finally it's time for my favorite audit which is that something goes wrong audit inevitably if you work in S. C. O. Long enough you're going to encounter a website, a client, a company that lost rankings suddenly maybe overnight. And they're looking for your help to figure out why it happened. And there are three scenarios in which they happened. I'm going to show you my process for figuring out No one. pretty straightforward. There's an algorithmic update and maybe a bunch of sites in your vertical got affected, went up, went down, who knows? And the way to figure that out is first just google the google algorithmic update in the month or go to MAS search engine, land search engine Journal and you'll probably see a lot of chatter people talking about it the next way you can figure this out is if a whole bunch of websites in your vertical that your competitors essentially if they also went up and down and rank. So if you're not alone in the rankings drop and it's probably an algorithm ...

update and there's less you can do about that as an individual website. The second way that things go wrong is you know, make a slight change in the code that breaks your ranking somehow or breaks a page. Maybe you accidentally no index a whole bunch of pages. And what I do to figure that out besides doing a basic technical seO audit like we showed in the past which keeps track of changes like to title tags and meta tags over time. So I also will check the html code that before and after the event and the way I do that is if you have S C O radar and content King, they will automatically do that for you and send you an alert if something changes. But if you don't you can use this thing called the way back machine and it's possible that they've taken a snapshot of your website or page before the event and after. So the way to use this is just first by going to google the way back machine, click on the result, then you get brought to a page like this where you enter in your your l as you see here this, you're all that. I have entered our strep throat. Your l It has pictures of this. URL snapshots going all the way back to 2016. So if we lost rankings in 2018, I can pick a point in 2017, maybe just before or a while before and then look at a point afterwards, maybe later in 2018, and see what the differences in code and copy and everything like that. So you just click on a result and you can just see all the changes And you can see this is this is 2019. But if we clicked in early 2016, you see a very different site and that's how I figure out if there's any technical changes that may have caused problems for rankings. Now. The final step is what we're going to focus on for this chapter, which is how to do a link audit to figure out if you got a link penalty. So the first thing to note is you may or may not get an alert in google search council and if you do just check that first, they give you examples of the links in question and then you can try to disavow them. But if you don't get an alert and you're not sure what are the spammy links in question. Here's my process of figuring out what are the spammy links using sem rush and a a trips. So first with some brush, you go to the back link audit section, you first have to run a side audit. Then you have access to this back link audit. And then they do a great job of giving you all this context here. So they check all the links that link to your site, What they found with their crawler. They give them a score between zero and 160- being really toxic. 45-59 being sort of toxic. And then they have this nice ui where you can decide if this is a toxic link or not that you want to keep or if it's one that you want to add to your disavow file. The disavowal file is a file that you used to tell. Google which links should not be a part of your link index or your link profile. And I highly recommend that you disavow at the domain level rather than the U R L level. That's because google may find a couple of links from a domain but it may not find all of the links. So if you have one spammy site linking to you in 1000 links, you don't want to add each of those links as an individual. You are all, you should just go ahead and block the whole domain and so they make this uI very easy where you can just go through every link, review them manually because again, this is just a metric they use. So there could be some noise in here, some good euros in here and then add them to the Disavowal file and then it prints out a disavowal file that you can then upload to google. I put a link on how you can do this pretty straightforward, but you follow that video and we'll show you how to do it. Note that adding a link to disavow file, you can un disavow things. Um so if you accidentally add a really good link to disavow file, you can un disavow it and there have been many studies that people have run where they've disavowed good links and lost rank and un disavowed links and those rankings have come back, but nothing is perfect. There's no perfect system. So just be very careful when you do this process. And HFS also allows you to do this, but the process is really different. They don't have a spam score per se, but you can go through every link in the back list and manually review if it looks spammy or not. So Wikipedia doesn't seem spammy medical daily. That seems relatively fine. This is parameters here. It's probably part of an affiliate campaign. Okay. Site google. This is just regular link that most sites have these foreign links. I don't know. You might want to go review them, but you can review every link manually, you can filter by domain authority. So this is your authority and domain authority. We can filter for low domain authority and they may have a higher likelihood of being spammy. So this is a blog spot. It's fine squarespace learn math dot net doesn't seem to have anything to do with our site and I don't know how we're linking to this. So this might be something that would appear in our spam in our disavowed file. You can go through that way. Another thing to look at here is you can look at links by anchor text. So if I go back to the main page. So here are all the links that we have, here's health lines, anchor text And so they have 25% of their links have the exact match anchor text strep throat. It's possible that that could be too many um that could get them in the penalty. Now that we know they rank really well. So I'm gonna assume that this is not a problem for them. And probably if we look at similarly ranked pages, they also have a high percentage of exact match anchor text with strep throat. Let's check out ours actually real quick. Okay, kids health, They have 38%. So let's say, we looked at the the average domains ranking in the top 10 for strep throat and they all had This percentage 25%, then it's possible we should try to reduce that amount. If we had a penalty, we should reduce our amount from 38 to 25 and see if that gets us out of the penalty. It's a test worthy of trying and so that's how I'll use h refs to come up with you or else to add to our disavow file as a test

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The -Oops Something Happened- Audit

The -Oops Something Happened- Audit

Lesson Info

29. The -Oops Something Happened- Audit

Lessons

Intro- Course Overview

What is a Search Engine, and how do they work

What Kind of Work do SEO Practitioners Do

Popular Tools for SEO

The Evolution of Google's Algo

Quiz: Chapter 2: SEO 101

Analysis Introduction

Reporting your Findings

Checking Google's Index

Checking Google Search Console

Setting up Crawler Tools

Interpreting Crawler Tool Reports

Interpreting Page Speed Tool Reports

Checking Schema Markup

Quiz: Chapter 3: Technical Analysis

Content Audit - Introduction

Basic Keyword Research

How to Determine What Type of Content You Should Create

Qualitative Content Audit

How to Take Your Content Inventory

Reviewing site Architecture

Keyword Optimization

Keyword Gap Analysis

Keyword Opportunity Sizing

Quiz: Chapter 4: Content Audit

Competitive Link Audit

How to Find Short Term Opportunities

How to Check if a Domain Link is High Quality