Text-heavy notes and key takeaways from the SEO tracks I attended in Dallas, Texas for the State of Search conference on October 9th and 10th.
Slideshares referenced:
https://www.slideshare.net/crumplezone/paradigm-shifts-can-seo-survive-google
https://www.slideshare.net/johnleoweber/state-of-search-2017-cross-channel-marketing-by-john-leo-weber?qid=5ae4f63a-59dc-4e05-82c3-a67c5af6ef8c&v=&b=&from_search=7
https://www.slideshare.net/jonhenshaw/forget-amp-make-fast-sites?qid=44296fcd-b690-4fd4-bd75-467cdc6aaff5&v=&b=&from_search=1
https://www.slideshare.net/goralewicz/javascript-indexing-and-seo-the-naked-truth-state-of-search-2017-80617471
https://www.slideshare.net/MarthavanBerkel/structured-data-from-az-managing-your-knowledge-graph-state-of-search?qid=3d2086c7-af58-4036-8767-71394027902e&v=&b=&from_search=1
https://www.slideshare.net/TomAnthony/seo-by-hypothesis
https://www.slideshare.net/DawnFitton/cruft-busting-technical-debt-code-smell-and-refactoring-for-seo-state-of-search
https://www.slideshare.net/alanbleiweiss/owning-the-answer-box-knowledge-graph-and-featured-snippets
2. SEO TRACKS – TOPIC OVERVIEW
2
Will SEO survive Google?
AMP and site speed
Cross-channel agency
JS indexing
Bill Hunt rant
Structured data and Featured Snippets
Local SEO
SEO A/B testing
SEO audits
Technical debt
Gary Illeyes Q&A
4. Attack of the ads = Level 2 risk factor
There’s a natural tension between ads and organic at Google and we need to pay attention
Local Pack ads are live on mobile and being tested on desktop
Personalized results = Level 2 risk factor
Google assistant and Google Now are disruptive to the SERP and hyper personalized but
limited since it’s query-less and it will be hard to expand
Voice search: voice of doom = Level 3 risk factor
Voice searches are removing links
Google Home can send a link to your mobile app and you can send data back to
Google Home if it makes sense like with a recipe
SHARKNADO (LOW TO HIGH RISK)
4
5. Content wars: cached = Level 3 risk factor
Images don’t take you to the website when you click on it
Google Posts serve as an intermediary of curated content
Instant Answers and KG
Things like sports, weather, lyrics, and job listings (as of July), are creating curated
experiences that are sticky
Local KP replaces terrible UX of local websites and also prevent you from directly visiting the
site by serving a map pack
Content wars: creation = Level 4 risk factor
These self-contained content experiences are expanding although only in a few niches,
especially YMYL industries and are highly disruptive
On mobile, these packs are the only experience
Google is particularly concerned with bad finance and medical results
Ex. – “plan a trip” Google travel port, humpback whale sounds allows you to play the sound,
medical KP, NYC Fashion week, tabbed content for movies and books
SHARKNADO (LOW TO HIGH RISK)
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6. Takeaways
Prepare for further disruption
#1 concern is the increase of curated content experiences provided by Google and
their partners
#2 concern is the increase of cached content that keeps users on Google and adds an
additional step to click through to your site
Be aware of what’s going on and rollouts of changing SERP features both paid and organic
Optimizing for FS doesn’t work for all queries because voice results don’t provide the link
Pick your battles
Be careful with giving all your data away to Google (local, news, and FS is ok)
Think about short-term benefits
Seamless integration across devices is coming, likely within the next two years
Voice won’t take over, but will move between desktop >> mobile >> voice so we need to
better understand cross-device attribution
SHARKNADO (LOW TO HIGH RISK)
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9. Each department has different goals
PPC – leads and conversions, work individually, don’t have access to site, hoard data, use different
measurements of success
SEO – rankings, keyword stuff, disregard UX
Web Design – win awards, slow down websites, code bloat, not SEO-friendly, pretty
Geek Agency changed the department structure from vertical to horizontal to be client-based teams
Cross channel marketing secret formula:
1. Develop niche-specific content
2. Use traditional SEO, PPC, and Facebook to drive traffic
3. Use trap doors to capture email address
4. Use email addresses for retargeting and look alike audiences on Facebook to identify similar people
1. Drip campaigns are free automation for Mail Chimp
2. Emails should look like they came from a real person since typically the more HTML, the less
engagement
