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All About Fraggles (Fragment + Handle) - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Suzzicks

What are "fraggles" in SEO and how do they relate to mobile-first indexing, entities, the Knowledge Graph, and your day-to-day work? In this glimpse into her 2019 MozCon talk, Cindy Krum explains everything you need to understand about fraggles in this edition of Whiteboard Friday.

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Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. My name is Cindy Krum, and I'm the CEO of MobileMoxie, based in Denver, Colorado. We do mobile SEO and ASO consulting. I'm here in Seattle, speaking at MozCon, but also recording this Whiteboard Friday for you today, and we are talking about fraggles.

So fraggles are obviously a name that I'm borrowing from Jim Henson, who created "Fraggle Rock." But it's a combination of words. It's a combination of fragment and handle. I talk about fraggles as a new way or a new element or thing that Google is indexing.

Fraggles and mobile-first indexing

Let's start with the idea of mobile-first indexing, because you have to kind of understand that before you can go on to understand fraggles. So I believe mobile-first indexing is about a little bit more than what Google says. Google says that mobile-first indexing was just a change of the crawler.

They had a desktop crawler that was primarily crawling and indexing, and now they have a mobile crawler that's doing the heavy lifting for crawling and indexing. While I think that's true, I think there's more going on behind the scenes that they're not talking about, and we've seen a lot of evidence of this. So what I believe is that mobile-first indexing was also about indexing, hence the name.

Knowledge Graph and entities

So I think that Google has reorganized their index around entities or around specifically entities in the Knowledge Graph. So this is kind of my rough diagram of a very simplified Knowledge Graph. But Knowledge Graph is all about person, place, thing, or idea.

Nouns are entities. Knowledge Graph has nodes for all of the major person, place, thing, or idea entities out there. But it also indexes or it also organizes the relationships of this idea to this idea or this thing to this thing. What's useful for that to Google is that these things, these concepts, these relationships stay true in all languages, and that's how entities work, because entities happen before keywords.

This can be a hard concept for SEOs to wrap their brain around because we're so used to dealing with keywords. But if you think about an entity as something that's described by a keyword and can be language agnostic, that's how Google thinks about entities, because entities in the Knowledge Graph are not written up per se or their the unique identifier isn't a word, it's a number and numbers are language agnostic.

But if we think about an entity like mother, mother is a concept that exists in all languages, but we have different words to describe it. But regardless of what language you're speaking, mother is related to father, is related to daughter, is related to grandfather, all in the same ways, even if we're speaking different languages. So if Google can use what they call the "topic layer"and entities as a way to filter in information and understand the world, then they can do it in languages where they're strong and say, "We know that this is true absolutely 100% all of the time."

Then they can apply that understanding to languages that they have a harder time indexing or understanding, they're just not as strong or the algorithm isn't built to understand things like complexities of language, like German where they make really long words or other languages where they have lots of short words to mean different things or to modify different words.

Languages all work differently. But if they can use their translation API and their natural language APIs to build out the Knowledge Graph in places where they're strong, then they can use it with machine learning to also build it and do a better job of answering questions in places or languages where they're weak. So when you understand that, then it's easy to think about mobile-first indexing as a massive Knowledge Graph build-out.

We've seen this happening statistically. There are more Knowledge Graph results and more other things that seem to be related to Knowledge Graph results, like people also ask, people also search for, related searches. Those are all describing different elements or different nodes on the Knowledge Graph. So when you see those things in the search, I want you to think, hey, this is the Knowledge Graph showing me how this topic is related to other topics.

So when Google launched mobile-first indexing, I think this is the reason it took two and a half years is because they were reindexing the entire web and organizing it around the Knowledge Graph. If you think back to the AMA that John Mueller did right about the time that Knowledge Graph was launching, he answered a lot of questions that were about JavaScript and href lang.

When you put this in that context, it makes more sense. He wants the entity understanding, or he knows that the entity understanding is really important, so the href lang is also really important. So that's enough of that. Now let's talk about fraggles.

Fraggles = fragment + handle

So fraggles, as I said, are a fragment plus a handle. It's important to know that fraggles — let me go over here —fraggles and fragments, there are lots of things out there that have fragments. So you can think of native apps, databases, websites, podcasts, and videos. Those can all be fragmented.

Even though they don't have a URL, they might be useful content, because Google says its goal is to organize the world's information, not to organize the world's websites. I think that, historically, Google has kind of been locked into this crawling and indexing of websites and that that's bothered it, that it wants to be able to show other stuff, but it couldn't do that because they all needed URLs.

