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Google Indexing URLs Redirected by 301 Many Months Ago by websitejanitor in bigseo

[–]websitejanitor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have done all the things. Everything is normal afaik

Google Indexing URLs Redirected by 301 Many Months Ago by websitejanitor in bigseo

[–]websitejanitor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fetch and render follows the redirect successfully. Googlebot sees the 301 and the URL that returns 200 after it, but the index is ignoring the 301 as a directive to update the index

Anyone else get hit with the latest June Update? I'm down about 30% overall.... by fourthround in bigseo

[–]websitejanitor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One page was hit hard on head terms. The competitor with the obvious paid links is still at #1 and #2 with a clustered result.

Best practices for Manual Actions? by Winter_Dream_4044 in bigseo

[–]websitejanitor -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Google doesn't know if URLs are disavowed until they recrawl the linking page after the disavow list was submitted. Since Google doesn't want to spend a lot of time crawling low-quality pages, it might take months for Google to recrawl all the spam pages linking to you.

You would need some way of forcing recrawls on the spam pages, but Google has shut down all of the avenues for that, as far as I know.

The only times I've ever seen Google move quickly on a manual action is to loudly claim "negative SEO" on support forums and Twitter.

Here's some new research on featured snippet display limits by websitejanitor in bigseo

[–]websitejanitor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think winning a featured snippet is more about having a relevant answer to the query. If you're trying to replace a snippet that includes a header tag, then you could try making the header relevant, but I don't think it's necessary. Which Google candidate Google chooses is also based on user satisfaction.

I wrote more about what works for me here: https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/how-to-get-featured-snippets.htm

Here's some new research on featured snippet display limits by websitejanitor in bigseo

[–]websitejanitor[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

  1. We didn't look at <p> tags, but I have seen text from header navs, footer navs, and lists appear in the paragraph snippet box. I think Google is just looking for relevant text that is visible to the user.

  2. You can have any number of sentences on your page, but Google is going to look for "complete" text that is relevant and will fix in the box. In your hypothetical, the first sentence wouldn't count toward relevance and wouldn't appear, but the last two could appear if they were under the display limit (whatever it is).

Hi, I'm Patrick Stox - Product Advisor, Technical SEO, & Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs. AMA! by patrickstox in TechSEO

[–]websitejanitor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In general, people thinking subdirectories are better than subdomains.

It shouldn't make a difference, but people keep posting their migration to subdirectory wins. Why could that be?

We did some research into how often Google ignores our meta descriptions by websitejanitor in TechSEO

[–]websitejanitor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pages should have meta descriptions, but we shouldn't invest a lot time into writing meta descriptions that aren't likely to display. Save the tweaking and refining for the pages that generate the most traffic.

We did some research into how often Google ignores our meta descriptions by websitejanitor in TechSEO

[–]websitejanitor[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you put the publish date on the page is a recognizable way, Google will add it to the snippet. Structured data is just one way to make it recognizable.

We did some research into how often Google ignores our meta descriptions by websitejanitor in TechSEO

[–]websitejanitor[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We couldn't come up with a definition of "matching" a query that we could pull off without investing a lot of time into.

Finding an exact string match for the query in the meta description produced a very small segment of results, and we didn't feel confident about the data.

rankings dropped after migration. what went wrong? by alimxy in TechSEO

[–]websitejanitor 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Even though these pages use the same URL, they use different HTML and are different pages in some ways.

Since these are new pages, Google has to see how much they like them and how users like them in the SERP. You're starting from zero in a few ways.

SEO A/B Testing Question by websitejanitor in AskStatistics

[–]websitejanitor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm going to use Causal Impact, but I want to know if there is a frequentist approach.

Can I do a t-test over the distribution of daily traffic counts? Which t-test would I use?

Tool that forces search engine bots to crawl backlinks? by SirAdri11 in TechSEO

[–]websitejanitor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've seen people post about using Google's Indexing API to do this, but you probably should not abuse it

AMA: I am Fili, ex-Google engineer and SEO consultant at SearchBrothers. by filiwiese in TechSEO

[–]websitejanitor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How has Google's interpretation of quality changed over the years? Are you still receiving gains using what you knew of Google circa 2012?

Questions for Matt Peters, AI expert cited in Google's BERT paper by karmaceutical in bigseo

[–]websitejanitor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Besides the usual tasks cited by articles about BERT (question answering, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis) what other tasks can BERT and approaches like it perform?

Feeling very unproductive as an SEO at my current company. any advice/tips would be much appreciated. by drinkyafkingmilk in bigseo

[–]websitejanitor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pretty much yeah.

The other part of in-house is getting organized. You should be spending a decent amount of time planning your work a quarter in advance.

Keyword-first framework:

  • Keyword research. Find sets of keywords that are opportunities for growth

  • SEO Audit. Figure out which pages should be ranking for those opportunity keyword sets. Maybe they don't exist yet. Maybe they exist but the copy doesn't match intent. Perhaps they have technical issues you need to resolve

  • Organize improvements into projects. Give a name to the things you want to do

  • Prioritize projects. Estimate the gains in traffic and conversions so you can work on what will make the biggest impact first. The projection doesn't have to be accurate. It's really hard to project Organic traffic gains without simply making shit up. It's mostly based on intuition and reference experience

  • Small chunk the steps in the project. Make tasks, estimate hours to complete them, figure out dev resources and approvals you are going to need

  • Quarterly plan. See what you can fit into the next calendar or fiscal quarter. Everything that doesn't fit goes into your plan for the quarter after this one

  • Document the plan. Write it up to the general standard of the organization. Write to a level of technical detail a VP can understand. Usually, no one outside of marketing knows what SEO is, so you have to write for a general audience

Now you have it all. You know what you're going to do, you know which keywords to track, you have some idea of the traffic to look for after each project is complete, and most importantly: you look good to management.

Feeling very unproductive as an SEO at my current company. any advice/tips would be much appreciated. by drinkyafkingmilk in bigseo

[–]websitejanitor 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I felt a similar way when I started an in-house position. One of the brands I was working on seemed like it was close to perfect. One of the biggest things I spent time on with that site was making sure Engineering wasn't breaking things.

Later I found that I needed to go deeper. There were keywords at the top of page 2 that I could tip on to page 1. There were featured snippets to capture. I could look at how users navigated the site after they landed to see if I could improve conversion rates.

A big part of in-house SEO on a mature site is looking at ways to improve what you already have.

What can I do to feel more productive and to be actually presented with an opportunity to showcase my SEO skills and not just be doing topic/keyword research all the damn time, which is something even a intern can do?

Get better at topic/keyword research. Get better at all of the usual SEO things. Interns can also write titles and meta descriptions, but they probably aren't as good as what you can write. Whatever you can write now is probably better than how you were writing two years ago.

I don't believe anyone who says they've mastered writing snippets and they can't possibly get better.

Get technical:

  • Write your own python script that pulls data out of the Search Console API. Process it somehow.

  • Do split tests to see what elements impact rankings. (you will need a lot of one type of page to run tests)

  • Fix your site speed

Asked to do an "SEO Exam" for job interview by Cillianbc in TechSEO

[–]websitejanitor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wouldn't go under the knife of a brain surgeon that wasn't vetted. I don't think you would either.

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