specific SEO considerations: Optimize for as many related branded terms as possible
• Other teams to get involved: Include your reputation management + social media teams to address these questions properly when they have to

Takeaways:

• Questions are useful on many levels, from audience research to conversion optimization and product development
• As far as SEO is concerned, optimizing for questions helps you develop better-targeted copy and gain more organic search visibility (especially through appearing in featured and "People Also Ask" boxes)
• Researching questions is an ongoing process: You need to be constantly discovering new ones and monitoring social media for real-time ideas
• There are lots of tools to help you discover and organize niche questions (when it comes to organizing them, using your favorite tools or even simply spreadsheets is always a good idea)
• Question research is not just for SEO or content ideation. It can help improve social media engagement, help you develop a better product, train your internal teams to better explain product advantages to clients, etc.

Are you researching and optimizing for niche questions yet? Please share your tips and tricks in the comments below!

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The SEO Elevator Pitch - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

What is it you do again?

It's a question every SEO has had to answer at some point, whether to your family members over the holidays or to the developer who will eventually implement your suggestions. If you don't have a solid elevator pitch for describing your job, this is the Whiteboard Friday for you! Learn how to craft a concise, succinct description of life as an SEO without jargon, policing, or acting like a superhero.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey guys, welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and I work here at Moz. Today we're going to be talking about creating an SEO elevator pitch, what is it, why we need one, and what kind of prompted this whole idea for an SEO elevator pitch.

So essentially, a couple of weeks ago, I was on Twitter and I saw John Mueller. He tweeted, "Hey, I meet with a lot of developers, and a lot of times they don't really know what SEOs do." He was genuinely asking. He was asking, "Hey, SEO community, how do you describe what you do?" I'm scrolling through, and I'm seeing a lot of different answers, and all of them I'm resonating with.

They're all things that I would probably say myself. But it's just interesting how many different answers there were to the question, "What do SEOs do and what value do they provide?" So I kind of thought to myself, "Why is that? Why do we have so many different explanations for what SEO is and what we do?" So I thought about it, and I thought that it might be a good idea for myself and maybe other SEOs if you don't already have an elevator pitch ready.

What is an SEO elevator pitch?

Now, if you're not familiar with the concept of an elevator pitch, it's basically — I have a definition here — a succinct and persuasive speech that communicates your unique value as an SEO. It's called an elevator pitch essentially because it should take about the length of time it takes to ride the elevator with someone. So you want to be able to quickly and concisely answer someone's question when they ask you, "Oh, SEO, what is that?I think I've heard of that before. What do you do?"

Why is this so hard?

So let's dive right in. So I mentioned, in the beginning, how there are so many different answers to this "what do you say you do here" type question. I think it's hard to kind of come up with a concise explanation for a few different reasons. So I wanted to dive into that a little bit first.

1. Lots of specialties within SEO

So number one, there are lots of specialties within SEO.

As the industry has advanced over the last two plus decades, it has become very diverse, and there are lots of different facets in SEO. I found myself on quite a rabbit trail. I was on LinkedIn and I was kind of browsing SEO job descriptions. I wanted to see basically: What is it that people are looking for in an SEO?

How do they describe it? What are the characteristics? So basically, I found a lot of different things, but I found a few themes that emerged. So there are your content-focused SEOs, and those are people that are your keyword research aficionados. There are the people that write search engine optimized content to drive traffic to your website. You have your link builders, people that focus almost exclusively on that.

You have your local SEOs, and you have your analysts. You have your tech SEOs, people that either work on a dev team or closely with a dev team. So I think that's okay though. There are lots of different facets within SEO, and I think that's awesome. That's, to me, a sign of maturity in our industry. So when there are a lot of different specialties within SEO, I think it's right and good for all of our elevator pitches to differ.

So if you have a specialty within SEO, it can be different. It should kind of cater toward the unique brand of SEO that you do, and that's okay.

