Dr. Marie Haynes is widely regarded as a trailblazer in the SEO industry, leveraging her extensive expertise of over 10 years to help businesses of all scales enhance their website quality. Her contributions to industry-leading platforms like Moz.com and Search Engine Watch have established her as a thought leader, while her speaking engagements at esteemed conferences such as Pubcon and SMX further solidify her influential presence.
Marie’s expertise extends beyond conventional channels as she has been invited to present SEO insights at prominent events like BrightonSEO and has actively participated in webinars alongside renowned authorities in the field. Her articles on crucial topics like E-A-T and algorithm update analysis have even been cited by Google, reflecting the depth of her knowledge and credibility. With a keen eye on the future, Marie finds great enthusiasm in exploring the potential of AI and machine learning, eagerly anticipating the transformative impact these technologies will have on the SEO landscape.
Marie can be reached on Twitter @Marie_Haynes or via LinkedIn
Recent Shows with Marie Haynes
549 | Semantic Search Evolution with Marie HaynesInterview / podcastA Refresher on Eat and the Quality Raters Guidelines
Today on the EDGE, Erin sits down once again with Dr. Marie Haynes to discuss how semantic search has evolved and what the future may have in store for SEOs and webmasters.
Many Google algorithm updates are discussed from 10 years ago until today. They spend time discussing the impacts of Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E.A.T.), as well as the considerations associated with Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) and Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines. The algorithm updates mentioned above all help Google understand language better while defining online entities in it’s Knowledge Graph.
Dr. Marie Haynes has over 10 years in the SEO trenches and frequently speaks at industry conferences. In addition, she contributes to many SEO publications. Marie is the founder and President of Marie Haynes Consulting.
Key Segments:
Choppy Waves in the SEO Industry
An Overview of the Quality Raters Guidelines
Your Money or Your Life
Algorithms and Machine Learning
Feeding the Machine Learning Beast
News, Disinformation and Political Subjects
Entity Space of SEO – Understanding Language
Structured Data and Unstructured Data
Original Reporting, Information, Analysis and Content.
Quality Raters Guidelines Book and Newsletter
Final Thoughts [...]
November 30, 2022- 547 | Recovering from Algorithm Update Effects with Marie HaynesInterview / podcastTracking Google Updates Galore
Dr. Marie Haynes shares her thoughts and insights on the EDGE by looking at the plethora of Google algorithm updates this year. 2022 has seen its fair share of volatility in the SERPs. In addition, she explores ways to identify and track the impacts of algorithm updates on a website while pointing out many of the culprits responsible for misleading false positives which may be wrongfully associated with an update.
With over 10 years of SEO experience, she’s a regular speaker at MozCon, Pubcon, SMX, and Brighton SEO, and a frequent contributor to many industry publications. She’s the owner and President of Marie Haynes Consulting. Additionally, Dr. Marie Haynes is the host of one of the top SEO podcasts, Search News You Can Use.
Time to dive into Google algorithm updates… on the EDGE!
Key Segments:
Introducing Dr. Marie Haynes
Highest Levels of Continued Rank Volatility
Should We Be Focused On Traffic?
Product Review and Core Updates
The Compounding Impacts of Multiple Updates and Diagnoses
Gross Traffic vs. Individual Page Traffic
Transactional vs. Informative Content
Old School SEO
Intent and Relevancy
The Helpful Content Update, Knowledge Graph and Snippets
Not All Traffic Changes Are From Algorithm Updates
MobileMoxie Tracks Historical SERP Snippets
The Apocalypse!
Questions, Questions and More Questions
External Evidence
AI Content Is Likely Algorithmically Identifiable
Dr. Marie Haynes’ SEO Podcast
https://www.mariehaynes.com/seo-newsletter/seo-podcast/ [...]
November 22, 2022
- EP 324: What is Google E-A-Ting? – Interview with Marie HaynespodcastGoogle is constantly coming out with small and core algorithm updates, forcing digital marketers to continuously work on providing top-notch content that develops expertise, authoritativeness, and trust! So what exactly is Google E-A-Ting? Find out everything you need to know from Marie Haynes, Owner of Marie Haynes Consulting Inc., who has been completely obsessed with understanding Google Algorithms! You won’t find someone who knows more about Google’s E-A-T standards and algorithm updates, so tune in to episode 324 of the EDGE of the Web podcast to get the inside scoop on what Google is E-A-Ting! [...]
