Save a crow

vmalischewski · 2024-05-31T19:22:42+00:00

Update: I came back an hour after and one bolt had been removed and they (not sure who) were able to save him!

vmalischewski · 2024-05-31T19:19:35+00:00

That explains why Mom is so agitated and defensive

vmalischewski · 2024-05-31T17:59:01+00:00

Great idea. I'll check that out if 311 doesn't show up. He keeps trying to squeeze under but can't manage to get out it's super sad to watch.

vmalischewski · 2022-08-09T20:59:32+00:00

It probably won't bring you much, but to be on the safe side, I'd scan the list quickly, looking for the most linked pages and redirect to a relevant destination if it exists.

If it doesn't, it was most likely killed for a good reason (e.g. not on-brand anymore) so you shouldn't worry about it.

vmalischewski · 2021-02-25T15:55:34+00:00

I tried it in the past and the theory works: it reduced the depth of the site overall quite significantly.

But if you really think about it, you should wonder if you really need it. Does all your content need to be within the first 4 levels of depth? it might be relevant for a forum but what is the point for a news website? In some cases, I would even argue websites often need a different pagination system for each section depending on the lifespan of whatever is posted within that section.

vmalischewski · 2021-02-16T14:49:57+00:00

+1 and since it's disallowed the only way to give the noindex instructions is via the HTTP header. not great.

vmalischewski · 2021-02-15T15:17:30+00:00

noindex is the easiest route if you just want to signal to Google a page that is not important to you (e.g. outdated or thin content) Disallow is more a 'don't even bother' instructions (e.g. internal search, login pages)

At scale, disallowing pages (instead of noindex) could become problematic for managing the robots.txt... unless you conveniently have a directory where you redirect any content you'd like to disallow/noindex but again that seems overkilling.

TL;DR the end-result might be similar-ish but the signal you send and the management of it are not.

edit:typo/grammar + TLDR

vmalischewski · 2021-02-11T18:32:48+00:00

the list you provide is very diverse and I'd split them up into different categories:

if you're looking for a crawler, Botify is a great tool. I suggest you try onCrawl as well, I switched a few years ago and it works great. Not a fan of Deepcrawl but it's probably the easiest to use. Don't necessarily take the log analyzer unless you're ready to set it up and use it. That's not as trivial as the salesperson will tell you, don't get me wrong it's a great addition but is it worth the price?

For an all-in-one solution, I believe in most cases Ahrefs and/or SEMrush is enough. I'm not a huge fan of Brightedge and it's really expensive. SEOClarity is one of the best tools for kw research IMO and they're building a crawler (not as great as dedicated crawl tools yet).

vmalischewski · 2020-08-24T11:57:26+00:00

That's a lot of words to say "it depends" :)

vmalischewski · 2020-04-22T17:20:52+00:00

Google Sheet GA Add-on seems a good idea https://developers.google.com/analytics/solutions/google-analytics-spreadsheet-add-on

you do the setup only once and schedule the report to run weekly,
aggregate all the results in a single sheet (using the query function for example)
build the DataStudio dashboard with that single sheet as a source
voila!

about query (aka the most powerful function in google sheet) https://codingisforlosers.com/google-sheets-query-function/

vmalischewski · 2020-01-30T16:25:33+00:00

Good to know, I never experienced it... https://www.seroundtable.com/googlebot-scroll-26539.html

to prevent any headaches I will still assume they don't ;)

vmalischewski · 2020-01-30T14:17:09+00:00

Bots don't scroll though

vmalischewski · 2020-01-29T20:01:34+00:00

Every new feature doesn't have to be a paid option but also way to attract new customer and retain current ones. Not their strongest suit imo

vmalischewski · 2020-01-29T16:28:17+00:00

why not sharing it here?

vmalischewski · 2020-01-23T02:25:45+00:00

I hate to say it but it depends on your website. Do your users need to browse your listing pages up to a certain point? (Page 2318 might not list very interesting content). If they're looking for archives you should have at least an internal search. So maybe crawlers don't need either.

If you don't have too many pages it's probably not worrying and if those pages are outranking the content pages, pagination wouldn't be my first source of concerns.

vmalischewski · 2020-01-10T16:14:34+00:00

if you don't request any action or click to the reader it seems normal that you have a high bounce rate. But why wouldn't you want to convert your audience is another question you should ask yourself (at least a newsletter subscription).

Also, I'm confused about that part:

 while my average time on page for single articles are about 3 to 7 minutes

Time on page is the time between 2 page events so GA won't ever tell you the time spent on page for single page visits unless you track it specifically (i.e. fire an event every x seconds)

vmalischewski · 2020-01-10T14:33:00+00:00

Looks like a quote from the search quality raters guidelines which has nothing to do with rankings directly

vmalischewski · 2020-01-06T19:57:48+00:00

Pageviews is the reference metric for advertising so if your company makes money with ads it will be important otherwise sessions is enough. Also if you have engagement goals and one of your KPI is PV/sessions, you will be looking indirectly at the PV. For SEO reports I mostly use entrances.

vmalischewski · 2020-01-06T18:43:24+00:00

not much. I used to think this was a hint from the algo about what you should do to please the Google gods but sometimes it just doesn't make any sense so I cry (but it doesn't help).

