Mordy Oberstein, the Chief Marketing Officer at RankRanger, came to my hotel in Jerusalem to talk SEO. RankRanger is a toolset I reference a lot here around Google algorithm updates and tracking changes with Google. He started in SEO about 4-5 years ago and has really been instrumental recently in the SEO industry.
He is actually a former teacher and it has helped him a lot carve his niche into the industry. He tries to portray what he calls “search philosophy” into the industry through his writing and podcasting.
Google algorithm updates is a topic we both are pretty passionate about. RankRanger has a great tool for tracking updates and feature changes, you can see them at rankranger.com/rank-risk-index.
Mordy explained that you can learn a lot about how to write good quality content from the meanings these Google algorithm updates. He explained that Google is hyped up around entities and your site is an entity. He said a lot of sites getting hit during the Medic update had a lot of call to actions and banner ads. Google is asking the site, what is your identity of your site and if your core entity is about X, but you are saying your site is about Y, it can cause issues for your rankings in Google.
Featured snippets in Google is a hot topic and has been for a few years. He explained that featured snippets can be good but in some cases, it can be bad and a waste of time. He also said that list featured snippets are getting longer and paragraph featured snippets are getting shorter. Google is getting better are parsing out the information needed in the featured snippet. FYI, this interview was done before the featured snippet deduplication, by the way. So if featured snippets have fewer clicks than other snippets, that may have changed now.
You can learn more about Mordy at rankranger.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @mordyoberstein.
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