But with fragments, potentially they don't have to have a URL. So keep these things in mind — apps, databases and stuff like that — and then look at this. 

So this is a traditional page. If you think about a page, Google has kind of been forced, historically by their infrastructure, to surface pages and to rank pages. But pages sometimes struggle to rank if they have too many topics on them.

So for instance, what I've shown you here is a page about vegetables. This page may be the best page about vegetables, and it may have the best information about lettuce, celery, and radishes. But because it's got those topics and maybe more topics on it, they all kind of dilute each other, and this great page may struggle to rank because it's not focused on the one topic, on one thing at a time.

Google wants to rank the best things. But historically they've kind of pushed us to put the best things on one page at a time and to break them out. So what that's created is this "content is king, I need more content, build more pages" mentality in SEO. The problem is everyone can be building more and more pages for every keyword that they want to rank for or every keyword group that they want to rank for, but only one is going to rank number one.

Google still has to crawl all of those pages that it told us to build, and that creates this character over here, I think, Marjory the Trash Heap, which if you remember the Fraggles, Marjory the Trash Heap was the all-knowing oracle. But when we're all creating kind of low- to mid-quality content just to have a separate page for every topic, then that makes Google's life harder, and that of course makes our life harder.

So why are we doing all of this work? The answer is because Google can only index pages, and if the page is too long or too many topics, Google gets confused. So we've been enabling Google to do this. But let's pretend, go with me on this, because this is a theory, I can't prove it. But if Google didn't have to index a full page or wasn't locked into that and could just index a piece of a page, then that makes it easier for Google to understand the relationships of different topics to one page, but also to organize the bits of the page to different pieces of the Knowledge Graph.

So this page about vegetables could be indexed and organized under the vegetable node of the Knowledge Graph. But that doesn't mean that the lettuce part of the page couldn't be indexed separately under the lettuce portion of the Knowledge Graph and so on, celery to celery and radish to radish. Now I know this is novel, and it's hard to think about if you've been doing SEO for a long time.

But let's think about why Google would want to do this. Google has been moving towards all of these new kinds of search experiences where we have voice search, we have the Google Home Hub kind of situation with a screen, or we have mobile searches. If you think about what Google has been doing, we've seen the increase in people also ask, and we've seen the increase in featured snippets.

They've actually been kind of, sort of making fragments for a long time or indexing fragments and showing them in featured snippets. The difference between that and fraggles is that when you click through on a fraggle, when it ranks in a search result, Google scrolls to that portion of the page automatically. That's the handle portion.

So handles you may have heard of before. They're kind of old-school web building. We call them bookmarks, anchor links, anchor jump links, stuff like that. It's when it automatically scrolls to the right portion of the page. But what we've seen with fraggles is Google is lifting bits of text, and when you click on it, they're scrolling directly to that piece of text on a page.

So we see this already happening in some results. What's interesting is Google is overlaying the link. You don't have to program the jump link in there. Google actually finds it and puts it there for you. So Google is already doing this, especially with AMP featured snippets. If you have a AMP featured snippet, so a featured snippet that's lifted from an AMP page, when you click through, Google is actually scrolling and highlighting the featured snippet so that you could read it in context on the page.

But it's also happening in other kind of more nuanced situations, especially with forums and conversations where they can pick a best answer. The difference between a fraggle and something like a jump link is that Google is overlaying the scrolling portion. The difference between a fraggle and a site link is site links link to other pages, and fraggles, they're linking to multiple pieces of the same long page.

So we want to avoid continuing to build up low-quality or mid-quality pages that might go to Marjory the Trash Heap. We want to start thinking in terms of can Google find and identify the right portion of the page about a specific topic, and are these topics related enough that they'll be understood when indexing them towards the Knowledge Graph.

Knowledge Graph build-out into different areas

So I personally think that we're seeing the build-out of the Knowledge Graph in a lot of different things. I think featured snippets are kind of facts or ideas that are looking for a home or validation in the Knowledge Graph. People also ask seem to be the related nodes. People also search for, same thing. Related searches, same thing. Featured snippets, oh, they're on there twice, two featured snippets. Found on the web, which is another way where Google is putting expanders by topic and then giving you a carousel of featured snippets to click through on.



 So we're seeing all of those things, and some SEOs are getting kind of upset that Google is lifting so much content and putting it in the search results and that you're not getting the click. We know that 61% of mobile searches don't get a click anymore, and it's because people are finding the information that they want directly in a SERP.