September 6, 2019
- Making Sense of Google’s Focus on E-A-T with Marie HaynesInterviewEDGE host Erin Sparks and Creative Studio Producer Jacob Mann spoke with SEO expert Marie Haynes of Marie Haynes Consulting in EDGE of the Web Episode 324 to find out ???. Here’s what we learned:
00:20:26
How a Page’s Intention Plays Into EAT and Ranking
Google wants to see websites and pages with content that show expertise, authoritativeness, and trust because it wants people to feel confident they are getting the best search results from Google. Sites with information that can really impact people’s lives in terms of health and finances are getting more scrutiny than ever. And part of what Google’s looking at is a page’s intention.
Google uses real human Quality Raters to help determine how well the algorithms are working. And it teaches people how to do quality ratings in its Google Quality Raters Guidelines, which is a document that anyone can look at, with the most recent update having come out on September 5th, 2019 (see the full document here). One of the first things the raters are supposed to look at is determining a page’s intention. If Google decides the purpose of your page is to sell a product, then it’s going to hold that page to a higher standard because people’s money is at stake. If WebMD has information about a product and it’s also not trying to sell that product, then Google is going to trust its information more than your page that is trying to sell the product and not just provides information about it.
One way to characterize a shift that has happened in SEO is that you can’t just build pages for Google. You have to build pages for the people who use Google, with content people can trust is good.
00:24:13
Is Google Becoming the Final Arbiter of Truth?
The problem, of course, is that Google isn’t necessarily always good at what it’s trying to do. This is especially true when a new core update comes out. A lot of the sites that took big hits from the June 3rd update were really good sites. Marie looked at some of them and couldn’t see anything that would obviously lead to a drop. It all looked trustworthy. This is what makes people nervous because it seems like Google is deciding what’s true and what’s not, and it’s not always clear how that’s happening. People just have to trust that Google has a system in place that will continue to improve what it’s doing. But it’s that idea that totally legitimate information might not be coming up in search results that keeps some SEO practitioners up at night.
It’s especially frustrating for Marie because one of the reasons she built a veterinarian website years ago was because people would come to her and say things like, “I saw on the internet that I could treat my dog’s fleas by giving the dog garlic.” But garlic is actually toxic to a dog’s red blood cells. She got involved in SEO because of the misinformation problem on the web. Now imagine you’re Google – you’re the company feeding this information up to people, and it could actually harm them! You can see why Google wants to get this right and has to keep changing its algorithms to get better at weeding out bad information by demoting it. Yes, Google wants to make lots of money, but they also want to help people by showing them search results they can trust. In that sense, just painting Google as the enemy in all of this is the easy way out.
00:31:12
The Dark Side of SEO
There’s very little that bugs Marie Haynes about SEO as an industry. Overall it’s a really wonderful community of people, and everyone’s trying to do their best. But there’s still a good deal of unhelpful complaining that goes on. For example, when Google recently published a blog article all about EAT, and it linked out to several different SEO sites that had published really good content about EAT, and one of those sites happened to be Marie’s site. Unfortunately, many SEO practitioners were miffed that some got the nod from Google and they didn’t. That sort of pettiness isn’t good for anyone, but it’s also understandable on some level. There is still progress to be made in having SEOs feel more solidarity than competitiveness, to engage in a more open dialog to benefit everyone, to post more about experiments without your fellow SEOs being so critical of each other.
Marie also thinks the changes in SEO that have happened in recent years are good for the industry. There was a time when SEOs could take just about any business and make them money just by performing relatively simple SEO tactics. As Google has developed its algorithms, though, the jig is up. You can’t survive just on SEO tricks alone. Google can see through the tricks and will penalize you for them. Nowadays it takes real work, quality work, to be a successful SEO on behalf of clients.
Connect with Dr. Marie Haynes
Twitter: @Marie_Haynes (https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes)
Facebook: @MarieHaynesConsulting (https://www.facebook.com/MarieHaynesConsultingInc)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marie-haynes-consulting-inc/
Website: https://www.mariehaynes.com
Blog: https://www.mariehaynes.com/blog/
Newsletter (Search News You Can Use): https://www.mariehaynes.com/newsletter
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September 6, 2019
- Whether, When and How to Use the Disavow Tool with Marie HaynesInterviewEDGE hosts Erin Sparks (Site Strategics CEO) and Tom Brodbeck (Site Strategics Digital Media Director) spoke with SEO expert Marie Haynes of Marie Haynes Consulting in EDGE of the Web Episode 302 to find out whether or not the disavow tool is something that should still be actively used. Here’s what we learned:
A Brief History of the Disavow Tool
When the Penguin update first came out in 2012 it was meant to address link quality. Google was trying to prevent people from working their way to the top of SERPs just by building their own links. Links have been important to the Google algorithm because when someone links to your site, it’s seen as a recommendation for your site. But if you create your own links and recommendations, why should Google count those, right? Those self-built links don’t really mean your site is better. Then in late 2012 Google rolled out the disavow tool. It was a way for site owners to look at links to their site to figure out which ones might be seen by Google as untrustworthy or of low quality, put them in a text file and upload them to Google search console as a heads up to Google that you want to disavow those links so they won’t count against you.
