Interview with SEO Expert: Yannis Divramis

SEO interview

In this series, I interview experts to get insights, opinions, and specific strategies to level up SEO businesses.

Goals of this post

My goal with this interview series is to talk to expert consultants to get the best strategies, tips on hiring experts, ideas and recommendations on tools and resources.

I have interviewed Yannis Divramis from Paramarketing.org to learn his opinions on the most recent SEO topic.

Here are his opinions about the questions I have asked him.

What do you think will have the biggest impact on SEO in 2020?

The most important impact in SEO in 2020 is the zero-click searches, as Google is transforming to one-stop-shop for everything, commencing from air tickets to knowledge cards.

Google wants to keep the end-user on its ecosystem as long as possible for two main reasons.

In order to show to him even more paid adverts, in case he will finally click on a paid result and second Google wants to promote its own brand in every instance and it can do it well to an extent.

Google’s monopoly starts to overwhelm the competition and it comes to a cost for the rest of the internet and the smallest websites.

At one point this is not good in terms of user experience and end-user value, as the average internet user wants to see web pages and not a single site with its own opinion about everything in life.

The quality of the search results will fall decently in proportion to the quantity. Google will show even more ads, rich snippets, videos, that will disorientate the average user.

Machine learning and AI will be even more prominent but they will never manage to predict the human search intent 100%.

Still, in 2020, the quality backlinks will be a major impact on SEO. People and even some of the most clever minds of the SEO community are getting distracted from the clutch and the too many changes of the Google Algorithm.

Despite the fact that the Algorithm is getting more and more complicated, the Core of every SEO business is simply who has the best backlinks, the most relevant and the most natural in the eyes of Google.

Do you have a specific strategy to earn Rich and Featured Snippets?

Yes, l have a very easy strategy as l use WordPress sites and l as an SEO expert optimize every day WordPress sites.

Google has transformed into an answering machine, the best thing is to answer the most important questions first and include the summary of this answer into the Featured Snippets.

The rest is only comments.

What is your opinion about “Google Sandbox”?

I do not believe in Google Sandbox and in the fact that Google will suppress a new site not to get on the SERPs.

Actually, it is the natural start for every new site the point 0 which is somewhere on the 100th page of Google? I don’t know from where a site starts to rank on Google, but if we make a search for the term SEO on Google, we can still have some important websites ranking on page 23, or even 54 of Google.

They are ranking together with the newly built sites. SO there is no Google Sandbox as soon as there is only one way to get on the first page, to pass the other 99 pages of Google or the rest 999 pages of Googles' search results.

A new site has to acquire some clicks and some backlinks in order to outrank the competition page by page. That’s all.

And the only suspicion that gives existence to Google Sandbox is that Google does not know a new site and needs some time to characterize it, to crawl it, to index it and to rank it.

Do you think the BERT update is as big as Google claimed to be?

Some big sites of the SEO community such as Search Engine Roundtable claimed that Google Bert impacted the 10% of the queries and it was bigger than it thought to be.

These are only assumptions as the 15% of Google Searches are totally new searches that didn’t exist one year ago and because we are not Google, we don’t know exactly how much was the impact of the BERT update.

To add more to this logic, does the 10% include every national search results such as the German search results, the French or only the American?

I think that the BERT impact has nothing to do with sites that had solid content and solid backlinks. These two are the basics of every well-optimized website and soon as every savvy webmaster takes care of the above two he has nothing to afraid.

I think that the pace of the Google Updates will rise significantly in the near future and every update will be considered even more drastic and impactful than the previous one. The updates don’t matter if you are a brand or if you had the proper backlink profile.

I didn’t notice any significant impact in the Greek marker where l live and l have 80% of my operations.

Do you think Google tests its algorithm aggressive enough?

Yes, that is something l noticed from the medical update in 2018. Many well-established websites were hit unexpectedly and Google launched many other corrective updates till March 2019 in order to equalize the losses.

Every new update is unpolished and doesn’t make many times any discrimination.

Above all, we have to say that Google it’s not a democracy driven search engine. It’s just an algorithm and it will always be, and as a mathematical model can only see maths and types.

Google is not always right in its effort to fight spam and to deliver better quality sites but every update has sometimes its own toll and some sites even the cleanest and the most innocent ones will fell victims of this notion.

I would like to add that many scientists from the Artificial Intelligent community said that the AI that the Algorithm is using sometimes is getting more and more aggressive in filtering the websites that will rank on the first results.

The situation is the same today only one can rank first for a specific keyword and Google knows well the value of the position one.

I hope that you found my answers helpful and thank you for having me.