That's tough for SEOs, but great for Google because it means Google is providing exactly what the user wants. So they're probably going to continue to do this. I think that SEOs are going to change their minds and they're going to want to be in those windowed content, in the lifted content, because when Google starts doing this kind of thing for the native apps, databases, and other content, websites, podcasts, stuff like that, then those are new competitors that you didn't have to deal with when it was only websites ranking, but those are going to be more engaging kinds of content that Google will be showing or lifting and showing in a SERP even if they don't have to have URLs, because Google can just window them and show them.

So you'd rather be lifted than not shown at all. So that's it for me and featured snippets. I'd love to answer your questions in the comments, and thanks very much. I hope you like the theory about fraggles.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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The Practical Guide to Finding Anyone's Email Address

Posted by David_Farkas

In link building, few things are more frustrating than finding the perfect link opportunity but being completely unable to find a contact email address.

It’s probably happened to you — if you’re trying to build links or do any sort of outreach, it almost always entails sending out a fairly significant amount of emails. There are plenty of good articles out there about building relationships within the context of link building, but it’s hard to build relationships when you can’t even find a contact email address.

So, for today, I want to focus on how you can become better at finding those important email addresses.

Link builders spend a lot of time just trying to find contact info, and it’s often a frustrating process, just because sussing out email addresses can indeed be quite difficult. The site you’re targeting might not even have a contact page in the first place. Or, if the site does have a contact page, it might only display a generic email address. And, sometimes, the site may list too many email addresses. There are eight different people with similar-sounding job titles — should you reach out to the PR person, the marketing director, or the webmaster? It’s not clear.

Whatever the case may be, finding the right email address is absolutely imperative to any successful outreach campaign. In our industry, the numbers around outreach and replies aren’t great. Frankly, it’s shocking to hear the industry standard — only 8.5% of outreach emails receive a response.

I can’t help but wonder how many mistakes are made along the way to such a low response rate.

While there are certainly instances where there is simply no clear and obvious contact method, that should be the exception — not the rule! An experienced link builder understands that finding relevant contact information is essential to their success.

That’s why I’ve put together a quick list of tips and tools that will help you to find the email addresses and contact information you need when you’re building links.

And, if you follow my advice, here is a glimpse of the results you could expect:

We don’t track clicks, in case you were wondering ;)

ALWAYS start by looking around!

First, let’s start with my golden rule: Before you fire up any tool, you should always manually look for the correct contact email yourself.

Based on my experience, tools and automation are a last resort. If you rely solely upon tools and automated solutions, you’ll end up with many more misfired emails than if you were to go the manual route. There’s a simple reason for this: the email address listed on your target website may, surprisingly, belong to the right person you should contact!

Now, if you are using a tool, they may generate dozens of email addresses, and you’ll never end up actually emailing the correct individual. Another reason I advocate manually looking for emails is because many email finding tools are limited and can only find email addresses that are associated with a domain name. So, if there is a webmaster that happens to have a @gmail.com email address, the email finding tool will not find it.

It’s also important to only reach out to people you strongly believe will have an interest in your email in order to stay GDPR compliant.

So, always start your manual search by looking around the site. Usually, there will be a link to the contact page in the header, footer, or sidebar. If there’s not a page explicitly named “contact,” or if the contact page only has generic email addresses, that’s when I would recommend jumping to an “About Us” page, should there be one. 

You always want to find a personal email, not a generic one or a contact form. Outreach is more effective when you can address a specific individual, not whoever who is checking info@domain.com that day.

If you encounter too many emails and aren’t sure who the best person to contact is, I suggest sending an email to your best hunch that goes something like this:

And who knows, you may even get a reply like this:

If you weren’t able to locate an email address at this point, I’d move on to the next section.

Ask search engines for help

Perhaps the contact page you were looking for was well-hidden; maybe they don’t want to be contacted that much or they're in desperate need of a new UX person.

You can turn to search engines for help.

My go-to search engine lately is Startpage. Dubbed as the world's most private search engine, they display Google SERPs in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you just stepped into Times Square. They also have a cool option to browse the search results anonymously with "Anonymous View."

For our purposes, I would use the site: search operator just like this:

If there is in fact a contact page or email somewhere on their website that you were not able to find, any competent search engine will find it for you. If the above site query doesn't return any results, then I’d start expanding my search to other corners of the web.

Use the search bar and type:

If you’re looking for the email of a specific person, type their name before or after the quotation marks.

