If you’ve needed to extract information from a website, and ended up copy and pasting data from the webpage to your spreadsheet, you probably should have been scraping anything that took more than 2 minutes. Scraping a website is particularly useful if you need information in mass – such as scraping a competitor to find gaps and […]
How to Scrape Websites Read More »
XML sitemaps are pretty well known within the SEO community but their purpose and value are often misunderstood, so let’s start with the basics. In this post, we’ll look at how to create XML sitemaps strategically. Shortly I’ll be posting a follow up post of XML sitemap generators to help you actually create your XML
How to Create XML Sitemaps Read More »
If you work on a large site that gets updated frequently, accidents are a big concern and can be hard to catch. Accidents like noindex tags or robots.txt “disallow: /” directives being copied from staging to production. There are a lot of indexation killers that are easy to overlook and can have a catastrophic impact on your
Quality Assurance SEO Checklist for Enterprise Sites Read More »
Google’s Complicated History With JavaScript JavaScript has long been one of the SEO’s greatest enemies – you can do a lot of cool things with JavaScript, especially with the introduction of new frameworks like AngularJS; SEO though has historically been a challenge for Google. Rendering content or links that were served in JavaScript has been one
AngularJS SEO: Make Your Angular Site Indexable Read More »
What are Hreflang Tags? Hreflang tags are an explicit signal for Google to indicate the location and language of a URL’s intended audience. They can be implemented as a link in the HTML <head>, XML sitemaps, or HTTP header. Google introduced hreflang tags in 2011 to help search engines understand the internationalization of a page
How to Setup Hreflang Tags for International SEO Read More »
Typically the canonical tag is deployed to the <head> section of a website, ex: <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://geoffkenyon.com/how-to-add-canonical-tag-to-http-headers”> This works fine for most use cases and there are many plugins for popular CMS platforms to help you do this so that you don’t even need to request any support from your development team to implement the
How to Add the Canonical Tag to HTTP Headers Read More »
Typically when you want to remove a webpage from Google, you can just add the meta robots noindex tag to the <head> section of the webpage. Once this is done you want to get Google to recrawl the webpage in order to pick up the noindex tag and then remove the page from the index.
How to Remove PDFs From Google Search Read More »
The robots.txt file is used to control what content search engines are allowed to access on your site. This is great for controlling duplicate content and for directing your crawl budget to your most important pages. It is important to understand that if you you have content that you want to remove from Google’s index,
How to Use Wildcards in Robots.txt Read More »
Simply put, duplicate content is any content that is identical to another page on your site OR a different site on the web. While this might not sound like a big deal, it can actually be quite problematic for search engines (and inherently you). When search engines come across duplicate content, it’s difficult for them to decide which page to display in search results. Typically search engines will try to choose the original or canonical version of the content though they often do not get this right, leading to the wrong page ranking in search results.
The Problem With Duplicate Content & How to Fix it Read More »
On September 5th, Google announced their “new and improved” sitelinks search box (blog post announcement). I’m sure that this was a well intentioned action on Google’s part, but it may not be beneficial for you. This experience will steal branded traffic, potentially direct visitors to incorrect pages, and deprive users of the experience you’ve created
Is Google Sitelinks Search Box Hurting You Read More »