Google SEO: Time to Retire the Keyword from Site Architecture?

[martinibuster]

In another thread someone asked about site architecture constructed around keyword phrases. But the more I think about it the more this tactic the more it resembles spam. The tactic I'm referring to is the one of creating a keyword pyramid with the big traffic keyword at the home page (top of the pyramid) and longer keyword phrases at the base of the pyramid, generally located several clicks away from the home page.

Is it time to retire Keywords as a way of organizing a web site?

[Planet13]

@ fathom:

Thanks for the link.

[keyplyr]

Keyword(s) in H1 tags still has the power, more so with Bing than Google, although evidence is difficult lately because of vanishing search term strings.

As for the pyramid schema mentioned above, I never followed that. I always developed each page individually, targeting specific topics which resulted in each page being a landing page.

[moTi]

Content will take care of keyword optimization for you.

like has been said, you have to define what you're about. say, you're an event guide. your content consists of event dates. none of the event dates mention "event guide". you have to communicate that extra, otherwise nowhere to be found. don't overestimate the algo: google is too dumb to read from the content what the website purpose is.

there are startups spending a ton of money on marketing/seo, ridiculously overoptimized sites with all that obviously not-for-reading text in the footer just to have any text content to be found for. on this front, yeah, content is king - where it's completely unnecessary for the user :) google has helped creating that kind of nonsense.

[ogletree]

I have always said the best example of good architecture is Wikipedia. They pretty much silo and they build around a keyword architecture. Anytime an article mentions a phrase that they have a page about they link to that page. There is a difference between a keyword based architecture and an architecture that is aware of keywords.

I think a site should be built for the users and content should be written as if SEO does not exist. I like the joke MB posted last year.

An SEO goes to a bar, a tavern, a public house, a gin joint, a pub, a dive, a bar and grill, a bar and grille, a grill and bar, a place to drink.

[martinibuster]

you have to define what you're about. say, you're an event guide. your content consists of event dates. none of the event dates mention "event guide". you have to communicate that extra

I'm in Massachusetts. In response to your post I did a search for (city name) Event Guide. *

1. The number one result does not feature the phrase Event Guide.
2. The title tag says Events Calendar.
3. It contains the phrase "--- --- Visitor Guide" and "--- --- free guide ---" Neither instance features the city name, neither instance is wrapped in an H tag or bolded. In fact, the last instance is in small fonts at the bottom of the page. It's actually de-emphasized.

Your example proves my point. We don't need to focus on keyword phrases.. Time to put a fork in it. The search engines don't care anymore. So why are SEOs still obsessed about whether their keyword is in the Title Tag or in H1?

*moTi is free to PM me and I'll share the city name.

[fathom]

Not totally true.

Edited to avoid charter violations.

I'm sure keyword stemming, LSI, Hummingbird, etc., all help Google to better understand events are commonly associated with a Calendar but your posted example didn't retire keywords, as the claim suggests.

[martinibuster]

First, thanks for editing your post. :)
fathom knows the site I'm referencing and I will repeat what I said, and you can confirm it:.

The phrase Event Guide does not appear on the number one result.

Consequently, the phrase (City Name) Event Guide does not appear anywhere on the page of the number one result, either.

True?

Furthermore, this is definitely not LSI. LSI has been superseded. LSI was about mathematical patterns. It was not about the meaning of the words themselves. What Google achieved with the Knowledge Graph (and the knowledge graph boxes) was understanding the meaning of phrases and how they relate to and modify each other. When the KG was announced several years ago it was stated that this was the first step. The next step was to integrate the technology into the SERPs. This is what we are looking at in the SERPs. This is what needs to be discussed.

[fathom]

I don't dispute the words don't appear on the page... That wasn't the thread claim.

You can also make a blank page rank #1 ... But off-page stuff e.g. Links ... Especially Link Anchors are parcelled with site architecture, and very powerful as well as content from other pages are equally part of site architecture.

Relatedness isn't simply tied to URL SLUGS.

When keywords stop working I will let you know.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Regarding the "event guide" thing, If I do a search here in the UK for the word "computer", Dell's website homepage features in fourth position but the word computer appears nowhere on the page. It's high position is clearly the result of links, not keywords. This does not mean that keywords don't matter. IMO it just means that links matter more.

[IanKelley]

The relevance of (many) links is going the way of keywords. They will always contribute something but the value is being progressively diluted.