With this query you can find non-domain email addresses:

If that person’s email address is publicly available somewhere, you will likely be able to find it within the search results.

Email-finding tools

There are many, many excellent email finding tools to choose from. The first one I want to talk about is Hunter.

Hunter has a Chrome extension that’s really easy to use. After you’ve downloaded the extension, there’s not much more that needs to be done.

Go to the site which you are thinking about sending an email to, click on the extension in the top right corner of your screen, and Hunter, well, hunts.

It returns every email address it can find associated with that domain. And also allows you to filter the results based on categories.

Did I say “email address?” I meant to say email address, name, job title, etc. Essentially, it’s a one-click fix to get everything you need to send outreach.

Because I use Hunter regularly (and for good reason, as you can see), it’s the one I’m most familiar with. You can also use Hunter’s online app to look up emails in bulk.

The major downside of working in bulk is coming up with an effective formula to sift through all the emails. Hunter may generate dozens of emails for one site, leaving you to essentially guess which email address is best for outreach. And if you’re relying on guess-work, chances are pretty high you’re leaving perfectly good prospects on the table.

There are several other email finding tools to pick from and I would be remiss to not mention them. Here are 5 alternative email-finding tools:

• Sonvio
• Clearbit Connect
• Finder Expert
• Find That Email
• Voila Norbert

Even though I personally try not to be too dependent on tools, the fact of the matter is that they provide the easiest, most convenient route in many cases.

The guessing game

I know there's no word in the digital marketing world that produces more shudders than “guessing.” However, there are times when guessing is easier.

Let’s be real: there aren’t too many different ways that companies both large and small format their email addresses. It’s usually going to be something like:

• david@domain.com
• davidfarkas@domain.com
• dfarkas@domain.com

If you’ve ever worked for a living, you know most of the variations. But, in case you need some help, there’s a tool for that.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you just pick any one of these random addresses, send your email, cross your fingers, and hope for the best. Far from it. There are actually tools that you can use that will indicate when you’ve selected the right one.

Sales Navigator is such a tool. Sales Navigator is a Gmail extension that is easy to use. Simply enter the name of the person you’re looking for, and it will return all of the possible standard variations that they may use for their email address. Then, you can actually test the address from your Gmail account. When you type in the address into the proper line, a sidebar will appear on your screen. If there no is no information in that sidebar, you have the wrong address. If, however, you get a return that looks like this:

Congratulations! You’ve found the right email address.

Obviously, this method only works if you know the name of the person you want to email, but just don’t have their email address. Still, in those scenarios, Sales Navigator works like a charm.

Trust, but verify

There’s nothing more annoying than when you think you’ve finally struck gold, but the gold turned out to be pyrite. Getting an email that bounces back because it wasn’t the correct address is frustrating. And even worse, if it happens too often, your email can end up on email blacklists and destroy your email deliverability.

There are ways to verify, however. At my company, we use Neverbounce. It’s effective and incredibly easy to use. With Neverbounce, you can enter in either individual email addresses or bulk lists, and voila!

It will let you know if that email address is currently Valid, Invalid, or Unknown. It’s that easy. Here are some other email verifiers:

• Zero Bounce
• Mail Floss
• The Checker
• Proofy

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Here’s one final out-of-the-box approach. This approach works more often with sites where one person clearly does most, if not all, of the work. A site where someone’s name is the domain name, for example.

If you come across a site like davidfarkas.com and you see a newsletter that can be subscribed to, hit that subscribe button. Once that’s done, you can simply reply to one iteration of the newsletter.

This method has an added benefit. An effective way of building links is building relationships, just like I said in the opening. When you can demonstrate that you're already subscribing to a webmaster’s newsletter, you'll be currying favor with that webmaster.

Conclusion

When you send a link building outreach email, you want to make sure it’s going to a real person and, even more importantly, ending up in the right hands. Sending an email to an incorrect contact periodically may seem like a negligible waste of time, but when you send emails at the volume a link builder should, the waste adds up very quickly. In fact, enough waste can kill everything else that you’re trying to accomplish.

It’s well worth your time to make sure you’re getting it right by putting in the effort to finding the right email address. Be a picky link builder. Don’t just choose the first email that comes your way and never rely solely on tools. If you email the wrong person, it will look to them like that you didn’t care enough to spend time on their site, and in return, they will ignore you and your pitch.

With the tips outlined above, you'll avoid these issues and be on your way to more successful outreach.

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