2. Different audiences

Number two, there are different audiences. We're not always going to be talking to the same kind of person. So maybe you're talking to your boss or a client. To me, those are more revenue-focused conversations.

They want to know: What's the value of what you do? How does it affect my bottom line? How does it help me run my business and stay afloat and stay profitable? If you're talking to a developer, that's going to be a slightly different conversation. So I think it's okay if we kind of tweak our elevator pitch to make it a little bit more palatable for the people that we're talking to.

3. Algorithm maturity

Three, why this is hard is there's been, obviously, a lot of changes all the time in the algorithm, and as it matures, it's going to look like the SEO's job is completely different than last year just because the algorithm keeps maturing and it looks like our jobs are changing all the time. So I think that's a reality that we have to live with, but I still think it's important, even though things are changing all the time, to have a baseline kind of pitch that we give people when they ask us what it is we do.

So that's why it's hard. That's what your elevator pitch is.

My elevator pitch: SEO is marketing, with search engines

Then, by way of example, I thought I'd just give you my SEO elevator pitch. Maybe it will spark your creativity. Maybe it will give you some ideas. Maybe you already have one, and that's okay. But the point is not to use mine.

The point is essentially to kind of take you through what mine looks like, hopefully get your creative juices flowing, and you can create your own. So let's dive right into my pitch.

So my pitch is SEO is marketing, just with search engines. So we have the funnel here — awareness, consideration, and decision.

Awareness: Rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

First of all, I think it's important to note that SEO can help you rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

Consideration: Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries.

So when your audience is searching for information, they want to solve their pain points, they're not ready to buy, they're just searching, we're meeting them there with content that brings them to the site, informs them, and now they're familiar with our brand. Those are great assisted conversions. Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries. When your audience is starting to compare their options, you want to be there. You want to meet them there, and we can do that with SEO.

Decision: Rank, attract clicks, and promote conversion for bottom-funnel queries

At the decision phase, you can rank and attract clicks and kind of promote conversions for bottom of funnel queries. When people are in their "I want to buy" stage, SEO can meet them there. So I think it's important to realize that SEO isn't kind of like a cost center and not a profit center. It's not like a bottom of funnel thing. I've heard that in a lot of places, and I think it's just important to kind of draw attention to the fact that SEO is integrated throughout your marketing funnel. It's not relegated to one stage or another.

But how?

We talked about rank and attract clicks and promote conversions. But how do we do that? That's the what it does.

But how do we do it? So this is how I explain it. I think really, for me, there are two sides to the SEO's coin. We have driving, and we have supporting.

1. Driving

So on the driving side, I would say something like this. When someone searches a phrase or a keyword in Google, I make sure the business' website shows up in the non-ad results. That's important because a lot of people are like, "Oh, do you bid on keywords?"

We're like, "No, no, that's PPC." So I always just throw in "non-ad" because people understand that. So I do that through content that answers people's questions, links that help search engines find my content and show signs of authority and popularity of my content, and accessibility. So that's kind of your technical foundation.

You're making sure that your website is crawlable and it that it's index the way that you want it to be indexed. When people get there, it works. It works on mobile and on desktop. It's fast. So I think these are really the three big pillars of driving SEO — content, links, and making sure your website is technically sound. So that's how I describe the driving, the proactive side of SEO.

2. Supporting

Then two, we have supporting, and I think this is kind of an underrated or maybe it's often seen as kind of an interruption to our jobs.

But I think it's important to actually call it what it is. It's a big part of what we do. So I think we should embrace it as SEOs.

A. Be the Google Magic 8-ball

For one, we can serve as the Google Magic 8-Ball. When people come to us in our organization and they say, "Hey, I'm going to make this change, or I'm thinking about making this change.Is this going to be good or bad for SEO?"

I think it's great that people are asking that question. Always be available and always make yourself ready to answer those types of questions for people. So I think on the reactionary side we can be that kind of person that helps guide people and understand what is going to affect your organic search presence.

B. Assist marketing

Two, we can assist marketing. So on this side of the coin, we're driving.

