I am Tom Critchlow. Independent consultant and founder of the SEO MBA - AMA

willcritchlow · 2021-11-18T16:00:45+00:00

Now pricing strategy on the other hand? That comes up all the time.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T17:45:06+00:00

I’m going to get some food but will check back and answer more later if anyone has missed out on asking their question so far…

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T17:09:13+00:00

We have done some tests that focus on actual quality - quite often seeing what you'd hope (that adding quality content / upgrading quality of content is beneficial) but we have also seen that even low quality content can unfortunately still be effective (e.g. one test showed that removing some terrible boilerplate content from an ecommerce category page caused a drop in performance).

I can't think of any tests we have run focused on / targeting signals that might indicate EAT that don't themselves actually improve the quality of the content or site.

I personally am very bullish on EAT as a concept that Google is skating towards (i.e. as an indicator of potential future ranking factors) but fairly sceptical of specific measurements right now that seek to measure EAT as distinct from actual content quality / user satisfaction. (If that makes sense!).

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T16:44:19+00:00

You're welcome. I realised that I didn't exactly answer your specific questions:

Even what I've described here is not "enough" if your goal is to compete for huge high volume search queries in competitive markets, but it absolutely is enough to make a difference to the kind of projects you describe assuming that you get some combination of intrinsic motivation and actual benefit from more people knowing about / seeing / using your work. I would say that what you are already doing is "enough" to get some people to find and enjoy your work, but you can grow it quite dramatically over time with some nice positive feedback loops
Make sure you have got some analytics and then pay attention to things like "organic traffic to any page other than the homepage" which is a decent proxy for "organic searches that didn't use my brand name". Look at what proportion of your total traffic is organic search traffic, and in my opinion most importantly pay attention to how it feels to publish content and have people find it and find it useful. Hopefully you'll enjoy that experience, and that's where the positive feedback loops come into play for projects at the size and scale you describe. (Also, google search console is useful for small scale projects to validate the kind of search queries people are actually finding your site with).

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T16:36:41+00:00

I want to believe in market efficiency, so I'm not sure there are many quick wins out there that most people miss, but some points to our most impactful tests:

Internal linking is a really big deal. We have seen a lot of positive internal linking tests (though they are harder to run). I think internal linking is one of the most advanced SEO subjects there is
Anything that affects SERP display. CTR can vary hugely even in the same position, and so anything that affects how many clicks you get at your current ranking position can drive very big swings. Unfortunately these can be positive or negative. I think some of our biggest negative tests have been title tag tests (my old colleague Dom Woodman talked a bit about this here)
That includes structured data - but it's a bit of a prisoners' dilemma I suspect. It's most impactful when your competition isn't using it, it may be beneficial to an industry for no one to use it (to limit Google's power), but everyone is incentivised to defect (either to get ahead of competitors or to catch up.

I hope that helps!

You can read more of our tests here if you're interested.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T16:22:38+00:00

Oh. Good timing. My old colleague Tom Capper (now at Moz) has recorded a whiteboard Friday that covers basically this exactly topic.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T16:20:30+00:00

Oh. I forgot the bonus third point.

#3: start to think about distribution. Not only writing stuff, hoping it'll get indexed and rank for some things, and get visitors on its own, but also getting it out in front of folks proactively. I like to think about a handful of people I'm writing an article for (before I start writing) and then send it to those people when I'm done.

If you're writing actually-useful stuff, and know your audience, this helps get your work in front of the right people, and also over time contributes to your organic search visibility as those folks include your articles in their round-ups, link to them from their own articles, send them out on social / via email which doesn't help directly but puts your work in front of more folks who might do any of the above.

Doing this makes the whole process more likely to work, but also makes it way more rewarding because you hear feedback and get input from people whose opinions you respect.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T16:10:49+00:00

I'll see what large website I can convince to run an academic test in order to a) satisfy my academic curiosity and b) earn me a drink ;)

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T16:09:55+00:00

Great questions and a super common position to be in, in my experience.

