July 05, 2021

Revamp your Old Blog for 2021

I want to have AdSense (again) on my old BlogSpot blogs. The times when you just had to place the widget are gone. Now Google does not anymore automatically fill it. Why? The times of in-built PageRank, when Google preferred their own blogs slightly over other publications are gone as well. 

A blog must fill very strict and hard criteria now to even get (re-) indexed on Google. Mine were not. I found out only after wondering for a long time. First, I was told on the dashboard "something" had to be done to be ready for AdSense. Scanning over Google's Publisher Policies I saw clearly: Of course legal pages are a must. 

Since my article is going to be well over 2300 words, I'd better insert: "Please Bookmark my Article, and be sure to come back to read on you stopped 😊 Maybe I forgot something and you have a question? Please leave a comment!"

OK, OK, done the legals... (and here too improvements are needed). Only strictly private blogs don't need legal pages, but as soon as you put anything on to monetize a blog, you are seen as a company and your website must meet the 

  • Imprint and Contact (I better call it both, because I'm German, and the DSGVO requires the word "Impressum" to be seen on every page and reachable below 3 clicks. 
  • Privacy Policy -mainly about which personal data are collected from visitors, how we, the webmasters, use and protect those.
  • Cooky Policy - personal data of visitors are usually collected using cookies, but basically the same as above.
  • GDPR / DSGVO compliancy together with
  • the obnoxious Cookie Opt-In Banner and I'm really excited when reading just now, that Google will come up with a new solution for Blogspot. It sits in the news below the AdSense statistics, and I must read about it as soon as possible. 
  • Disclaimers and TOs - well, this is not a Web-Shop, so it may be neglected a bit (I hope) - unless you are blogging about anything health- or law-related (oO...). 
  • Affiliate Disclosure - Any advertising must be clearly declared as such. Affiliate-Links inside content are a bit difficult to mark. So today most bloggers I visited came to the solution to mark them with asterisks, and I will do it too (*--*) also the affiliate disclosure in my new WP blog will be put in a widget in the sidebar, linking to my affiliate-disclosure page. 
  • On a blog about Online Home Business, this means beating three birds with one stone, lol. (if you want to see more please return when I'm finished revamping this blog 😊 
  • An SSL Certificate - No need to bother about this on Blogspot - but check the Settings if you haven't yet: Your URL must start with HTTPS! A blogger can simply switch this on. But new Webmasters should pay attention, that their Host has included an SLL Certificate with every Domain that is registered or hosted with them. Otherwise, the website is not considered secure, which among general trust will prevent AdSense and influence Ranking negatively. 
  • Copyrights - a huge subject on its own. Most important in short: Pictures - whether required or not, if you use free stock photos, better always imply an attribution in the caption below. Also when you buy a license - one never knows... Read the Terms and Conditions of the distributor to make sure commercial use is really really allowed and how far. And protect your own Site as a whole against copyright infringement. Therefore it is often recommended (though legally required only for shops /sales pages) to have Terms and Conditions besides Disclaimers on your Site, if only for copyrights and spam protection.

Why Is my Blog Still Rejected for AdSense?

Changes over changes going on inside Google, and of course not fast and stringent due to Corona. A webmaster must have a lot of patience, even with a giant like Google. The next complaint - without further explanation - was "Thin Content". In the Google AdSense Help Forum, I only found out that everyone else was like "WTF??" just like me.

Then, finally using the Webmaster Tools, the first problem I detected was: Only the Title, meaning not even the whole Startpage obviously was indexed on Google! After nothing but "Eeeek!" I went into detail: What Is Required to Get a Blog re-Listed with Google?

The New Requirements a Blog (orWebsite) Must Meet in 2021 to Get Indexed and Listed By Google

We must work hard nowadays to catch up with Google's steadily changing algorithms. I always try since my return to the net, but I am not a qualified SEO person and can't present a list here, and sorry, not even any links to any sites I read. I just googled the most pressing questions I had and found some answers, which I can report here. What I still don't know: 

Why Are My Blogs Not Indexed On Google anymore??

Well, first I came across Google Analytics implication, and learned, that without Analytics, you can't have Adsense. I didn't get around this stuff being ten times more complicated now, and I think I claimed this blog here twice for Analytics by accident. In the Settings of New Templates, you can insert this Analytics Code, Starting with UA. But the new Analytics has no UA anymore. So I was unsure if the new number worked. - And of course, no way to find anything about this in the Support. 

Well, now this is done, and my blog is slowly getting re-indexed. But this is only for statistics and AdSense and does not refer to websites in general. A Website does not generally have to use Google Analytics to get indexed. 

I'd still like to find an answer to my question. Does Anyone Know about a Google-Slap against their own blogs? Or am I the only one who happened to find this out? It sure would be paranoid to think it was only me, so...  

I was really shocked by my findings and am still a bit afraid that Google is going to dump Blogspot after all. I have lost so much content before - some of which I was happy to find with the Way Back Machine - more about this later, in the very first post, Google found here, much to my dismay, as that post about "Multiply" is really redundant since the platform closed.

But back to the subject of this chapter: The New SEO- and Content Requirements for Blogs

Content still is King. Fresh Content, Unique Content, Keywords, - anything SEO we still know is still valid so far. What has changed drastically is: 

A Blog Post must contain at least a thousand words to get indexed. 

