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SEO for Web Engineers

johnwdefeo.com

51–57 of 57 posts

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#51
post #35

The interesting one for me was measuring error rates (if your JS heavy web page calls the server 100 times, if two users try to load and one gets 500 that should be 50% error rate but it looks like So it feels like a piece of JS that says I have seen everything that should load load ok, then reports home with the page seems a good idea. Probably quite doable - can JS see the network load like web developer tools ?

JS errors, page size, HTML errors, bad web design, CSS problems, SSL and broken layout has nothing to do with organic results or SEO and it is not proved that it affects your organic result position. Even if it does, in-page problems doesn't affect your result not even by 1%. 99% is backlinks and their quality (or course). Example: check techcrunch.com and debug/inspect their homepage. 15 JS errors, 6mb in size, no D…

Exactly! And I think the problem with an SEO guide to engineers in particular, is that it ends up being a list of technical things. Things that are easy to quantify and that are black or white. Those are marginal. Yet an engineer can increase the score in some tool from X to 1.257X so they’re happy.

It’s much harder to write a guide on how to engage and delight your audience, and how to get the attention of other sites and the authority and trust to get linked to.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#52
post #34

I'm hoping my free SEO monitoring app in Cloudflare can at least help with the technical dirty work. It is powered by the Cloudflare Workers platform which allows for quick fixing from within the app https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/ranksense

This is an interesting use of Cloudflare Workers.

My unsolicited advice is to list some specific SEO fixes and improvements in the app description. It's not clear to me what it does and the screenshots are hard to parse.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#53
post #49

The million dollar question is how to get good rankings for good keywords without having to spend too much money. This article does a good job describing how to keep a successful site optimized but actually getting the rankings is not covered much. Never, ever, let marketers send newsletters and promotional e-mails from the same IPs that the websites are hosted on. A rogue employee who violates the CAN-SPAM act may r…

I don’t understand, a mail server sends an email and it has an ip address. There’s no website associated with that. Sure, there’s an email address, and a load of rules about how to help avoid spam by setting up SPF and DKIM and DMARC to prove that the mail server is allowed to send on behalf of the domain. And if the specific IP address of the mail server ends up on a spam list, you can try to get it removed or start…

You could potentially host an spa on s3 which hits an api. In that situation the spa would still be indexable. And I dont think google removes you from the index, but spam coming from the same ip seems to be a negative criteria.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#54
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand, a mail server sends an email and it has an ip address. There’s no website associated with that. Sure, there’s an email address, and a load of rules about how to help avoid spam by setting up SPF and DKIM and DMARC to prove that the mail server is allowed to send on behalf of the domain. And if the specific IP address of the mail server ends up on a spam list, you can try to get it removed or start…

You could potentially host an spa on s3 which hits an api. In that situation the spa would still be indexable. And I dont think google removes you from the index, but spam coming from the same ip seems to be a negative criteria.

Is it negative criteria though? It seems to me that with shared hosting the situation would be so common that it would seem to be big false positive metric. Granted, it’s a couple of years ago and things maybe have changed, but here’s Matt Cutts saying that it doesn’t (for that reason) https://youtu.be/4peSUa2FKvk

I think this is the danger of the SEO industry. On the one hand you have bad actors trying to game the system, but on the other, people selling you legitimate SEO are often claiming rules as fact with little or no evidence - because it’s different to verify.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#55
post #22
post #18

Don't waste your time reading this article, it just mentions random points about how to have a functional web app, plus in a perfect world SEO should not exist, it's the Search Engine's job to find the content and show the user the content he is looking for, not the developers. I shouldn't have to add "hacks" in my code for the Google Crawler to understand my site the same way users already do.

Eh, not sure I'd say SEO shouldn't exist. At least, the techniques used for it are all things that should be the expected default on every site, like having a logical HTML structure with heading tags, having a useful unique title for every page, having a description shown in listings, logically linking to relevant content, rendering the page on the server rather than the client, etc. Maybe black hat/spammy SEO should…

I agree with doing SEO as of implenting stuff the way it should be implemented (use tags as they were supposed to do, add rich snippets for ratings and prices), but not with stuff done purely to optimize for a search engine. As I said, the article doesn't mention any real SEO techniques, but only good practices that should be known by any junior web dev (site should load fast, use a CDN, mind the cache, etc.)

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#56
post #34

I'm hoping my free SEO monitoring app in Cloudflare can at least help with the technical dirty work. It is powered by the Cloudflare Workers platform which allows for quick fixing from within the app https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/ranksense

This is an interesting use of Cloudflare Workers. My unsolicited advice is to list some specific SEO fixes and improvements in the app description. It's not clear to me what it does and the screenshots are hard to parse.

Thanks. This is actually great feedback. I will list the issues we fix so far in the next update.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#57
>A bot in Russia isn't automatically bad and a bot in the United States isn't automatically good. Plenty of bad actors deploy bots from within Amazon's U.S.-based AWS servers.

"Checked his post history. Russian bot confirmed."

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