BUILDINGACROSS CHANNELAGENCY
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10. Takeaways
Share data and standardize goals
Communication
Shared learnings = employee happiness
Unity
Innovation
BUILDINGACROSS CHANNELAGENCY
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12. FORGETAMP: MAKE SITES FAST
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AMP is our punishment for ruining the internet which is horse crap because it’s Google-centric
since it’s about delivering ads faster
Faster = more traffic = more money
1. Refactor the code
Identify and test which JS and CSS code is actually used and whatever is unnecessary, get
rid of
WP is notorious for themes that are JS library intensive creating waste
Conditionally serve code only on pages that need it
Consolidate code into one file
Use inline CSS and JS
Put inline JS at the end of the pages
2. Use system fonts
Google fonts are pretty, but slow down the site and add up quickly especially when you add
weights and styles
Use system fonts that are optimized for displays
3. Optimize images
Responsive-sized images are not optimized
Optimized = serving different images on screen width through SCRSET
Automatically can be done for WP
13. MAKE SITES FAST
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4. Reduce and compress image size for PNGs and
JPGs
SVG vs. PNG vs. JPG
SVG: simple images, icons, vector
Don’t need to compress SVG
PNG: simple (8 bit) images
JPG: complex images and photos
Tool/plugin recommendations
FileOptim
WQ EWWW Image Optimizer
Doesn’t recommend TinyPNG because it
ruins image clarity
14. FORGETAMP: MAKE SITES FAST
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5. Cache, Gzip, and HTTP/2
Use Gzip via .htaccess file or via PHP at the top of templates
HTTP1 has every file from server to browser
HTTP2 is 95% faster than HTTP1 because it streams everything at the same time (single
stream)
6. Improve UX
AMP is bad UX so focus on primary purpose and consider a linear presentation of content
7. Use resource hints to speed up navigation
Enhances UX
Use prefetch to load resources in the background
Use prerender for pages you’re confident the user will visit next
Tool/plugin recommendations (use as few as possible)
WP Rocket (paid)
Checkgzipcompression.com
Gzip Resource
Free HTTP2 and SSL certificate through Cloudflare
16. JS INDEXINGAND SEO
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Background
JS is not as forgiving as HTML
HTML is easy to serve, but JS needs
to be exchanged into HTML
It all started when Google deprecated the
AJAX crawling scheme in 2015 and
announced they are able to generally
render JS like headless browsers – based
on Chrome 41
Google and JS have a complicated
relationship
Google created AngularJS so we
assume it’s ok but that’s not true as
proved in a huge JS indexing test
19. TAKEAWAYS
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Not all JS frameworks are crawled and indexed the same
Links generated by JS aren’t always crawled
Inline vs. external JS makes a huge difference
AngularJS2 always has to be server-side rendered
JS kills your crawl budget
Isomorphic JS is the ideal setup on React and Universal on Angular
Avoid JS if you care about more than Google
21. Goal #1: Help someone improve
Goal #2: Improve our industry
He wants to quit twice a week but has great clients, wins, and loves the digital community
Goal #3: Personal therapy
“Make Google your bitch and own all the results” – basically don’t fear Google and don’t panic,
prosper
“SEO’s job is to make websites that don’t deserve to rank, rank!”
“Paid search is the #1 tactic that marketers have offering precise targeting…that we squander
through crap ads”
“IT people hate SEOs because they sometimes gives bad advice from bad articles”
Celebrity SEO types
1. Speakers – don’t actually do the work, they are not technical
2. Seekers – figure it out, they are technical
3. Sheep – followers
BILLHUNT RANT
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29. Schema was originally designed by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex back in 2011,
Structured data appears as microdata inline or in block of code as JSON-LD
Appearing in search and email
Not just about rich results, but also CTR, engagement, semantic analytics
Think of it as marketing strategy and not just code
Marketers have new job to manage brands as Knowledge Graph maps
Focus on strategy, automate the rest
Don't need to manually create JSON-LD code! Things change, manually updated
structured data is just not scalable
1. Define important things about your brand/product/service/reviews/etc.
What's unique?