In their site assessments and link audits, Marie’s company found they were able to help some sites recover from the big hit they took from the Penguin update by using the disavow tool. Then in 2016 Google came out with Penguin 4.0, which many were anxiously awaiting because they were stuck with suppressed rankings and couldn’t get out of it until a new Penguin was rolled out. With Penguin 4.0, Google said it would no longer “demote” websites because it could now tell which links are “unnatural” and could just automatically ignore them. And it seemed to be working really well, which raised the further question of whether or not the disavow tool had been rendered obsolete. And this is important because doing link audits and disavow work really takes a professional who knows what they’re doing, and that can be expensive.
Why and When the Disavow Tool Should Still be Used
For a while, if you asked Google whether or not the disavow tool was still relevant from an algorithmic standpoint, they would offer up coy answers like, “Use it if it makes you feel better,” which is just a PR kind of answer. But more recent conversations with Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller have revealed how the disavow tool is till useful. One reason is to avoid potential manual actions from the Google Web Spam team, which can really decimate a website in a way from which it’s hard to recover. If your site has a lot of unnatural links you don’t want the Web Spam team to see, perhaps because you’ve done a lot of paid links or large-scale article marketing with a lot of keyword anchors, then yes, you should definitely disavow those links to avoid a manual action. From an algorithmic standpoint, the disavow tool is also still useful because Mueller said there are algorithms besides Penguin that play into this. If those algorithms decide that some of the links pointing to your website are untrustworthy, then it’s going to put less trust in all of your links.
Keep in mind that most sites won’t need to use the disavow tool. If you examine the links to your site and they’re clearly very “spammy” links from spammy sites, Google is going to easily see those are the “unnatural” links every and will automatically ignore them. The sites that need to use the disavow tool are those that have a lot of links made for SEO purposes and that don’t have much value outside of their SEO value, meaning PBNs (private blog networks) or articles on article-marketing sites that no one is ever actually going to read, then disavowing could have good results. But one of the problems here is that people who aren’t experts tend to be really bad at using the disavow tool. They end up disavowing sites that shouldn’t be disavowed and miss disavowing the worst sites and even disavow their own websites by mistake. As Mueller puts it, if there is a tool that can tell which sites you should disavow, then Google is probably already ignoring them. The tools like Domain Authority can’t really tell you which sites to disavow anymore. The new defining criterion Marie uses is this: Was the link made with the intention to manipulate rankings. If so, it should be actively disavowed, like the article marketing and the way overdone guest blog posts and so forth. And Google has provided lots of examples of what it considers to be an unnatural link. There’s more nuance to the process of disavowing than before.
What bugs Marie most about her industry is misinformation and how hard it is to share information about theories. If you try to say what you think is happening with something like EAT, you get a lot of negative feedback, which then makes people reluctant to share. But because SEO is a constantly-changing landscape everyone is trying to figure out as they go, it’s essential to have those conversations about thoughts and theories, as long as it happens within a framework that recognizes it’s all based on thoughts and theories, not proven facts. But people are afraid to have the conversation at all, and that’s unfortunate.
Conversely, what’s exciting about the industry is the opportunities that exist for true SEO experts. You’d be shocked at how many agencies are charging good money for totally outdated SEO techniques, like directory submissions and so forth. But if you take a well-reasoned, thoughtful approach based on keeping up with developments at Google, the opportunities are rich.
Connect with Dr. Marie Haynes
Twitter: @Marie_Haynes (https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes)
Facebook: @MarieHaynesConsulting (https://www.facebook.com/MarieHaynesConsultingInc)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marie-haynes-consulting-inc/
Website: https://www.mariehaynes.com
Blog: https://www.mariehaynes.com/blog/
Search News You Can Use: https://courses.mariehaynes.com/search-news-you-can-use
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February 19, 2019
- EP 302: Learning from Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines w/Marie HaynespodcastLast year, Google updated its Quality Rater Guidelines – what changed and what lessons are there to learn from this update?
Marie Haynes, the owner of Marie Haynes Consulting, Inc., joins us on the show this week as she and her team have dove into this 160+ page document to see what changes SEOs and webmasters can glean from it.
The most important feature of the guidelines seems to focus around E-A-T which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Several of Google’s recent updates have focused on this topic, so it makes it really important for us to focus on this subject!
Also, Marie Haynes has spent a lot of time discussing the value of Google’s Disavow Tool. Is this tool something we should still be using regularly or is it an outdated tool after Penguin 4.0?
Let’s cover all these topics and more, today on the EDGE.
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February 19, 2019