Longer content is considered more valuable, giving more complete information on the chosen keyword subject. (I should do this here too, but this post here is more a warning than an instruction for seasoned bloggers and content marketers and the only precise tip I can give here is: do what I did and find precise information by SEO bloggers on how long a blog post should be on Google. In this here more involuntary written post I can only promise to insert my resources later, when or if I find them again :-( But then, I know what I wanted to know, and can tell you the most important stuff I needed to know for me.)

The average post length for well-positioned blogs is reported to be 1600 words. So the hard-to-explain difference between blog posts is no longer relevant. Forget last year's assumption about 500 words or "as long as it needs to be". In my eyes, 1000 words is much too long for anyone to read. But SEO experts say no, and scientific explanations about readers' attention span require at least one or two own articles in the category of online marketing. 

A blog should contain exclusively veritable Articles 

So forget everything you know about blogging and its beginnings. It's no longer a casual conversation with your readers. Veto here: this can be combined. I don't have the time to learn how to write articles - in two languages even, and I must hope I can still rely on what I learned in school 50 years ago. 

That means for me as a content marketer (is the word "Infopreneur" still used?) and a blogger: blog like you always did for promotion, get more into depth and consider some SEO principles stronger, make it at least 1000 words, but still without the fluff. About style, I trust my "All in One SEO Plugin" in WordPress, which scolds me when I have too large Paragrps, over 300 words without Subheadings, too much or too little passive voice (?), and go for 100 words - when you do, it somehow always goes for over the goal automatically.

Other Not Unimportant Stuff 

While I'm on the subject of SEO, articles, style, and keywords...

LSI - Latent Semantic Index(ing) Keywords

I just found a free tool   https://lsigraph.com/      this helps to find LSI keywords. 

"LSI Keywords are keywords that are semantically linked to a target keyword or a search query. It helps search engines to thoroughly understand the topic of a piece of web content.

In SEO context, LSI keywords are keywords that we should be using in our content to help search engines understand our content deeply, leading to higher ranking potential."

For example, Keyword is "bank" Google spiders look for LSI keywords like "sit" as opposed to something like "deposit" to find out which kind of bank the text is about. This is a new AI trick the search engine spiders have now and for ranking as important as the keywords themselves. 

Finally, I found a practical Thesaurus: https://www.wordreference.com/ (Guess synonyms are LSI keywords too) 

Thorough Researches on the Subject of Each Article

Do better than I demonstrated above, lol, each article should be planned. If you think you know enough about your subject, ok, just write. But if it contains any knowledge from recent researches, have the sources at hand. From now on, I will organize it this way: 

I open a new Word document - copy and paste the URL of any page you find interesting, a must if you find something you can cite anyways. (And citations are content, words that count if you struggle with the count f them, lol. Although, they are valid outbound links, which Google likes.) Needless to say: don't overdo it, 'cause the whole thing has to be your own unique content. 

But the required length comes from the wish for in-depth information which google assumes the reader has. So don't hesitate to show you did research and give your reader the chance to more information via the links. (Don't worry, up to now you are not required to link to your competitors - just you may not steal their content. That might get you sued. 

Perfect Spelling and Grammar

(Just for the sake of completeness in this probably far from complete listing) I use "Grammarly" for spellcheck (to find and correct my 1000 typos and the occasional wrong comma). I don't pay for it to correct my grammar. If my A grades for Languages have worn out - who cares? The point is readability.

Normally, I still write right into the CMS (means on the blog). Maybe, with the (superfluous, annoying) word-counting I will change to Word documents. Caution! once more: A Word- or Open/Libre Office Document must not be copied and pasted directly to a CMS, because docs have their own heavy formatting, which might not look nice online, but especially will prevent the ranking factor Loading Speed. So before it goes to the blog, can be copied and pasted to a simple text file first, and then to the blog.

Conclusion

Before you revamp your blog check if it isn't maybe de-indexed by Google, not the Startpage, but any random post. Getting familiar with the new functions of the Google Webmaster tools is a good idea in any case.

Feed "King Content" fat, but only with useful content. 

Read about SEO whenever you find a bit of time.

Know about the official and unofficial ranking factors like 

SSL on

Page Speed - Not much you can do about that here except adding the Load Lazy property to pictures (yes, I also have to google every time to get the correct codes I must insert in the HTML 😧 but what should be has to be... ). And while you are looking at the HTML, check if it is clean (especially old posts tend old tend to be odd with hundreds of superfluous spans and such, and because the mistakes did not show in red. )

Keywords with Pictures - a picture should have a descriptive name before upload (oO), title- and alt-tags, the mentioned load lazy attribute, a caption, if it comes in handy.

Mobile Friendliness - I did get a new theme instead of the traditional one when they came out and wondered where they had gone... Now I see: I need a new theme again, my current one is Not Mobile Friendly. Please, someone, tell me, where I find the best (free) Blogger templates! 

(Download a Backup! - this has nothing to do with SEO and Ranking, but better is better.)

Neither Advertisements Nor Affiliate-Links should Harm your SEO - of course Banner- and Link-Farms still do, as before. By law, the reader must clearly be told what is advertising and which content is sponsored. 

Wished, I could say "Check my exemplary legal pages", but I did them hush hush and must work them over, and copy and add them all to each of my blogs... - right after I found a new template.

Since now I am over 2300 words: "Please Bookmark my Article, and be sure to come back to read on you stopped 😊 Maybe I forgot something and you have a question? Please leave a comment!" 

Hoping to see you later

Neila~Sabine R.

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