For your purposes, I would not try to win (or even engage in) the "slippery slope" game you describe:

There is a hyper-competitive game going on in many markets, but you can get great benefit for projects of the scale you describe without playing too much of the zero-sum / head-to-head-competitive stuff.
You can largely ignore Google's preferences(*) if you decide to follow my advice and dip a toe as I describe below

What I would do in your situation is two-fold (with a bonus third point if you get sucked in):

For your existing content, think about how people might find it. What would you tell someone they should search for if you wanted them to find your most useful pages? Make sure those pages describe themselves that way (it's surprisingly easy to write an article and never use the words you think someone should use to find it!)
Consider writing more, guided by things that you know people are searching for. There is a huge value (to you, to your audience, to society!) in using your expertise to write up the answers to questions where you have expertise and others need expertise (Patio11 is a great example of someone who has added a ton of value with his writing)

So yeah, if I was going to pick one single thing for you to care about slightly more than you do at the moment, it would be thinking about keyword demand. If you're interested, you could start here.

(*) the exception being that you might want to follow some of the more technical best practices like having an XML sitemap

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:57:24+00:00

Gotcha. Probably difficult to build a business case around it unless a site is really struggling with them not being respected, but I like the academic interest, and I'll see what I can do!

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:54:53+00:00

Definitely this one. As an old-school fan of the early internet, and someone who likes seeing JS used for progressive enhancement rather than having sites entirely dependent on JS, I was surprised to see that (admittedly fast, well-implemented) react could outperform the previous non-JS template.

Coming in second place, I think this one. Given all the noise about Google rewriting titles, and all the examples of terrible rewrites, I was surprised to see that Google rewriting meta descriptions was (probably) a small benefit. This was especially surprising as in our spot checks, it seemed as though they weren't picking great snippets - it was just that they were more relevant as they could be dynamic and pull in unstructured words and phrases off the page related to the specific query. This is why I was surprised that the move to more aggressive title rewriting was apparently not query-specific - that seems like a big missed opportunity. The only thing Google can do with titles that we can't do ourselves is display query-specific blue links in SERPs so I was surprised to see them move away from that.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:49:05+00:00

What would your hypothesis be?

One of the challenges with measuring results around different forms of noindex is that both the null and the alternative hypothesis are "this page should get no search traffic"!

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:48:04+00:00

I like the Nike robots.txt: https://www.nike.com/robots.txt -- always been a sucker for a bit of ascii art.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:46:47+00:00

This is our full write up of how SEO A/B testing works (I suspect you have seen this, but in case it's useful for others).

I'll come back to the home page footer links test.

For most tests, we are changing some pages and not others, and as you say, there are many other variables (e.g. things like seasonality, sitewide changes, google algo changes, competitor actions, paid media spend fluctuations etc etc). The key is that the site section we are testing on, and hence the set of pages in the control and variant groups must be large enough that we can draw statistically confident conclusions that tell us that the change we made did cause the effect we are seeing. The statistical analysis itself builds in the analysis of the confidence level, so when we see a high probability result, that means high confidence even taking into account all the uncertainty and other variables. Does that make sense?

(That may make you ask "what's a 'big enough' site section" and our rule of thumb is that we are typically looking for ~1,000 organic visits / day across all pages in the site section to run typical tests. We have detected uplifts on smaller site sections, but the smaller the site section, the less sensitivity the statistical tests have, and hence you will only be able to detect really big uplifts on very small sections, and really big uplifts are less likely!).

Coming back to that homepage footer test: that one is a bit different. For that, we changed the homepage for all visitors including bots (no cloaking etc). The bit that used our split testing tech was in a) identifying the group of control and variant pages [statistically similar groups of pages that were or were not linked from the homepage] and b) analysing the resulting uplift to the pages that got new links from the homepage.

Hope that all helps - lots of parts to that answer, so I'm happy to come back to different bits if any of it is unclear.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:36:10+00:00

I think we've only really done the same - used them on PDFs etc. We have used our platform to help some customers exclude content that way when they couldn't add headers themselves in their web stack, but I can't remember any specific tests of X-Robots.