2. Relationship between each thing
Explicitly define with Wikipedia
Use schema paths - free tool by Schema App helps with this
3. Map Google features
Review the 40+ features Google supports to see what else you want to add
SCHEMAMARKUP FOR NON-DEVELOPERS
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30. Maintenance
Lots of updates happening constantly (44 since January)
Data items change
Showing value
Focus on rich results - hard to measure, have GSC rich results in SA, SEMRush shows the
features, so does Moz
BI = Semantic Analytics
Ex - Adding author field in GA custom dimension
How do you measure analytics of the machine channel?
Scaling
Hard for non-developers
Can you GSC Data Highlighter but it’s super basic and can’t link to external items
Create data feeds
Plug it in in GTM
Can use plugins for WP, Shopify, and Adobe Marketing Cloud but they are basic
TOP CHALLENGES
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31. Benefits
Business intelligence
Onsite search and chat box
Competitive research
Content strategy - what do search engines think are related?
Takeaways
Rethink schema as just code to part of marketing strategy
Look into Schema App
Pull in Analytics team to scale JSON-LD via GTM
Stay up to date for Schema changes and Google features
TAKEAWAYS
31
33. Background
AMP is open source, supported by
Google and Baidu but not Bing
Initial launch was meant just for major
news sites to be added to the AMP
News Carousel on mobile and the top
stories on desktop
Thrillist converted 90% of all articles
to AMP and got a 70% lift in traffic
(custom implementation)
AMP isn’t supposed to be a direct
ranking factor, but speed matters
9to5google.com found over
half of users would prefer to
click on AMP links
AMP LESSONS
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34. Myth #1: AMP only benefits news sites
No Broker has PWA and AMP (PWAMP) and saw drops in bounce rate
PWA – when a website has access to your phone’s hardware in almost the same ways as a
native mobile app
PWA prefetches the content by predicting what page you will visit next which allows the
site to function offline
Myth #2: AMP can’t work for ecommerce
It can with AMP Live List Component and AMP Bing Component, but there’s serious issues
with analytics data tracking
http://www.myntra.com/ is an ecommerce PWAMP example and eBay is still testing it out
Myth #3: Build it and they will come
Since content is served from Google’s CDN, all engagement metrics are messed up and
pages per sessions is usually close to 1.0
“Session Stitching” is a GA tactic that can be used to rectify these tracking issues
Other common issues are omitting navigation and CTAs
Myth #4: AMP sites have to be stripped down
It’s possible to maintain your mobile design with AMP without compromising on UI
AMP LESSONS
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35. PWA + AMP = PWAMP
You must fix analytics tracking if you implement AMP or it will be inaccurate
It’s still new and coming out with new templates so expect the unexpected
Many AMP pages return errors and won’t get cached by Google
Google won’t consistently show your pages as AMP if there are errors
Integrate dynamic components to improve UX and maintain functionality as much as possible
Validate your pages using Chrome Developer Tools or another validator
https://validator.ampproject.org/
TAKEAWAYS
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38. Crawl site
Export in spreadsheet
Get Moz rank for each then normalize MozRank
Use NetworkX or similar to in it
Then add a new page, linked from homepage then see the change - would the homepage
change in PR - could actually gain
Actually - homepage small drop in PR when adding link to another page
WEIGHTED INTERNALPR
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39. Keyword targeting
Test using SERP Turkey and Amazon Mechanical Turk
Panda and Quality
Panda created using human rather info then fed into machine learning algo to replicate
results, did algo overlay in 2011, then 2016 its part of core and live
Suggest panda surveys to capture useful customer info to prioritize efforts
Would you trust info from this website?
Is this written by experts?
