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When sitting down to plan an SEO campaign, a business owner might be inundated with technical jargon that does more to confuse than clarify. In our experience, some people use this technical jargon because it confuses people and dissuades them from asking questions. One such question is, “What is the difference between keywords and topics?”

When discussing SEO, it is common for “keywords” and “topics” to be used almost interchangeably in conversations about planning a campaign. But they are not interchangeable terms.

Defined simply, a “topic” is the subject matter you want a site to rank for, and a “keywords” is something a user would search for to find content related to that subject matter. One way to approach it is to use a taxonomy tree:

Let us assume you have a website where the overarching theme is “transportation.” You want to discuss vehicles. Transportation qualifies as a topic, as does Vehicles. Underneath vehicles, you might have shared vehicles like planes and ferries, personal vehicles like cars and bicycles, and cargo vehicles like trains and trucks. You could draw the line here, and you could say “cars” are a keyword under the subtopic of Vehicles, which is under the broader topic of Transportation. Perhaps you do, but your website is going to have a very difficult time trying to rank for “cars” and “bicycles” as terms in their own right without more.

And that more comes from keywords about what essentially are the sub-subtopics of “cars” and “bicycles.” Particular brands of these, safety tips, tutorials on how to maintain or use them, uses, descriptors, and more all might be keywords related to the bigger sub-subtopic.

You use a taxonomy tree like the one above to map your topics. But a good keyword tool can help identify particular keywords people use when researching those topics. While the word you use for your topic may itself be a keyword, trying to rank for that word alone will be daunting because everyone else is competing against you. More people are searching for cars than they are for “how to recharge an air conditioner on a 2004 Honda Civic.” By having pages dedicated to specific keywords, you can show your website to be knowledgable on the bigger topics. And in turn, over time, you can rank for those topics generally.

But by keeping the distinction between topics and keywords in mind, you can create an organized website that ranks for a variety of keywords and improves over time.

Google announced last Tuesday that they will reduce the visibility of certain rich results from the search results. Specifically, Google is reducing the visibility of FAQ results and limiting HowTo results to only desktop devices.

Since 2019, website owners have been able to mark content on their websites as frequently asked questions (FAQ) to take advantage of the increased screen space given, as shown in the image above. Presumably, too many website owners have done this, and they have done so with content that is less than desirable. Not all FAQ results will be removed from Google. “[R]ich results will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown regularly. Sites may automatically be considered for this treatment depending on their eligibility.”

What this means in practice is unknown. Website operators wanting rich results have to improve their website’s quality and hope for the best. The update will be introduced globally.

Google’s Danny Sullivan, the company’s official liaison for webmasters, has recently confirmed a major spam update by Google. Google’s November spam update marks the fourth such update in 2021, with major updates happening over the summer. The search engine is in a constant push and pull with webmasters who try to game the search engine results page by promoting spam websites instead of useful content.

As part of our regular work to improve results, we've released a spam update to our systems. This November 2021 spam update should be fully rolled out within a week. We encourage sites to follow our best practices for Search: https://t.co/jK3ArQmTqT

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 3, 2021

Updates such as these are the methods Google usually uses to combat spam in the search results. Uncommonly, Google will take manual action against offenders, which can be more difficult for search engine optimization professionals to solve for. 2021 has seen Google become more sophisticated in the fight against spam. Back in April 2021, Google publicly revealed their creation of a spam fighting artificial intelligence, which the company boasted provided an “unprecedented potential to revolutionize” spam fighting.

“By combining our deep knowledge of spam with AI, last year we were able to build our very own spam-fighting AI that is incredibly effective at catching both known and new spam trends. For example, we have reduced sites with auto-generated and scraped content by more than 80% compared to a couple of years ago.”

Google

The format of spam can vary. Spam can be thin or copied content (called “scraped” in the industry).

It may also be content that’s “spun”. In other words, a computer program can copy someone else’s content, then put the words through a sort of thesaurus program to change the actual words while retaining the grammatical structure. Spun content reads like nonsense to a human being, but to some computer systems it can appear relevant to the original topic while seeming like it’s also brand new content.

Spam may also consist of auto-generated websites that piece together content from a variety of places to try to game the algorithm. More insidiously, spam may also consist of hacking into a legitimate website and either changing the content of the site, adding spam pages in other areas of the website unbeknownst to the site owner, or redirecting the site’s domain name to a target selected by the hacker.

While it’s still very early, we can tender a guess at what types of search queries the webspam team is paying attention to with Google’s November spam update. Throughout 2021, Google has paid particular attention to sensitive searches, such as those relating to conspiracy theories or medical information. It’s safe to assume that attention to those types of searches will continue.