We can drive our own marketing strategies. As SEOs, we can see how SEO can drive all phases of the funnel. But I think it's important to note that we're not the only people in our organization. Often SEOs maybe they don't even live in the marketing department. Maybe they do and they report to a marketing lead. There are other initiatives that your marketing lead could be investigating.

Maybe they say, "Hey, we've just done some market research, and here's this plan." It could be our job as SEOs to take that plan, take that strategy and translate it into something digital. I think that's a really important value that SEOs can add. We can actually assist marketing as well as drive our own efforts.

C. Fix mistakes

Then number three here, I know this is another one that kind of makes people cringe, but we are here to fix mistakes when they happen and train people so that they don't happen again. So maybe we come in on a Monday morning and we're ready to face the week, and we see that traffic has taken a nosedive or something. We go, "Oh, no," and we dive in.

We try to see what happened. But I think that's really important. It's our job or it's part of our job to kind of dive in, diagnose what happened, and not only that but support and be there to help fix it or guide the fixes, and then train and educate and make sure that people know what it is that happened and how it shouldn't happen again.

You're there to help train them and guide them. I think that's another really important way that we can support as SEOs. So that's essentially how I describe it.

3 tips for coming up with your own pitch

Before I go, I just wanted to mention some tips when you're coming up with your own SEO elevator pitch. I think it's really important to just kind of stay away from certain language when you're crafting your own "this is what I do" speech.

So the three tips I have are:

1. Stay away from jargon.

If you're giving an SEO elevator pitch, it's to people that don't know what SEO is. So try to avoid jargon. I know it's really easy as SEOs. I find myself doing it all the time. There are things that I don't think are jargon.

But then I take a couple steps back and I realize, oh yeah, that's not layman's terms. So stay away from jargon if at all possible. You're not going to benefit anyone by confusing them.

2. Avoid policing.

It can be easy as SEOs I've found and I've found myself in this trap a couple of times where we kind of act as these traffic cops that are waiting around the corner, and when people make a mistake, we're there to wag our finger at them.

So avoid any language that makes it sound like the SEOs are just the police waiting to kind of punish people for wrongdoing. We are there to help fix mistakes, but it's in a guiding and educating and supporting, kind of collaborative manner and not like a policing type of manner. Number three, I would say is kind of similar, but a little different.

3. Avoid Supermanning.

I call this Supermanning because it's the type of language that makes it sound like SEOs are here to swoop in and save the day when something goes wrong. We do. We're superheroes a lot of times. There are things that happen and thank goodness there was an SEO there to help diagnose and fix that.

But I would avoid any kind of pitch that makes it sound like your entire job is just to kind of save people. There are other people in your organization that are super smart and talented at what they do. They probably wouldn't like it if you made it sound like you were there to help them all the time. So I just think that's important to keep in mind. Don't make it seem like you're the police waiting to wag your finger at them or you're the superhero that needs to save everyone from their mistakes.

So yeah, that's my SEO elevator pitch. That's why I think it's important to have one. If you've kind of crafted your own SEO elevator pitch, I would love to hear it, and I'm sure it would be great for other SEOs to hear it as well. It's great to information share. So drop that in the comments if you feel comfortable doing that. If you don't have one, hopefully this helps. So yeah, that's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday, and come back again next week for another one.

Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Karate Kid kicks it

good stugg

Alternative, Country and Gangsta

good stuff

Karate Kid kicks it

good stugg

Alternative, Country and Gangsta

good stuff

3 Big Lessons from Interviewing John Mueller at SearchLove London - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by willcritchlow

When you've got one of Google's most helpful and empathetic voices willing to answer your most pressing SEO questions, what do you ask? Will Critchlow recently had the honor of interviewing Google's John Mueller at SearchLove London, and in this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday he shares his best lessons from that session, covering the concept of Domain Authority, the great subdomain versus subfolder debate, and a view into the technical workings of noindex/nofollow.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, Whiteboard Friday fans. I'm Will Critchlow from Distilled, and I found myself in Seattle, wanted to record another Whiteboard Friday video and talk through some things that I learned recently when I got to sit down with John Mueller from Google at our SearchLove London conference recently.