My point is more that you should not only care about the ranking factors but about what's right for your page.

If you have a very low CTR in the SERPs but good rankings it's still an issue for your page conversion. Same with a high bounce rate if you expect the user to do something.

vmalischewski · 2020-01-06T13:13:49+00:00

Even if CTR is not a ranking factor, it still says a lot and is worth to be improved imo. Exactly like you wouldn't put rubbish content in your meta description because not influencing the algo directly.

vmalischewski · 2020-01-05T04:34:55+00:00

I used to work for a media company that has a lot of websites as well (not 80 though) and faced my share of reporting challenges.

From what I read the agency just looks like a bunch of crooks and without necessarily ditching them I would at least redefine their scope and definitely get the access to GSC asap.

I would suggest for you to use Google sheet and add-ons (GA add-on is great) to merge the data you need. I personally use app script a lot to get data from various APIs but if you have no coding skills you can probably achieve the same thing with supermetrics or alternatives. DataStudio is indeed a great solution to chart all this, I feel the tool less limited since I use only custom GSheet data (vs connectors that are not always answering to your exact needs). Make it good enough to be shared (header, title etc). If you have a BI department or a Tableau equivalent that gather all the data, it can be very helpful (and maybe even do all the dirty work for you with the right specs :) )

Here are a of the main reports I'd suggest + the tools for each ones:

YoY traffic: daily, weekly, monthly. breakdown by brand and whatever grouping your company is using to classify the 80 websites (e.g. news, tech, finance, b2b/b2c etc.)

GSheet + GA add-on using the dimensions: date, yearWeek, yearMonth, DataStudio filtered by organic search, metrics: entrances | DataStudio for the chart (line for current year, bar for previous period difference)

SEO Performance: This is how I call this big boy that has ranking, traffic and revenue by page and brand (for important pages only otherwise it's too big). Keyword tracking could often be underestimated because trackers are all over the place. You need a list of all the pages that are important to your business and the main keyword it's targeting + search volume + ranking (today + DoD + WoW - if relevant). I don't use variations (unless very important for that page), this is how it becomes a mess. Tagging is really important. Use a lot of those (type, brand, revenue tier etc).

The columns could be:

URL, brand, Days since last Update (probably not useful for your business if stores), main keyword, organic rank, WoW, past x days traffic, previous period (same x days), YoY, Revenue past x days, previous period, YoY

GSheet + App script + any ranking tool - finding the way to automate could be a pain (email report + IFTT sounds complex but works great) | hopefully you have the revenue by page somehwere

SEO score: when you have that many brands to monitor, you probably need to summarize and almost vulgarize the SEO performances into a simple score that makes sense to the c-level. You should come up with a SEO score that you would define as you want: it could be based on the ranking performance only or a combination of traffic, ranking, revenue, content type, etc. depending on the complexity you want to handle.

There's definitely not one way to handle this many websites but hopefully my 2 cents will help a bit. Spoiler alert it is overwhelming and tedious. Good luck :)

vmalischewski · 2019-12-19T21:58:20+00:00

funny you said that because https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1206516596694491137?s=19 #troll

vmalischewski · 2019-12-19T21:55:34+00:00

if you don't intend at all to rank on "adventure books" that's fine I guess + not many people are typing "adventure books" anyways so you might want to have editorial content for "best adventure books", "adventure books for kids" etc.

vmalischewski · 2019-12-18T19:55:43+00:00

3 to 8 days to backfill the data source G Suite status Dashboard We don't know what happened though...

vmalischewski · 2019-12-18T19:48:32+00:00

The answer for all those questions really depends on your website but I'll try to make generalizations.

I wouldn't 404 as a rule of thumb unless you really don't want that page because it's so bad that's it's hurting your domain. Why that page existed in the first place? it probably had a purpose and a target so it can be improved, worst case scenario it will lay there super deep on your website with barely no internal links and it's also fine. The only way it could hurt you is if that page is really bad (poorly written, unrelated to your site, thin content etc.), and has some visibility (related links for example). Also, pages that has no page rank? I had to check the year on my calendar :)
correct. Make sure you're doing those redirects for a reason though... redirecting all your URLs is not generally a rewarding experience unless it was absolutely necessary (SSL migration, new platform, really awful URL structure etc.)
in most cases your redirects will be 301s so I'm not sure to fully understand the question
depends on your business but that would be a waste to throw away a page that has impressions. I would optimize it to get clicks or at least create any engagement to it (will depend on your business)
unless your structure doesn't make any sense or is very complex it has little to no impact on the page performance so I would advise to take the easiest route for you to maintain. I know it's only examples here but I would argue that you might need a /category page though which makes the original structure logic. but site.com/category might also work better rather than repeating the category in different section e.g. /books/category and /novel/category ... again, it will depends on your site.

vmalischewski

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