Split testing
Hypothesis: page HTML is verbose, adding list of products as structured markup will make
the intent clearer, had an 11% lift but didn’t work for other sites because they didn’t have
dirty HTML
Freshness
Date annotations = important
Regularly making small updates helps freshness with dateModified itemprop, got 8%
lift in traffic
SEO SPLITTESTING
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41. Try to prove with data before launching
Ex. – Adding “Free Shipping” to the title tags for one client worked where for another it didn’t
We cannot predict rank with certainty
Even experts struggle with predictions
Move forwards with further data, build hypothesis, run tests
Free tool Distilled split tester (DistilledODN)
SERP Turkey
TAKEAWAYS
41
43. Top challenges facing marketers include:
Generating enough traffic and leads
Proving ROI
Securing enough budget
New era of consumers
Traditional >> Digital Transitional >> Digital Natives
Traditional are going away and they are offline only
Digital Transitional are more tech savvy but will do online research then buy offline
Digital Natives do everything online, are not brand loyal, want everything to be
personalized, authentic, and “not suck”
TV commercials >> Facebook ads >> Google Local
Commercials (wrong people, wrong time)
Facebook ads are personalized (right people, wrong time)
Google Local (right people, right time)
4/5 consumers use search engines to find local info
Digital is so disruptive now that companies are focusing purely on understanding digital and natives
(Air B&B and Uber own nothing)
Life expectancy of Fortune 500 companies was 75 years in 1955 and 15 years in 2015
LOCALINTENT ENGINE
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44. Top Three Local SEO Ranking Factors:
1. User’s location
2. Relevance
3. User’s actions
Five Pillars to Enterprise Local SEO
1. Business Intelligence & Analytics – invest in a local tool
2. Data Integrity – critical to NAP consistency
1. Data sanitation
2. Data normalization
3. Data compliance
3. Preferred landing pages – PLPs, technical, and on-page SEO
1. Don’t use subdomains
2. Setup taxonomy by country >> state >> city >> neighborhood (everyone forgets about
neighborhood)
4. Digital PR – page-level backlinks, reviews, spam fighting
1. BrightLocal can trigger alerts if someone tried to change your GMB data
2. Create review funnel to automatically deter bad reviews with auto email asking for feedback
1. If happy, ask them to add a review to a third-party website and share it
2. If unhappy, ask how we can help make it better
LOCALINTENT ENGINE
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45. Invest in a local tool to get analytics from and use features like alerts if someone tries to do
“negative local SEO”
Organize your site’s taxonomy not just by city, but also by neighborhood (makes sense for locations
with multiple locations in a major city in my opinion)
Create your own review funnel to prevent getting negative reviews and boost positive reviews
TAKEAWAYS
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47. Fred is a joke, not actionable, happens multiple times a day
Google looks at social mentions and sentiment
"I click on a lot of ads mostly because they are more relevant than organic search results. This is
shameful but stuff we couldn't discover.”
Technical SEO
• 302 / 301 - should pass the same still
• "I would do whatever"
Title tags
• Won’t be able to opt out of Google rewriting title tags
Don’t use noindex tags
Lowering your own traffic, don’t like idea of doing it, much rather improve pages, if not
showing up, not indexed, not effecting site (Corner cases: hacked sites)
Don't remove old content or comments unless spammy/low quality
Does usability impact rankings?
• “Why do you hate me?”
FS changes a lot, still under development
GARY ILLEYES Q&A– GRAIN OF SALT TIME
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48. Mobile First Index – small portion of sites are being tested now
If site passes test, there’s a chance they could move it to the MFI, then monitor the traffic to
make sure not losing, if you have m dot and traffic declines, yell at John Mu
Take links from desktop for now until figure out for mobile
Hreflang plus canonical - update canonical for mobile? John created diagram for hreflang
mobile and Google is still figuring it ourselves
Penguin - very good at discounting links but should we still do the disavow?
