Take The Google "Crawling" Test!
Take The Google "Crawling" Test!
#SEOForLunch 240 - Google recently made an update to their crawl budget documentation. It now includes a small quiz so you can test yourself on your true crawling knowledge.
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Hi Lunch Buddies!
I hope each of you had a fantastic weekend. I made it back home after a week in Wisconsin boating, fishing, and BBQing. I don't consider myself anything but a novice fisherman but I was able to catch a few. I did work a bit but was able to keep it under 20 hours. Overall I call the week a huge WIN.
Speaking of winning. My buddy Sean Markey launched his own SEO newsletter called "Rank Theory". If you enjoy snarky commentary and behind-the-scenes analysis of websites that rank, then you should definitely subscribe.
Let's jump into this week's #SEOForLunch.
Wix Continues to Up Its SEO Game
[sponsor]
In the latest of a series of major SEO upgrades, Wix now offers full URL customization.
You can customize subdirectory names, edit, remove or add a prefix to your URLs or even create a completely flat URL structure in blog and product pages. Plus, Wix automatically takes care of creating 301 redirects for all impacted URLs.
That’s on top of a long list of advanced SEO capabilities that are already built-in:
Structured data out of the box
Bulk 301 redirects
Editable robots.txt file
GMB integration
Enhanced eCommerce for GA
Bot log reports
Full control of meta-tags
Automatic page caching
Instant homepage indexing (Google)
Official Search Engine Updates
Article: Google Launches Crawl Budget Quiz
What's Important:
How Google crawls a website and what impacts its ability to crawl are commonly misunderstood. As a result, Google created a small 13 question quiz to test your understanding of crawling.
Nick's Take:
I got 12/13 questions right. The one I got wrong was "Small sites aren't crawled as often as big ones." Their justification makes sense but I'd still argue for the answer being "true."
Article: Google Search Console Insights (behind the curtains)
What's Important:
Last month Google announced Search Console Insights as a new feature within Google Search Console. Given the amount of feedback and questions, Google published this article answering the more common questions.
Nick's Take:
If you read nothing else in this article, I recommend you skim through the section "Why is the data I see in Google Analytics different from Search Console Insights?" Too often do folks try to line these numbers up (I've done this too) and it's comparing apples to oranges. read the article to find out why.
Video: Google Explains How They Handle Copyright Claims
What's Important:
Google explains not only what copyrights are but how they are identified on the internet. They also explain how they may handle cases when copyright infringement reports are made.
Nick's Take:
Most understand that you can't take someone else's content and use it on your site. But how many of us are guilty of using someone else's image(s)? This is just another reason why ALL your content and media assets should be unique to your website.
Top SEO Resources From Last Week
2021 Influencer Compensation Report
Written by Andrew Evans, Intellifluence
Many won't consider this post relevant to SEO. I'll challenge that level of thinking. We all know creating content is great for SEO but you are not done when you hit "publish." Content that often sees the highest success is the ones that are promoted. That's where this article becomes really valuable. See how much you can expect to have a piece of content promoted across various social media channels and even blogs.
500+ unsolicited SEO tips
Written b Mark Williams-Cook, WithCandour
For a short period of time, I started sharing various SEO tips on Linkedin. At this time I connected with Mark and saw that he's been doing this forever. I immediately stopped my efforts as Mark is crushing it on this front. Mark has now taken 500 of his tips and put it all together in one blog post.
Manual vs Automatic SEO Audits
Written by Brad Mchargue, Portent
I've had this debate with many people. Normally it comes down to someone saying why spend $X,XXX for an SEO audit when you can just use Ahrefs or SEMRush. While both of those tools offer value, they are limited to what they are... tools. I agree 100% with Brad and my argument for manual audits has always been behind not only identifying the issues but being able to place a value on fixing each and prioritizing them within a large list of items that need to be fixed.
UTM Tagging for Google My Business
Video by Claire Carlile, Moz
Most people know that Google Analytics by default won't segment organic traffic coming from a map listing vs traditional organic rankings. However, if you add a UTM parameter to your URL within the maps listing you can easily track traffic/conversions coming from your GMB listing. This White Board Friday has something for everyone!
How to Maintain Organic Traffic When Merging Multiple Sites
Written by Tom Crewe, Search Engine Land
Most SEOs cringe when you float the idea of large migrations or combining websites. I tend to find these projects very exciting. Tom walks us through the process of identifying your most important pages across all sites and ensure they are migrated in a manner that doesn't risk your organic traffic. Make sure you get this right. No pressure. :)
Take the State of Tech SEO Survey
[#SEOForLunch Partner]
Women in Tech SEO and Aira are excited to launch their first annual survey, The State of Technical SEO.
What does technical SEO mean for companies and how is it different between agency-side and client-side?
What techniques and tools do people rely on to help with tech SEO?
How are SEOs measuring the impact of tech SEO?
Full survey results in report form with commentary by industry experts will be shared soon.
You Made It To The Bottom. You’re AWESOME!
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