tools

How To Find The True Size Of Your Site Using GSC’s Index Coverage Reporting (And Why It’s Important For SEO)

So, how large is your site? No, how large is it really?? When speaking with companies about SEO, it’s not long before I ask that important question. And I often get some confused responses based on the “really” tag at the end. That’s because many site owners go by how many pages are indexed. i.e. … Read more

How To Use Scroll Depth Tracking, Adjusted Bounce Rate, and Average Time On Page As A Proxy For User Engagement and Content Quality

I was helping a company a few months ago that got hit hard by recent algorithm updates. When digging into the audit, there were a number of problems that were surfaced, including content quality problems, technical SEO problems, user experience issues, and more. From a content quality perspective, the site had an interesting situation. Some … Read more

Night of the Living 302s: How SEO Crawlers and GSC’s Index Coverage Reporting Helped Me Surface A Sinister 302 Redirect Problem [Case Study]

I recently started helping a new client that has seen a continued drop in search visibility over time. After getting up to speed on the site, its history, business model, etc., I started a thorough crawl analysis and audit of the site. The crawl analysis involves performing an enterprise crawl and then subsequent surgical crawls … Read more

The Magically Moving Meta Robots Tag And The Potential SEO Danger It Brings [Case Study]

{Update: Google’s John Mueller replied to my question on Twitter about this situation. You can read John’s feedback here.} {Update 10/27/18: My client’s dev team figured out the problem and I provided more information about that below.} I’ve been helping a client with a large-scale CMS migration recently and came across a very interesting, and … Read more

Meet Newsguard, A Team Of Quality Raters For News Publishers – And Another Way To Check Site Trust, Credibility, and Transparency

Update: April 2022 I just published a post explaining how sites can use NewsGuard’s nutritional labels to avoid manual actions for violating Google’s medical policy (for News and Discover). This is based on helping sites that received manual actions in January of 2022. —– Based partly on the August 1 Google algorithm update, there’s been … Read more

How Sinister Mobile Popups Only Triggering For Uncookied Users (and Googlebot) Could Impact SEO, Usability, and Monetization

Users hate popups. But they really hate mobile popups. They are annoying, inhibit the user experience, and can cause serious user frustration. But mobile popups can also cause problems from an SEO standpoint. First, Google has a mobile popup algorithm that can demote pages using an interstitial or popup when users visit from the search … Read more

More data awaits: How to juice up your Index Coverage reporting by adding directories to Google Search Console (GSC)

Google’s new index coverage reporting is killer. For a long time, the SEO community wanted something more powerful than the simple index status report in the old GSC. You know, something we could really sink our SEO teeth into. And we finally received that in the form of the new index coverage reporting in the … Read more

Measuring Infinity – How to identify, analyze, and fix an infinite spaces problem using a powerful SEO software stack

If you are working on a large-scale site, you need to be very careful that you don’t create infinite spaces. That’s when a site generates a near-endless list of urls that Google can end up crawling. Google does not want to churn through endless urls and it can cause problems on several levels SEO-wise. That’s … Read more

M-Dot Versus D-Top: How To Hack DeepCrawl’s Test Site Feature To Compare Your Mobile And Desktop Sites SEO-wise

Last month I wrote a post covering a number of real-world mobile problems I surfaced on sites using separate mobile urls (like m-dot subdomains). With Google moving to a mobile-first index, it’s extremely important to make sure your mobile urls contain the equivalent content, structured data, canonical tags, hreflang tags, etc. as your desktop urls. … Read more

How To Quickly Remove A Rogue Subdomain From Google Using The Remove URLs Tool In GSC – And Then Make Sure It Stays Out (Case Study)

I’ve written about Murphy’s Law for SEO before, and it’s scary as heck. And that’s especially the case for large-scale websites with many moving parts. Murphy’s law is an old adage that says, “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” For example, no matter how much you plan and prep for large-scale SEO changes, … Read more

How To Use Facebook Pixel Reporting To Identify Who Is Secretly Using Fetch And Render In GSC On Your Site

I can see you, and now you can see me. :) A few months ago, Dan Sharp from Screaming Frog wrote a killer post about how to use fetch and render in Google Search Console (GSC) on almost any site. Fetch and render in GSC enables you see how Googlebot is rendering any page on … Read more