"Do whatever makes you feel better“
Personally doesn’t disavow anything
When nofollow everything because of manual action penalty for linking from sponsored posts
Nofollow dangerous for int links - thinks it's bat shit stupid
GARY ILLEYES Q&A– GRAIN OF SALT TIME
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50. Technical debt makes crawling, indexing, query
clustering, and semantic understanding more
complex for search engines
Can be done by accident, intentionally, or
intentionally with awareness (we will fix it
later)
Debt is inevitable for project success and
70% of all projects fail
Project success is when you produce
the planned deliverables within budget
and on time (including approved
changes)
40% of SEOs wait more than a year to get critical
dev tasks done
Top issues are legacy technology limitations,
marketers saying “we’ll SEO it later”, and
organizations running fragile instead of agile
Unpaid SEO technical debt leads to SEO
bankruptcy
Google won’t wait very long for you to
deal and fix your technical debt
REDUCING THE BURDEN OF TECHNICALDEBT IN SEO
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51. Search engines never forget and we are finding that they have a lot of storage
Incremental crawling never ends = the web gets bigger and bigger
When there is consistency in signals, search engines use prediction based priority scheduling
Helps maximize the index freshness
REDUCING THE BURDEN OF TECHNICALDEBT IN SEO
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52. Generational software cruft
Spaghetti code or code that’s wanted, badly designed, and unnecessary complicated
Legacy code bases and deprecation (ex. – AJAX and Flash)
Content cruft
Poor quality content signals build up over time as incremental crawling continues to gather
signals
“Googlebot gets where water couldn’t”
Ex. – Google indexes staging and test sites somehow
Architectural and semantic cruft
Taxonomy changes can compound into semantic loss as weaken topical authority signals
“Concept drift” is the blurring of concept relatedness and topical dilution and can trigger AI
URL cruft – no URLs are ever gone, only the resource there is gone
Ex. – Filename extensions and junk directories like /public/
410 HTTP status codes are still recrawled just in case something changes
Crawl cruft
Crawl frequency is based on URL historical change and importance rate
URLs are added to the “queue”
Push indexing is when Google indexes a URL through fetch and submit or XML
sitemap submissions
Pull indexing is where Google indexes a URL through natural crawling and discovery
TYPES OF “CRUFT” THAT CREATE TECHNICALDEBT
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56. GSC analysis
Add everything to GSC from the
past and present and review the
reports for patterns
Ex. – internal link report for
“relatedness” and URL importance
Server/IP block analysis
Review IP neighbors or sites on
the same server as you and ask
questions
Server log file analysis
Review all protocols and sites but
filter out bot emulators
Plan to repay the debt using the
MoSCoW Approach and Refactoring
(restructure existing code, altering
internal structure without changing its
external behavior or a small series of
behaviors that preserve
transformations)
ACKNOWLEDGE, CALCULATE, PRIORITIZE, REPAY DEBT
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59. GSC URL Parameters Tool is a directive for Google so use it with caution
Helps guide Google with crawl rules and hint building
Revisit all past .htaccess files
Look to rewrite and reorder rules for efficiency with regex or cut out old rules still firing
Fix redirect chains
Remove redundant files like JS and CSS
Avoid relative URLs vs. absolute URLs particularly in WP
Review canonical link relation in all forms
Ex. – redirects, canonicals, hreflang, HTTPS are all forms of canonicalization but rel next/prev is
NOT
Rebuild strong semantics and relatedness
Rather than removing content, improve it (upcycling URLs)
Use co-occurring terms to develop strong semantic clues and conceptual structures
Find what correlates in Google’s eyes using https://www.google.com/trends/correlate
Create topical hubs for focused crawled
DIVERTTHE DEBT
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60. Build well categorized and conceptually structured sitemaps
XML sitemaps pass URL importance signals
Always check them periodically even if they autogenerate
Create externally hosted XML sitemaps to take back control and jump the dev queue
Forget about setting priority and last modified tags
Exclude lower quality sections of the site
Optimize and deoptimize internal links to increase and decrease URL importance
Accept that some SEO technical debt is necessary for agility but do your best to avoid it in the first place
and chip away at it over time
DIVERTTHE DEBT
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62. C suite thinks in PowerPoint slides, not Excel
