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How I ruined my SEO

johnnyreilly.com

71–80 of 96 posts

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#71

Johnny is correct and this most likely has to do with the 404 backlinks and accidental misuse of Google Analytics. I recently did a comprehensive SEO audit for a web3 brand that saw a similar drastic drop in traffic. Here are some other things to keep in mind to rank better on Google. 1. One H1 per page SEO experts agree the best practice is to use one H1 per page. Headers help keep content structured for both Google…

Thoughts on AI driven content and SEO?

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#72
post #18

Screw Google. Optimize your website for real humans. Then advertise it outside of Google, for example: have a link to your website in your profile.

Which profile? I link to it in my GitHub / Mastodon / Twitter profiles for instance

I think they mean on HN.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#73
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spelling nazi hat on > Yea he should of phrased the title as a question. ... he should have phrased ... Spelling nazi hat off

That's the grammar Nazi hat. Pedant hat off.

Grammar looks fine to me. "Have" is just misspelled :)

And no, Godwin's is about comparing something in the topic to Nazis, not self identifying as a "XXX Nazi".

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#74
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good comment! I’d add in one more question so we can put the GA tag issue to rest. Does the writer have access to Google Search Central? They rename this product every six minutes. It used to be Google Webmaster Tools and it’s likely called something new now. Are there any manual actions or security alerts in there?? If Google performs a manual action or picks up certain types of security problems, they will tank tra…

No manual actions / security alerts I'm happy to say. Good callout

What about duplicate content? Have you tried searching direct quotes from your writing?

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#75

With your approach I'm sure you'll get back to normal traffic very soon. I think your conclusion is right. It's not one thing that cause the drop but a combination of things. Let's forget one sec about the traffic you had before and focus on the current situation. - Page speed: It's one of the most important ranking factor. You don't have to get 100 score, but passing the core web vitals score and having higher score…

> You don't have to get 100 score, but passing the core web vitals score and having higher score on mobile is recommended Note that they don't have a CWV score yet due to low traffic. But a 39 performance score from the simulated Lighthouse is often more than enough for a passing grade. That is: if a Moto G4 can do OK , your normal users will likely do great. For instance, a site I made[0] has a 22 from Lighthouse, b…

This is very helpful, thank you. Raised a ticket against Docusaurus to track this: https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/issues/8552 will experiment

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#76
I don't think sharing your Google analytics tag was the cause. If Google de-ranked unrelated sites using the same Google analytics id, we would see black-hat SEOs using that against their competitors. This ID isn't a secret.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#77
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually Hacker News strips out "How" (and "Why") at the start of article titles to prevent this. I'm not sure why there are exceptions sometimes.

You can edit it back in after submission.

Yes, true. I've noticed, though, that more often than not HN's deletion of "How"/"Why" makes the title better when it comes to my submissions. I'd estimate 95% of the time I let the HN-auto-edited version stand.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#78
I gave up on following the Google SEO bandwagon years ago. I write for people and most definitely NOT for Google. I get around 800 real users a month on my site across about 20 countries - top 3 being U.S U.K and for some reason China. I get maybe 20 or so emails asking questions or just saying thanks and they have to track me down to send those emails there's no "email me" link on the site. If you want to "monetize" your site then SEO away otherwise setup a Google site owner/developer account for the "advice" (page not mobile friendly for example) but ignore the Googley crap unless you like running on THEIR treadmill.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which pages or queries in GSC specifically lost traffic? Was there a handful of keywords that drove most of your traffic that you’ve lost? Or is it down across the board for all articles?

I still get traffic, but for things like a webpack define plugin post I wrote in 2017 and for 2 CSharp posts. "eslint for c#" and "build props" All my Azure / TypeScript / React / Bicep traffic dried up. No idea what replaced me.

It’s a bit annoying but you should be able to see in GSC what the ranking change was for particular URLs and queries by comparing before October and after October. You should also be able to see if the issue is whether the pages dropped in ranking or if some articles became de-indexed entirely. Take one of the page URLs that has dropped in traffic and make sure it’s still being indexed.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#80
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no ads. Over time I've change page URLs, partly as a migration from Blogger to Docusaurus, partly due to just changing page URLs without thinking about it. I've changed image URLs by switching from PNG to WebP and back again. Thanks for the link will check it out.

that was the latin "ad" aka "about" mobile friendly tests fails see https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly/result?id=SAu... and google can not render the page correctly also test with GSC page inspect -> render page -> see screenshot if this correlates with the software update (and the page URLs) did not change, then this is the strongest contender. check the crawling metrics in GSC google search console js,…

> that was the latin "ad" aka "about"

Latin "ad" is more like "to" or "toward", but I've never seen it used to mean "about". FWIW.

You might be aiming for "ab", with which autocorrect will likely refuse to cooperate.

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