So I got to interview John on stage, and, as many of you may know, John is a webmaster relations guy at Google and really a point of contact for many of us in the industry when there are technical questions or questions about how Google is treating different things. If you followed some of the stuff that I've written and talked about in the past, you'll know that I've always been a little bit suspicious of some of the official lines that come out of Google and felt like either we don't get the full story or we haven't been able to drill in deep enough and really figure out what's going on.

I was under no illusions that I might be able to completely fix this this in one go, but I did want to grill John on a couple of specific things where I felt like we hadn't maybe asked things clearly enough or got the full story. Today I wanted to run through a few things that I learned when John and I sat down together. A little side note, I found it really fascinating doing this kind of interview. I sat on stage in a kind of journalistic setting. I had never done this before. Maybe I'll do a follow-up Whiteboard Friday one day on things I learned and how to run interviews.

1. Does Google have a "Domain Authority" concept?

But the first thing that I wanted to quiz John about was this domain authority idea. So here we are on Moz. Moz has a proprietary metric called domain authority, DA. I feel like when, as an industry, we've asked Google, and John in particular, about this kind of thing in the past, does Google have a concept of domain authority, it's got bundled up with feeling like, oh, he's had an easy way out of being able to answer and say, "No, no, that's a proprietary Moz metric. We don't have that."

I felt like that had got a bit confusing, because our suspicion is that there is some kind of an authority or a trust metric that Google has and holds at a domain level. We think that's true, but we felt like they had always been able to wriggle out of answering the question. So I said to John, "Okay, I am not asking you do you use Moz's domain authority metric in your ranking factors. Like we know that isn't the case. But do you have something a little bit like it?"

Yes, Google has metrics that map into similar things

John said yes. He said yes, they have metrics that, his exact quote was, "map into similar things."My way of phrasing this was this is stuff that is at the domain level. It's based on things like link authority, and it is something that is used to understand performance or to rank content across an entire domain. John said yes, they have something similar to that.

New content inherits those metrics

They use it in particular when they discover new content on an existing domain. New content, in some sense, can inherit some of the authority from the domain, and this is part of the reason why we figured they must have something like this, because we've seen identical content perform differently on different sites. We know that there's something to this. So yes, John confirmed that until they have some of those metrics developed, when they've seen a bit of content for long enough, and it can have its own link metrics and usage metrics, in the intervening time up until that point it can inherit some of this stuff from the domain.

Not wholly link-based

He did also just confirm that it's not just link-based. This is not just a domain-level PageRank type thing.

2. Subdomains versus subfolders

This led me into the second thing that I really wanted to get out of him, which was — and when I raised this, I got kind of an eye roll, "Are we really going down this rabbit hole" — the subdomain versus subfolder question. You might have seen me talk about this. You might have seen people like Rand talk about this, where we've seen cases and we have case studies of moving blog.example.com to example.com/blog and changing nothing else and getting an uplift.

We know something must be going on, and yet the official line out of Google has for a very long time been: "We don't treat these things differently. There is nothing special about subfolders. We're perfectly happy with subdomains. Do whatever is right for your business." We've had this kind of back-and-forth a few times. The way I put it to John was I said, "We have seen these case studies. How would you explain this?"

They try to figure out what belongs to the site

To his credit, John said, "Yes, we've seen them as well." So he said, yes, Google has also seen these things. He acknowledged this is true. He acknowledged that it happens. The way he explained it connects back into this Domain Authority thing in my mind, which is to say that the way they think about it is: Are these pages on this subdomain part of the same website as things on the main domain?

That's kind of the main question. They try and figure out, as he put it, "what belongs to this site." We all know of sites where subdomains are entirely different sites. If you think about a blogspot.com or a WordPress.com domain, subdomains might be owned and managed by entirely different people, and there would be no reason for that authority to pass across. But what Google is trying to do and is trying to say, "Is this subdomain part of this main site?"

