A technical guide to SEO

Google plays go (learnt yesterday), develops self driving cars and robots. And it still cant understand which piece of text on simple website is the header. Without SEO. Right?

Re: A technical guide to SEO

#6

Post by gk1 » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

atirip wrote: post #5

Google plays go (learnt yesterday), develops self driving cars and robots. And it still cant understand which piece of text on simple website is the header. Without SEO. Right?

Why make it play go with your site when you can make it play checkers?

Nobody's claiming Google can't figure out the visual structure of a page or determine the canonical page within a set of duplicates, but evidence[0][1] has shown that making it easier for Google to do those things has a positive effect.

[0] Search Engine Ranking Factors 2015: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

[1] Anecdotal evidence: Just two weeks ago one of my clients' sites had a temporary issue with 301-redirects, causing some old URLs to return 404 instead of redirecting to new URLs, and the www version of every page not redirect to the non-www version. Search traffic nearly halved the following week (this past week). I patched up those issues and we're already seeing things resume back to normal.

Re: A technical guide to SEO

#7

Post by facepalm » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 5:33 PM UTC

I think AdSense used to warn of possibly lower earnings when switching to HTTPS, because somehow less ads are available over HTTPS. Is that still the case?

Re: A technical guide to SEO

#8

Post by graeme » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

Great overview, thank you. This gave me several things to fix I hadn't been aware of, and my site generally already does well with on-site SEO.

Actually, what do you recommend for ongoing monitoring of the things flagged by wget scripts? I could assign it to my programmer. I also think Moz or similar services handle that automatically. It might be more effective just to outsource it to them?

My current solution has been to avoid monitoring it, which isn't optimal.

Re: A technical guide to SEO

#9

Post by dazc » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 6:15 PM UTC

facepalm wrote: post #7

I think AdSense used to warn of possibly lower earnings when switching to HTTPS, because somehow less ads are available over HTTPS. Is that still the case?

I've switched a handful of sites from http to https over the past 7 months and the drop of adsense earnings has been negligible.

Re: A technical guide to SEO

#10

Post by pibefision » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 6:29 PM UTC

Search Engine Optimization starter guide from Google: http://goo.gl/zTsclA