Post of the Week
Content
How to tag your keywords 10X faster and beat your SEO competition on insights
This is coooooool. Manual keyword tagging can be a huge, boring pain but Christian Højbo Møller has saved the day with a process (and free Google Sheet) to do this at scale.
Tech
Killing your darlings – a practical guide for cutting the dead wood
A superb post by John Warner on getting rid of the chaff on your website. You know, the posts that aren't relevant anymore, the articles which cannibalise others, and content that just sucks. Where mosts posts talk about cutting content for the purpose of conserving crawl budget, this post comes at it from the angle of UX.
Monitoring unused CSS by unleashing the raw power of the DevTools Protocol
Unleashing the power of the headless browser 🔥. Ever looked at unused CSS in Chrome Dev Tools? This post shows you how to do that at scale using Puppeteer, a node.js library.
Common Robots.txt Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Sam Marsden with another smasher. I'm sure this will unearth some stuff you didn't know previously about the robots.txt file. I also enjoyed this comment about adding wildcards to the end of rules 'While this doesn’t usually cause any problems, it may cause you to lose the respect of colleagues and family members.'
How to get new pages or site updates indexed by Google quickly
I'm so excited by Google's indexing API - pushing URLs at scale to Google sounds like good news to me! This post by Richard Baxter introduces the API, alongside other ways to get new pages indexed, or your site re-crawled.
Tools
A Rank Monitor system on Data Studio using Search console Average Position.
Love this Data Studio report displaying Search Console average position. Check it out - it might be a good one to append to your existing reports!
Interesting AMA last week with Gary Illyes, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst. It's always worth tuning into these things, but I guess you should also take them with a pinch of salt.
Google has to be very wary with what they say publicly as spammers can go crazy. Gary even said so himself, "I can't give a concrete answer here because spammers would have a field day with it."
There were answers from Gary on how Google uses search interaction metrics, which are likely true, but far from the whole truth. He commented that search interactions are used primarily as evaluative metrics in live experiments for new algorithm changes. From multiple patents, comments from several ex Googlers, and my own experience, I highly doubt this is the only use case. Google's former Search Quality Chief, Udi Manber said that:
"The ranking itself is affected by the click data, If we discover that, for a particular query, hypothetically, 80 percent of people click on Result No. 2 and only 10 percent click on Result No. 1, after a while we figure probably Result 2 is the one people want. So we'll switch it."
Anyways, have a gander and see what you think! 👀
Andrew Charlton