Dell could be ranking for all kinds of reasons... lack of spam signals, hubs and authorities, content relevance (despite what some have implied, Google knows the page is about computers based on the content), user actions (i.e. frequently not returning and clicking another result, and much more if Dell runs an analytics snippet). There are all the more subtle metrics too, including the ones we don't know about.

[tangor]

The web is a huge messy place. Many of everything many times over. Yes, you can index it, but can you find value? Bing is making an effort in that regard, G, too, though still trying to be all things for everyone and .... beginning to show signs of bloat and arbitrary cuts. While keywords still have some value, there are so MANY out there the algo (my opinion) is getting confused from time to time. A little more human interaction is required and, sadly, that might not go well either.

[martinibuster]

I don't dispute the words don't appear on the page... That wasn't the thread claim.

Sorry, sorry, my bad.

The title of this discussion is not accurate. The initial post better describes my point. I'll clarify because this discussion is about more than url slugs, which I didn't have in mind at all. Please don't respond just to the title, there's more.

What I'm referring to is the strategy of architecting a website starting with keyword research, planning the content according to the highest ranked keywords and then peppering the web pages with those same keyword phrases.

Sorry for the confusion. That's why I said that the event guide search proves my point. The number one result does not feature the phrase Event Guide. There's been a major change and SEO has not responded to it.

There's been a lot of heavy breathing about entities but it's all been misguided by worrying how the Knowledge Graph box is going to replace the SERPs. The knowledge graph box was just the first baby step. The goal was always the integration of the knowledge graph data into how the SERPs look.

Given the fact of how the SERPs look, I am questioning the wisdom of strategizing strictly in terms of keywords when Google consistently ranks sites that do not even feature the entire keyword phrase. It's time to look elsewhere because the classic SEO strategy is threadbare, dusty and expired.

[Leosghost]

The goal of Google was always the integration of the knowledge graph in the SERPs .

FTFY :)

I've been seeing the knowledge graph a lot recently..apart from a thin blue line around it..it does not make any distinction between itself and the "organics"..but it is always at the top of them..right below the ads..looking just like a number one organic result..and incorporating so much of an answer to whatever was the query, that one has absolutely no need to click through to where it scraped the data from..

[fathom]

The Dell example has been that way since 2003... So Google was doing whatever back in 2003.

Bowing out of this discussion... I work within WHAT IS not what coulda, woulda, shoulda.

Until Google dumps PageRank nothing much will change IMHO.

[Kratos]

It's all about that PR brah (insert meme) Obtain massive PR juice by manipulating people, brah, and then channel that PR juice thru your navigation so as to tell Google what each page is about and how important it is according to its PR juice.

Just don't keyword stuff too much. And remember, Google is still a "silly" bot who needs guidance on how important your pages are so as to rank them.

It's all about dat tehre PR jusee brah (and channeling it, of course).

My three cents.

[Montresor]

It's all about that PR brah...

Five years ago. To use a phrase you used against someone else, "So you're a SEO, huh?"

They have this thing now, it's called Panda. It's been around for over five years. No matter how good your links are, Panda will take down your site. Those are my two cents. Add it to your three cents and you have a nickel. Enough to buy yourself a clue.

I read you're suffering from a negative SEO attack. "Should not you know already" that those who depend on links without tending their content will get hit by Panda?

[Kratos]

@Montresor You obviously haven't seen crap content ranking high from GSA blasts. Spun content is doing fine. Stolen content is doing fine. Panda isn't moving BH sites with manipulated links.

You've no clue, so take back your clue. About that site, read about it. Want me to show you the graphs how it did, kiddo? Do you know about the Polish PBN that was taken down by Google in Europe? We had a competitor blast Polish backlinks from that PBN at one of our pages. We fixed it with a 404. Three weeks later the rankings shoot up. Guess what? 404 does NOT pass PR so that neg SEO is nulled with a simple 404.

Panda will do nothing to sites with high quality backlinks. You've no clue about high competitive niches by the likes of your post and I cannot but feel pity for you with your post on Panda. It's all about PR; if you don't know about PR and flowing it thru site architecture then you're the noob here, which again, by the likes of your post, you really seem to be (or at least you have no idea of high competitive niches and industries).

Cheers.