Developers don’t want to waste time so they need separate doc like excel
UX, IA, and taxonomy of websites applies to audits
Don’t flip back and forth from topics, each should flow each other logically to tell the story
Your client doesn’t think about you when you're not around -- it's just the way it is
Help your stakeholders - if they cant make the case when you're not around you can’t get it
done
Create standalone doc for each topic
What it is, why important, what needs to be done, priority level, who needs to do it
Show don’t tell
Use screenshots and examples to illustrate your point
Supplemental materials
Include a checklist with step by step input toons and link back to audit
Prioritization - cant be replaced by a tool
May cost too much
Site may replatform in a year
May not be worth it (long URLs)
SEOAUDITS YOUR CLIENT CAN UNDERSTAND
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63. 1. Budget
• Fix sales process for people who can afford your services
2. Busy-ness
• Nagging is customer service, especially agency,
• Explicitly state I need this from you this week
3. Bad relationships
• Internal politics, especially internal
• Know your audience
4. Brain overload
• Break it down make tasks bite-sized
• Ex - page load time = big where compress images = small
SEOAUDITYOUR CLIENT CAN UNDERSTAND
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64. Audits are expensive, charge accordingly because they will always take more time than you think
Do better work
Get a reputation
Beat the tool
What is easy, but why how and when are harder
Q: Split content and technical audits?
A: Yes, to split content vs technical if that makes it easier to get it done and in JIRA, been successful
with that approach before
TAKEAWAYS
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66. Research extensively
Existing competitive answer box results
People also asked, click on them
Searches related to at bottom of SERP
Think like student for educational content
Readability is 3rd to 8th grade writing on average
Do I trust this content? Meet needs? What info do I need to have confidence in this topic?
Answer the public.com for topical research tool
Add rich media, graphs, charts, photos to enhance and be more complete
Don't need markup but still use because constantly being refined since G keeps making mistakes
Doesn’t advocate for JSON-LD, prefer schema or microdata or RFID
Bing doesn’t understand
Code directly in HTML instead of in script, but cant have conflicting signals if do script and
HTML code
FEATURED SNIPPETS
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67. Deeper answers get more FS
Dangerous to nest schemes inside each other, sometimes confused, need to test, not
perfect process
Strong topical organization reinforces topical strength
invasion also silo access
URL hierarchical silo model
Section level sidebar interlinking
Autocomplete
Choose schema carefully
Manual action penalty for recipe schema for non food recipe (soap) need to use HowTo instead
which is new as of 6 months ago
Smaller sites can win with more complete answers, stronger architecture and organization
Ex - goodtherapy.org
Toptenreviews.com own a lot of FS
FEATURED SNIPPETS
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In November 2015, John Mueller said he expected Googlebot to crawl websites by sending HTTP/2 requests starting in early 2016. We don’t know why, as of October 2017, that hasn't happened yet.
What we do know is that Googlebot doesn't support HTTP/2. It still crawls by sending HTTP/ 1.1 requests. Both this experiment and the “Rendering on Google Search” page confirm it. (If you’d like to know more about the technology behind Googlebot, then you should check out what they recently shared.)
For now, it seems we have to accept the status quo. We recommended that Robert (and you readers as well) enable HTTP/2 on your websites for better performance, but continue optimizing for HTTP/ 1.1. Your visitors will notice and thank you.
JavaScript Indexing and SEO: The Naked Truth
This was a fairly technical session, but eventually understood the importance of it. Bart Goralewicz of Elephate went through a very thorough presentation on how JavaScript can impact SEO. Particularly, he mentioned how Google and JavaScript don't really get along as well as regular HTML5. I learned that not all JavaScript is created equal, not all JavsScript frameworks are crawled of indexed the same, and inline vs. external JS makes a huge difference.
Google isn't the only search engine that has difficulty crawling JavaScript-heavy sites, Bing and Yahoo are probably the worst ones. See slide #74. Overall, this was a great talk and should be something developers, and marketers should discuss when dealing with SEO and the more technical aspects when building a website. You can view the slide below.