Ep 066 We Are Back

Theory of Content

After a long – and we mean LONG – hiatus (sorry loyal listeners), Theory of Content is back and better than ever! Joshua Unseth is joined once again by Rebecca Swanner, the owner of Let’s Eat Cake, to answer all your burning mailbag questions.

Joshua begins the episode with an apology and an explanation. 2020 was a wild year and life got in the way of creating new TOC content after August. Joshua walks Rebecca through his hectic year. He begins with his fast-planned wedding that was organized in September and took place in October. Next, he recounts the many times he found himself having to quarantine due to COVID exposure, and how frustrating all of that was.

This conversation leads the hosts to talk about blogging in the age of COVID. They explain why it presents a good opportunity to focus on building traffic for the site instead of focusing on revenue gains. Ad revenue is at a low right now (COVID + Q1 payouts = no good). Bloggers should focus their attention on building traffic, so that when COVID is hopefully over by Q3 or Q4 of 2021, they can monetize their newly grown audience. This is a good practice in general, building traffic before monetization, because advertising can anger the audience and it won’t lead to substantial profit until there is a substantial audience.

Mailbag begins with a question about using the same video clips in multiple videos on Youtube. Joshua instantly recommends the tool Tube Buddy. Tube Buddy is essentially an SEO tool that specifically helps with Youtube video rankings on Google and within the app itself. The hosts also point out that if you enable closed captioning, Google will be able to crawl a Youtube video as though it were a blog post. This can help push your videos to the top of Google, if they are SEO optimized. This also allows bloggers to reuse video clips in multiple videos. As long as you change the audio and closed captioning over the clip, Google will read the video as new content.

The last mailbag question is about what to do when an alternate dev page blocks Google from indexing cornerstone content from your site. Joshua offers a tip to help bloggers identify issues like this. If you perform a Google search query on your site, you will be able to tell every place in the domain that a certain word or phrase is used. Rebecca adds that this can be beneficial for internal linking. The fix to the initial issue lies in the robots.txt file, which can easily be accessed on WordPress sites. This file tells web crawlers which pages to crawl and which not to crawl. If the dev site is marked as “uncrawlable” in the robots.txt file, the page you wish to be crawled should take priority. Expanding on SEO optimization, Joshua makes one last closing statement. He tells listeners to not get caught up in diagnostic tools and trying to fix every page on your site. Like Rebecca says, focus on making new content.

Thank you for tuning into Theory of Content in the new year! Be on the lookout for new episodes soon, 2021 is the year to make your blogs the best they can be!

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Facebage 1: Ellen McLean – artsyprettyplants.com

I’ve become pretty addicted to this great podcast. I didn’t hear anything about the podcast being on hiatus. Does anyone know when we can expect it to come back? I think the last episode they have is late August.

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Facebag: Jessica Anderson – www.cutesycrafts.com

Hi Theory of Content!

Just finished listening episode 51, where you asked for YouTube questions. You’ve inspired me to start putting my face in videos and not just my hands. I think the combination of having to change up camera angles and do my hair and makeup for the day as been the drawback for me (boys have it so easy!)

Anyway… I make craft and embroidery tutorials on my blog and YouTube channel, Cutesy Crafts. I really started having success on YouTube when I posted embroidery stitch-alongs, where I would show each step of how to do an embroidery project in a separate video and compile them into playlists. In each video, I show the finished piece, talk about which part we’re working on, and then show how to do the stitch. I have moved away from these, as I feel they aren’t very good for SEO. There are only so many embroidery stitches that make up each project, and I was teaching the same stitches over and over again. In fact, when it got to the stitching part in a couple videos, I just stated cutting in old video footage of me doing that stitch (example: https://youtu.be/wm9MXRaoQ4k). I’ve had a few subscribers ask for more like those, but I’m wondering if it would hurt me to have several videos with similar titles and content, especially if they have old video footage cut in. New, different kinds of content do MUCH better in search, but I want to keep my subscribers happy too.

Also, I went to a YouTube class about a year ago, and the presenter said that YouTube looks at how many views you get immediately after uploading a video, so you should never upload a video unless you are ready to publish immediately. Along the same lines, she said if you ever change the title or words in the description of a video, that ranking kind of resets and you lose any momentum that the video had. This seemed kind of like superstition to me, but I wanted to see if there was any truth to it. I’m planning on going back and adding more information and links to my video descriptions. I won’t be changing titles or words in the first paragraphs of my successful videos, just adding more information below. I’m guessing that it’s the same as a blog post and if it’s ranking well, I shouldn’t try to fix it.

Thank you for all of the work you do! I’ve seen tremendous success implementing your strategies on my blog.

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Facebook 2: Jim from http://destination-bbq.com/

New ToC listener. Binging now…great show. Has me looking at GSC. Noticed a page which I consider “cornerstone content” that is not indexed by Google. (https://destination-bbq.com/sc-bbq-hash). Initially, the error mentioned it wasn’t indexed because of a page redirect. I requested indexing. Today, it is not indexed not because of an error, but because of “Alternate page with proper canonical tag.” I don’t know where an alternate page would be and the page doesn’t seem to rank. Looking further, I see that 12k posts are excluded for similar reason. I assume most of them are appropriately marked? However, what do you do for those like this which should not be excluded?

He followed up a few days later with the following email:

Follow up:

So, it looks like https://destination-bbq.com/sc-bbq-hash/ is the indexed page…with the / at the end. Not without.

Guess I didn’t realize there was a distinction.

Also, testing in Moz, I got this message, which confirms the original “page redirect” message:

You entered the URL https://destination-bbq.com/sc-bbq-hash which redirects to destination-bbq.com/sc-bbq-hash/. Click here to analyze destination-bbq.com/sc-bbq-hash/instead.

So, 1) why the redirect in the first place, and 2) why is such a comprehensive piece on the subject not in — at least — the first 11 pages of Google using sc bbq hash as the search term?

TIA

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