If you are interested in some accessibility support for your SEO, or if you’d like to inquire about our services, we would be happy to chat with you. In this presentation for Pubcon, we talk about web accessibility as a component and driver of SEO in 2021 and beyond. Far from being a big thorny…
A Brief History of HTTP If we’re going to talk about the transition from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/2, it’s worth taking a quick trip back to the flannel-soaked 1990s. Back then, HTTP was a simple protocol for a simple job – transporting documents from a web server to your computer as efficiently as possible. This is…
This article is an entire rewrite from its original 2012 version. When Google launched the new Search Console (thus killing the legacy 404 report), it rendered the old version of this post useless. The bad news – the new URL inspector doesn’t work the same as the legacy report. In the previous report, you could…
Much has been said about AMP, the Accelerated Mobile Pages project spearheaded by Google, both glowingly for and bitterly against. Whatever your personal take is, though, Google is doubling down on pushing AMP in all of their properties, from AMP-powered Gmail that other providers will have no choice but to support, to a bevy of…
Unless you’ve been dialing up to the internet on a 56K modem attached to your Tangerine iBook G3, chances are you’ve heard that mobile internet usage has surpassed desktop usage for over a year now. Mobile SEO and the mobile experience is perhaps the most important consideration for your site after the content itself. Source:…
If you asked me 1000+ days ago if I thought I would consistently have some redesign, replatform, or migration on my to-do board I would have laughed. Not because redesigns make me laugh like Bill #Sebald stories, but because I “left” the design world for content and marketing back in 2011. However, even though I…
This is a checklist of technical SEO basics that you might not have known were basics. We know some of our readers are new to technical SEO, so we wanted to arm you with (what we believe is) the essential technical audit list of 2016. Focusing on becoming a full-stack SEO? This is the resource for you. Whether you’re a developer wunderkind or two steps away from luddite, this checklist is a great SEO go-to guide that anyone can run through.
There are many XML sitemap generators available for purchase, or even for free. They do what they’re supposed to – they crawl your site and spit out a properly formatted XML sitemap. But sometimes there’s a problem with these XML sitemap generators. They don’t know what URLs should (or should not) be in the XML sitemap. Sure, you could tell some of them to obey directives and tags, like robots.txt and canonical tags, but unless your site is perfectly optimized, you’ll need to do some work by hand.
Chances are the disavow.txt file you sent to Google is outdated. As Google keeps discovering and rolling out Penguin updates, it’s discovering links that were missed on the first go-round. It’s important to also realize that the link data tools you used for your disavow are typically much slower at finding links than Google.
You put a robots.txt on your site expecting it to keep Google out of certain pages. But you worry – did you do it correctly? Is Google following it? Is the index as tight as it could be? Here’s a question for you. If you have a page blocked by robots.txt, will Google put it in the index? If you answered no, you’re incorrect. Google will indeed index a page blocked by robots.txt if it’s being linked by one of your pages (that do not have a rel=”nofollow”), or if it’s linked from another website. It doesn’t usually rank well because Google can’t see what’s on the page, but it does get PageRank passed through it.
If a website is a mess of URLs and duplicate content, Google will throw their hands up in the air out of frustration. This is a bad spot to be in. You’ll find your traffic and rankings drop while your indexation becomes bloated. Your crawl rate (which we’ve found correlates with traffic) will be curbed. It could seem all very sudden, or it could be gradual. Every case is different – but it’s always a nightmare. Keeping track of website changes is critical with SEO. The other day I peaked into our own Google Webmaster Tools indexation report, and saw something pretty alarming in the “index status” report.
For one reason or another, plenty of sites are in the doghouse. The dust has settled a bit. Google has gotten more specific about the penalties and warnings through their notifications, and much of the confusion is no longer… as confusing. We’re now in the aftermath – the grass is slowly growing again and the sky is starting to clear. A lot of companies that sold black hat link building work have vanished (and seem to have their phone off the hook). Some companies who sold black hat work are now even charging to remove the links they built for you (we know who you are!). But at the end of the day, if you were snared by Google for willingly – or maybe unknowingly – creating “unnatural links,” the only thing to do is get yourself out of the doghouse.