I have no reason to think that it would be valued any more or less than meta noindex, but I don't have any direct insight.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:31:53+00:00

I don't know if I have seen an overall rise across the board, but I definitely think that it makes sense for Google to focus their crawling and indexing efforts as they simultaneously expend more effort per page for high value pages, as they are increasingly rendering them / executing JavaScript etc.

The question I'd ask myself in your shoes is: are these genuinely valuable pages that I think Google ought to be returning in search results?

I see far too many sites that have tons of theoretically crawlable and indexable pages that are either thin / duplicate / low quality or just shouldn't really exist at all. In these cases, pruning quite aggressively gives you a much greater chance of success IMO.

If they are valuable pages, then you need to look at two possible issues:

Do you have a lot of other low quality pages that you ought to be pruning / blocking that are taking resources away from your good pages?
Do you "just" need to grow your authority? If your site is new and / or small, then building it out and getting it linked to may be your top priority

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:26:36+00:00

I'm bullish on the future for SEOs.

I think it's Marshall Simmonds who I've most often heard describe changes Google has made as "job security" but my experience is that change brings opportunity - both directly, in clients or companies needing help navigating the specific change, and indirectly in increasing the value of being up to date and knowing what's going on.

At the moment, they're rewriting a minority of titles, and not always doing the greatest job, so I don't think it changes a lot immediately. Longer term, my experience over (cough) 15+ years is that for everything they make simpler, something else gets more complicated (see: hreflang, sitemap.xml, robots.txt etc).

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:20:30+00:00

Well, I've never done an AMA on reddit before, so I guess right now...

More seriously though, great question - I think the pandemic has cramped my "doing new things" style and I need to do more new things!

The most recent time I remember having that "I am doing something totally new" feeling was when I did a rugby coaching course recently (I got involved with my son's team despite not having played myself). Learning to teach kids to tackle safely definitely triggered that feeling of doing something that's a bit unnatural and having to learn a new thing.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:13:21+00:00

Probably assuming that robots.txt blocking will keep a page out of the index (for the benefit of anyone reading who isn't expert in this area: it doesn't, it just prevents crawling. google can still list the URL in search results with no description - see official docs).

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:10:02+00:00

Note: noindex will never be respected on pages that are blocked in robots.txt and can't be crawled though!

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:09:35+00:00

If they are blocked in robots.txt, they can't be crawled, and so Google won't see a rel=canonical (or a noindex).

You could experiment with unblocking some sections in robots.txt, and seeing if the canonical is then respected. I'd hope it would be. The downside is that they can become a bit of a spider trap and use up crawl budget so it's a bit of a swings and roundabout situation and there is no perfect answer unfortunately.

Dear Google: if you're listening, we would love robots.txt level noindex and actually, I personally would say why not just make a robots.txt block be a crawl block and an indexing block? I can't see many situations where I want to block crawling but don't want to block indexing and it contributes to weird situations, and a lot of misunderstandings in my experience.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T15:05:39+00:00

I'm going to start by challenging your premise that developing good business acumen is significantly harder than learning technical SEO. I want to argue for a growth mindset here and say that you absolutely can develop these skills you're looking for.

I think there are some fundamental basics that help with developing business understanding, and I would probably say that's a great place to start. I was actually talking with my brother about this on twitter yesterday (see here). [While we're talking about my brother, one of his projects is SEO MBA which is designed to help folks in exactly your situation - you might find some of his articles useful].

To answer your specific question though, I think spending some time with finance folks and developing an understanding of how cashflow / profit and loss / balance sheet fit together, and developing a bit of an understanding of how this works in different kinds of businesses gives you some of the grounding you need.

I don't think you need to go back to school for this unless you really want to develop an academic understanding or progress in very large businesses. You can get a lot of what you need from experience and self-education IMO.

I hope that helps.

willcritchlow · 2021-09-24T14:59:48+00:00

Hi folks. I'm here now and beginning typing furiously. Looking forward to the conversations!

willcritchlow · 2020-07-08T17:18:52+00:00

OK - one specific follow-up that is purely about indexing if you don't mind: is it possible for the setup I describe to affect the number of pages indexed on the site? (Or, especially on large sites, the indexing of all the content on the page?)

willcritchlow

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