Post of the Week
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The Ultimate Guide to Robots.txt for SEOs
Although robots.txt files seem like an easy to understand topic, in reality it's one of the more complex topics within Technical SEO. Why? For starters, because robots.txt files influence crawl budget, duplicate content and JavaScript rendering. What's more, different search engines interpret robots.txt differently.
Details matter, and ContentKing put together the ultimate guide to help you get your robots.txt right.
Tech
How To Automate Screaming Frog With Google Data Studio
Oh wow, automate your Screaming Frog crawls with Data Studio. This is super smart from Evgeniy Orlov 🔥
Internal Link Analysis with Python
Not sure I've seen an internal linking post this deep or technical before. Justin Briggs introduced me to graph theory in this post, and I'm now in a rabbit hole trying to better understand my client's internal link graphs. 🤓🐇
Build automated SEO audits with Slack+Python
Create automated audits in Python for sitemap status code checks, internal link checks and missing meta description checks, and get alerted in Slack. Great stuff by Stefan Neefischer!
Regex for Marketers: Plain English, Real World Examples [VIDEO]
This is seriously gold. A 45 minute video on regex for marketers by the fantastic Annie Cushing. Regex is very confusing imo, but Annie has made it a lot more understandable!
Processes & Frameworks
Triple R: a new technique to accelerate your progress
Huge fan of this project management process.
Prioritise tasks in the order that they’ll most quickly reduce the project’s remaining risk. This has been a game changer for me. 💡
A modern understanding of SEO
Enjoyed this from Kevin Indig.
He ends with a great point, relevant to the theme of this issue:
"We need to think about SEO more like medicine or investing. We have rough ideas of what works, but a single data point proves nothing. We need to make assumptions and then ruthlessly question and test them."
Welcome to the SEO MBA (Newsletter)
I rarely, if ever, promote other newsletters on The Weekly SEO (obviously). BUT...I know this is going to be awesome and you should go subscribe, now. The SEO MBA by Tom Critchlow .
Read This Before You Run Your First SEO A/B Test
Another pragmatic approach to SEO testing, well described by Trevor Fox. 🙌
Tools
Structured Data - Change History & Alerts
This is so cool from Sitebulb! They've created a structured data timeline and you can get alerts when anything changes. 💡
My Products 💡
Forecasting For SEO (Video Course) - 1 Week To Go
Everything I’ve learned, tried and tested about SEO forecasting. Pre-order for $29. Increases to $59 on Launch.
Hi there 👋
Theme of the week: SEO A/B testing.
AJ Kohn published: The Comforting Mirage of SEO A/B Testing (my Post of the Week) last week. While the article wasn't completely against A/B testing in SEO it did raise some valid limitations, such as sample size requirements, getting the right sampling in each cohort and differences in pages being indexed in each cohort.
This sparked a healthy debate.
Will Critchlow, CEO of SearchPilot, an SEO A/B testing platform, countered equally with some great points.
There's also another post in this issue by Trevor Fox, who offers another take on how to do A/B tests.
Hopefully the debate introduced A/B testing to a wider audience and improved testing methodologies going-forward. I think it did.
Have a great week! 🙌
P.s I'm launching my Forecasting for SEO course next Monday! Check it out.
Andrew Charlton