tools

Gather, Crawl, Freak, and Fix – How To Run A Quick Health Check Of Top Landing Pages When Seeing A Drop In Organic Search Traffic

It can be extremely frustrating when experiencing a slow decline in rankings and organic search traffic. Could it be an algorithm update, technical SEO problems, or something else? The fact of the matter is that it could be a number of serious problems causing the drop. And unless you can isolate the problem, it’s hard … Read more

How To Check The X-Robots-Tag For Noindex Directives (Google Tools, Chrome Extensions, and Third-party Crawlers)

Updated: April 2022 The post now contains the most current tools I use for checking the x-robots tag for noindex directives. The list includes tools directly from Google, Chrome extensions, and third-party crawling tools. —— I have previously written about the power (and danger) of the meta robots tag. It’s one line of code that … Read more

Challenging Murphy’s Law – 8 Immediate SEO Checks After A CMS Migration Goes Live

CMS migrations are a necessary evil for many companies. If your current technical setup is inhibiting your business from doing what it needs to be successful, then a CMS migration could be your way out. But migrations should not be taken lightly, and especially for large-scale websites that are changing urls. Any time you change … Read more

How To Identify and Avoid Technical SEO Optical Illusions

Without a clean and crawlable website structure, you’re dead in the water SEO-wise. For example, if you don’t have a solid SEO foundation, you can end up providing serious obstacles for both users and search engines. And that’s never a good idea. And even if you have clean and crawlable structure, problems with various SEO directives can throw … Read more

From SEO Tools To Emulation To Devices, How To Check Smartphone Rankings As Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Rolls Out

We are now ten days into the mobile-friendly algorithm rollout, and to be honest, the impact has been somewhat underwhelming. I’ve been tracking many websites across categories and countries as the algorithm rolled out and it has been interesting to how some verticals were impacted, while others experienced no change. I didn’t personally see any fluctuations until … Read more

Sinister 404s – The Hidden SEO Danger of Returning The Wrong Header Response Code [Case Study]

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a small business owner about my SEO services. And what started out as a simple check of a website turned into an interesting case study about hidden SEO dangers. The company has been in business for a long time (30+ years), and the owner was looking to boost the … Read more

How To Identify A Mobile Rankings Demotion Using The New Search Analytics Report in Google Webmaster Tools

{Update: The Search Impact report was renamed to “Search Analytics” during the beta. The screenshots below will show “Search Impact” when the new report in Google Webmaster Tools is labeled “Search Analytics”.} April 21, 2015 is an important date. That’s the day when Google will begin using mobile friendliness as a ranking signal. There’s been a … Read more

XML Sitemaps – 8 Facts, Tips, and Recommendations for the Advanced SEO

After publishing my last post about dangerous rel canonical problems, I started receiving a lot of questions about other areas of technical SEO. One topic in particular that seemed to generate many questions was how to best use and set up xml sitemaps for larger and more complex websites. Sure, in its most basic form, … Read more

How To Get More Links, Crawl Errors, and Search Queries By Verifying Directories in Google Search Console (GSC)

{Updated on 2/8/16 to reflect the name change from Google Webmaster Tools to Google Search Console.} In my opinion, it’s critically important to verify your website in Google Search Console (GSC). By doing so, you can receive information directly from Google as it crawls and indexes your website. There are many reports in GWT that can … Read more

Rap Genius Recovery: Analyzing The Keyword Gains and Losses After The Google Penalty Was Lifted

On Christmas Day, Rap Genius was given a heck of a gift from Google.  A penalty that sent their rankings plummeting faster than an anvil off the Eiffel tower.  The loss in traffic has been documented heavily as many keywords dropped from page one to page five and beyond.  And many of those keywords used … Read more

Facebook Ads for eCommerce – How To Combine Custom Audiences, Lookalikes, and Unpublished Posts to Target Customers and Similar Users

I used to be extremely critical of Facebook Ads in the past.  But that’s before Facebook released a boatload of functionality for enhancing your campaigns.  Sure, marketplace ads, or ads running the right sidebar, have seen declining engagement over the years, but that’s just a fraction of what you can do now with Facebook Ads.  … Read more