P.S. If you want to talk about SEO, feel free to PM since you seem to be so interested in talking about stuff that you don't know much about.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

"P.S. If you want to talk about SEO, feel free to PM since you seem to be so interested in talking about stuff that you don't know much about. "

I can't help feeling that if I was as clued up about SEO as you profess to be then I would be too busy making myself ££££millions rather than wasting my time bragging about the size of my willy on forums like this. :)

[Leosghost]

BDW..I now have wine in my nose..thank you ;)).. cannie or cannae ..eh...I think we are agreed ;)

[seoskunk]

Its interesting that google themselves rarely offer good urls in youtube and google+, this indicates to me they see this as irrelevant, however there wrong, a good url is easier to share.

[Nutterum]

I wanted to refrain from posting in this thread because I have a very strong and subjective opinion on the matter.

But I will say this - some niches especially the non US and UK extension of Google are absolute gold mines for keyword focused website architectures. Most of all because they are more loosely monitored by Google and the advancements of the Knowledge Graph haven't hit home on these google domains yet.

If you are strictly talking US or UK or highly competitive global niches, then yes arranging a website from the vantage point of a single keyword or keyword phrase is a bad call to say the least.

[martinibuster]

I was right. I freaking told you. Keywords matter less. It's about concepts. Google just confessed they're rewriting search queries just as I described. Google calls it RankBrain [searchengineland.com].

I have read the Google research papers on this and calling it RankBrain is Google's way of hiding what is really going on.

[ogletree]

I have been seeing this and I'm sick of it. I don't know how smart this algo is. I think all it does is take a zillion searches and boil it down to a much smaller number of searches. The only problem is some of us know what we are searching for and don't want Google to rewrite our search. What I see most the time is that I do a very specific search that used to bring up good results but now brings up the more mainstream result completely unrelated to what I searched for. It is like Google used to play all kinds of music but only plays top 40 now.

Is there a way to get old Google and not let them do this?

[fathom]

So if Google is hiding what is really going on... Then surely you can't tell what is really going on, implying you can just as easily be wrong.

If you can't really use whatever as a competitive advantage then how precisely can you monetize on that understanding?

The coulda, woulda, shoulda approach isn't better it is just different.

I generally don't target phrases like: search engine optimization

I target search | engine | optimization and allow Google to mix & match whatever for a query like search marketing but not PPC optimization in Google's engine. If the page content also mentions Google, PPC & marketing all there is left are common words which suggest your page is extremely targeted by not targeting anything but words.

The premise of this thread discussed keywords in a relationship with site architecture.

My idea of site architecture isn't about single pages /keyword/index.php as I use /?p=123 but how all pages relate with all other pages and that is more about naming conventions.

[edited by: fathom at 7:22 pm (utc) on Oct 26, 2015]

[martinibuster]

So if Google is hiding what is really going on... Then surely you can't tell what is really going on,

No, no. Seems like every sentence I write needs three sentences of clarification for you, lol. The RankBrain name is deliberately vague so as to hide the function. It doesn't hint at the methodology. But if you read the article you will see that the claims of what it does matches what I described.

As for the premise of this post, please re-read my apology and explanation. When I posted Architecture I used Architecture the word in the sense of planning and creating, as in the creation of the site, not URL slugs. The proper title should be something like:

Time to Retire the Keyword From Content Creation

[fathom]

Ya ok, I now recall that part. This was more than a month ago.

[Robert Charlton]

New dedicated discussion about RankBrain here...

Google Search Powered by Artificial Intelligence, RankBrain
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4774728.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[IanKelley]

Is there a way to get old Google and not let them do this?

Not that I know of... but I find that creative use of quotes can sometimes get the results I'm looking for.

[Nutterum]

@martinibuster - You were/are correct in your assumptions. But I believe that there is still merit in keyword focused architecture. There is simply too much data and entire verticals and geo-targeted domains left to their own demise, ripe for such methods of website building. If you are speaking purely from a philosophical point of view, saying we need to change our thinking of how we should build website SEO wise, then I would completely agree. If you say we should cease and desist doing it since yesterday, I'd say no-way.

[martinibuster]

Absolutely, we should change the approach to building and optimizing a site. Of course we should, it's the proper response to how the search engines have changed how sites are ranked. I am proposing something called User Experience Marketing.

I'm not proposing being ignorant of what keywords are being used. But I do believe we should retire the practice of beginning and ending with keywords. That's a strategy for a search engine that no longer exists. In fact, that strategy was born before Google existed. Think about that.

I am saying we should step back and consider adding in thinking in terms of concepts and user experience to the way we create a site and individual pages.