Sometimes this includes subdomains and sometimes not

He said sometimes they determine that it is, and sometimes they determine that it is not. If it is part of the site, in their estimation, then they will treat it as equivalent to a subfolder. This, for me, pretty much closes this loop. I think we understand each other now, which is Google is saying, in these certain circumstances, they will be treated identically, but there are circumstances where it can be treated differently.

My recommendation stays what it's always been, which is 100% if you're starting from the outset, put it on a subfolder. There's no upside to the subdomain. Why would you risk the fact that Google might treat it as a separate site? If it is currently on a subdomain, then it's a little trickier to make that case. I would personally be arguing for the integration and for making that move.

If it's treated as part of the site, a subdomain is equivalent to a subfolder

But unfortunately, but somewhat predictably, I couldn't tie John down to any particular way of telling if this is the case. If your content is currently on a subdomain, there isn't really any way of telling if Google is treating it differently, which is a shame, but it's somewhat predictable. But at least we understand each other now, and I think we've kind of got to the root of the confusion. These case studies are real. This is a real thing. Certainly in certain circumstances moving from the subdomain to the subfolder can improve performance.

3. Noindex's impact on nofollow

The third thing that I want to talk about is a little bit more geeked out and technical, and also, in some sense, it leads to some bigger picture lessons and thinking. A little while ago John kind of caught us out by talking about how if you have a page that you no index and keep it that way for a long time, that Google will eventually treat that equivalently to a no index, no follow.

In the long-run, a noindex page's links effectively become nofollow

In other words, the links off that page, even if you've got it as a no index, follow, the links off that page will be effectively no followed. We found that a little bit confusing and surprising. I mean I certainly felt like I had assumed it didn't work that way simply because they have the no index, follow directive, and the fact that that's a thing seems to suggest that it ought to work that way.

It's been this way for a long time

It wasn't really so much about the specifics of this, but more the like: How did we not know this? How did this come about and so forth? John talked about how, firstly, it has been this way for a long time. I think he was making the point none of you all noticed, so how big a deal can this really be? I put it back to him that this is kind of a subtle thing and very hard to test, very hard to extract out the different confounding factors that might be going on.

I'm not surprised that, as an industry, we missed it. But the point being it's been this way for a long time, and Google's view and certainly John's view was that this hadn't been hidden from us so much as the people who knew this hadn't realized that they needed to tell anyone. The actual engineers working on the search algorithm, they had a curse of knowledge.

The curse of knowledge: engineers didn't realize webmasters had the wrong idea

They knew it worked this way, and they had never realized that webmasters didn't know that or thought any differently. This was one of the things that I was kind of trying to push to John a little more was kind of saying, "More of this, please. Give us more access to the engineers. Give us more insight into their way of thinking. Get them to answer more questions, because then out of that we'll spot the stuff that we can be like, 'Oh, hey, that thing there, that was something I didn't know.' Then we can drill deeper into that."

That led us into a little bit of a conversation about how John operates when he doesn't know the answer, and so there were some bits and pieces that were new to me at least about how this works. John said he himself is generally not attending search quality meetings. The way he works is largely off his knowledge and knowledge base type of content, but he has access to engineers.

They're not dedicated to the webmaster relations operation. He's just going around the organization, finding individual Google engineers to answer these questions. It was somewhat interesting to me at least to find that out. I think hopefully, over time, we can generally push and say, "Let's look for those engineers. John, bring them to the front whenever they want to be visible, because they're able to answer these kinds of questions that might just be that curse of knowledge that they knew this all along and we as marketers hadn't figured out this was how things worked."

That was my quick run-through of some of the things that I learned when I interviewed John. We'll link over to more resources and transcripts and so forth. But it's been a blast. Take care.

• Further reading: Interviewing Google’s John Mueller at SearchLove: domain authority metrics, sub-domains vs. sub-folders and more

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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