Category: SEO – Search Engine Optimization

The folks at Shopify were excited to announce that they now let you modify and edit your robots.txt file. Previously, Shopify handled it all automatically but now, if you know better, you can make your own modifications.

10 years ago, the folks at Search Engine Land (that includes me) released the first edition of the SEO Periodic Table. Since then, we’ve updated the table a few times as SEO has changed over the years. We did it again for the 10th anniversary of the t…

Kristina Azarenko posted an outstanding SEO poll on Twitter asking on average, how many of your SEO recommendations get implemented? The results show that 56% of SEOs who answered the poll said that fewer than 40% of their recommendations are actually…

Nicolas Bouchand posted on Twitter that he is working on his thesis and selected SEO as the subject. He asked on Twitter “What do you think are the trends that will shake up the sector and that will absolutely have to be mastered?” John Mueller of Goo…

In December, Google told us they would move its structured data testing tool from Google’s site to the Schema.org domain. Well, now, the Schema.org markup validator is now live, in beta at validator.schema.org.

Aleyda Solis posted a poll on Twitter asking SEOs if SEO “easier, more difficult or as difficult as 5 years ago to achieve results/goals in the SEO processes you work on?” Over 1,000 results came in and 60% of SEOs say it is harder now to do SEO than …

Abby Reimer posted a Twitter poll that asks is there a shortage of SEO talent available on the market. The poll is open for the next several hours, so please take it. It does seem like there are a lot of jobs on the market currently hiring SEOs but t…

They say in business, one way to ensure your long-term failure, is to use the line “we’ve always done it this way.” Maybe the same is true for SEO? Esben Rasmussen, an SEO, posted on Twitter “I am just in an uphill struggle with a global IT departmen…

Ruth Everett asked on Twitter if SEOs consider accessibility when doing SEO on a web site. The question was worded “Hey SEO friends, a quick q, is website accessibility something you consider when working on a sites SEO?” The vast majority of SEOs do, …

Gary Illyes from Google posted four Twitter polls asking SEOs how has their work changed since the COVID-19 outbreak. The results seems super interesting to me, because it seems for some SEOs, nothing much changed but for others, it changed a lot.
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Marie Haynes is posting a weekly poll on Twitter asking SEOs if they are seeing organic search traffic declines for their customers sites during the COVID-19 period. Most are reporting declines in the past week, abut 60%. While about 16% are saying th…

John Mueller of Google was asked “I’d like to become the greatest SEO ever, what would you advise him to study?” John responded “There are so many interesting facets of what SEOs do, I’d recommend trying out different areas to find one those you’re pa…

At SMX the team did a short interview with Frédéric Dubut, the PM of overall Bing’s core search team, who said that he thinks SEOs need to move from keyword based research practices to intent research practices. He said with search engines focusing more on intent versus keywords, with the deployment of BERT and other machine learning techniques – that is an important area SEOs should focus on in 2020.

Russ Jones from Moz did a Twitter poll asking if you report rankings related to Bing and Yahoo to your clients and stakeholders. With almost 900 responses, 86% said they do not, while only 14% said they do.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google “never supported crawl-delay in robots.txt.” Bing’s Frédéric Dubut said on Twitter “Bingbot supports crawl-delay.” That is not to say Google does not let you slow the crawl, you can and here is how.

Pedro Dias, a former Googler, posted on Twitter this line “Doing SEO means either the website, or the search engine, or both, are not dealing effectively–and, to some extent, efficiently–with the web as they should.” In which, Gary Illyes from Google…

Chris Green posted a few Twitter polls about what folks in the SEO profession do after the SEO audit is complete. The responses to the poll show that many times SEO professionals do not agree on implementation or maybe “it depends.”

Dawn Anderson, an SEO who likes to listen to professors and PhDs give lectures about how search works, posted a poll asking if the SEO community thinks awareness of IR (information retrieval) is important or not for SEOs. Most SEOs said it is importan…

As some of you may have heard in my interview with Rand Fishkin, he was planning on relaunching the search ranking factors survey. Well, he did it and you can participate in the survey over here.

Tomorrow at SMX West I am moderating a panel called Machine vs. Man: What Really Matters For SEO Success. One of the panelists is Frédéric Dubut from Bing and he posted a poll asking what is more important for SEOs, understanding the search quality raters guidelines or the ranking algorithm updates?