Two weeks ago I showed a case where a client site had broken some redirects, lost organic traffic shortly thereafter, then magically gained it back without fixing anything. The Tl:DR was that Google was getting pretty good at “fixing” tech SEO problems itself. But don’t toe-tag technical SEO just yet. At the end of last week, this client finally fixed the redirects, and look what happened.
And what I mean by that is Google has figured out how to automate a lot of the technical SEO things we used to take for granted as the domain of the technical SEO practitioner. That metaphor makes sense right? Zombies are kind of like automated fixes to technical SEO problems? Let’s just pretend it makes sense. I needed a catchy headline. I bring this up today because two weeks ago one of our clients decided to redirect all of…
It was just over a year ago that Dan Leibson open sourced aggregate Lighthouse performance testing in Google Data Studio (yet another resource in the SEO industry inspired by Hamlet Batista). I’d like to share with you some observations I’ve made over the past year of running Lighthouse testing on our clients’ sites and how I think Google’s render service operates. I’ve noticed some interesting similarities between how successfully Google renders a page and the measurement thresholds in Core…
Hey everyone! It’s been a hot minute since I posted so just wanted to quickly come in here and share an update we made to a free tool. A while back we released a tool that would allow you to aggregate Lighthouse reports by template and visualize and report on assets across sites and at the template/page level in Google Data Studio. Sounds pretty cool right? You can read about it here and check out the GitHub repo here. Shortly…
I am located in the U.S. yet yesterday afternoon when I searched for “Google My Business” in Google, the first result I got was the UK URL for GMB: https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/business/. It wasn’t like that yesterday morning. So what changed? A canonical tag. According to Archive.org, yesterday morning the canonical tag for the URL that usually ranks #1, https://www.google.com/business/, was https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/business/. But looking at the source of that URL now shows the canonical tag has changed to https://www.google.com/intl/en_ae/business/:
Funny Kill It With Fire GIF from Funny GIFs Most SEOs I know hate sites with separate mobile URLs. They served their purpose back in the early days of mobile browsers, but over time the maintenance overhead combined with the SEO uncertainty brought on by having two different sets of near duplicate URLs has caused many of us to advocate for migrating to a single set of URLs for both mobile and desktop. But maybe we shouldn’t be the ones…
via GIPHY Google just published an article on how to “Get Started With Dynamic Rendering.” If you are working on a site with a “modern framework” (e.g. Angular, React, or other tech with a lot of JavaScript features), you’ll want to bookmark that post. If reading is not your thing, a few weeks ago I put together Server Side Rendering For Dummies (& Non-Technical SEO Decision Makers), which boils down a lot of the Google techno-jargon into a single PowerPoint…
In 2011, Google, Bing & Yahoo announced Schema.org which got SEOs all excited to start marking up website content to turn it into “structured data.” The benefit would be that search engines would be more certain that a text string of numbers was in fact a phone number, or at least they would be more certain that you wanted them to think it was phone number. The search engines could then turn the structured data into eye-catching fripperies designed to…
Two weeks ago a client reset its bot-blocker, unintentionally blocking Googlebot. We had SEORadar monitoring the site so we quickly discovered the problem and alerted the client. Unfortunately, by the time they fixed the bot-blocker settings, they had lost about 100,000 daily visitors from Google. Of course, the first thing they asked was: How Long Will It Take Our Google Traffic To Recover From Blocking Googlebot? While your mileage may vary, in this case the answer is about one week.…
Your engineering team just mentioned they are rolling out a new type of product landing page built with REACT or Angular or some other hipster tech name you may have seen out of the corner of your eye on your Twitter SEO feed. Your gut says this could be an SEO problem, and your gut is probably right. You search Google for “react SEO issues”, “react and SEO”, “what is server side rendering”, “google server side rendering and seo”, etc.…