5 ms·

Apologies for the self-promotion but I think this will be interesting to HN. It's an analysis of a huge crawl of 150k small business websites, correlated with g

Apologies for the self-promotion but I think this will be interesting to HN. It's an analysis of a huge crawl of 150k small business websites, correlated with google search rankings. This first chapter is focused on SEO. I'm in the midst of writing more chapters to address things like hosting, site speed, wordpress, etc. I'll probably also add some stats like what % of sites use bootstrap, most popular CDN, etc. This thread is a good place to ask me for more data points!

quickben 7y ago
It would be interesting if you can evaluate the UI spam lately somehow: - Sign up for newsletter - This website wants to send you notifications and more, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bx5a3PMks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bx5a3PMks
- gurgeous 7y ago
  I will have some of this in my "technical factors" chapter coming down the road. I definitely will be evaluating the percentage of SMB websites which use chat clients and various (annoying) marketing tools.
teh_klev 7y ago
Bit of a shame, but I can understand why, that you restrict your analysis to the US, and some US-centric optimisations. Perhaps that should be up front in your article about this. The internet is global after all :) However I still found a bunch of things really useful (see later). Yelp as far as I can see from my own experiences isn't really that big of a thing in the UK, but TripAdvisor is, especially for hospitality sector. Google local/My Business is certainly becoming a thing here in the UK as was pointed out to me by a buddy who runs an outdoor activities centre in the Highlands. He has a tremendous understanding of Google and funnelling folks into his biz and banging on about it in the pub the other night. Also in the UK we don't really have such a thing as BBB that google recognises as boosting the juice. Sure we have the British Chambers of Commerce and the CBI, but they're geared towards much larger businesses than your local SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprise). There are local "Chambers of Commerce" in each council area, but meh. That said, I'm working on unfecking a site that's never had image alt tags, no canonical refs (you can get at the same content from multiple URL's), out of nearly 200 pages there was one solitary H1, page titles were a mess...it goes on. The customer paid their previous "agency" a tidy sum for this site and somehow SEO was never looked at. I did find your article genuinely useful though. I'm a freelancer now, and it seems I need to learn how to SEO as well as be a developer. I look forward to your follow ups.
hnick 7y ago
When you mention external links, do you consider nofollow as not existing? I help out with a blog and we get a lot of requests from article writers who assure us all links will be nofollow.
Fjolsvith 7y ago
Does your site show a business that delivers to a target city but is located in a different state? For example, a shed manufacturer.
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I think your comments about no-index are a bit disingenuous. For example, when I used to blog, having a way to hide content from showing up in a search engine was important to me. I can imagine that for some businesses this is also true. Not to mention people who are new to creating websites and don’t feel ready for their in-progress site to be indexed, or business that are in the process of closing down. I think Squarespace does the right thing by making this option easy for the user to control. It’s weird to me that you encourage people to “blame” them. That sounds like a hidden agenda sort of bias to me.

quickben 7y ago

It would be interesting if you can evaluate the UI spam lately somehow: - Sign up for newsletter - This website wants to send you notifications and more, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bx5a3PMks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bx5a3PMks

gurgeous 7y ago
I will have some of this in my "technical factors" chapter coming down the road. I definitely will be evaluating the percentage of SMB websites which use chat clients and various (annoying) marketing tools.

teh_klev 7y ago

Bit of a shame, but I can understand why, that you restrict your analysis to the US, and some US-centric optimisations. Perhaps that should be up front in your article about this. The internet is global after all :) However I still found a bunch of things really useful (see later). Yelp as far as I can see from my own experiences isn't really that big of a thing in the UK, but TripAdvisor is, especially for hospitality sector. Google local/My Business is certainly becoming a thing here in the UK as was pointed out to me by a buddy who runs an outdoor activities centre in the Highlands. He has a tremendous understanding of Google and funnelling folks into his biz and banging on about it in the pub the other night. Also in the UK we don't really have such a thing as BBB that google recognises as boosting the juice. Sure we have the British Chambers of Commerce and the CBI, but they're geared towards much larger businesses than your local SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprise). There are local "Chambers of Commerce" in each council area, but meh. That said, I'm working on unfecking a site that's never had image alt tags, no canonical refs (you can get at the same content from multiple URL's), out of nearly 200 pages there was one solitary H1, page titles were a mess...it goes on. The customer paid their previous "agency" a tidy sum for this site and somehow SEO was never looked at. I did find your article genuinely useful though. I'm a freelancer now, and it seems I need to learn how to SEO as well as be a developer. I look forward to your follow ups.

hnick 7y ago

When you mention external links, do you consider nofollow as not existing? I help out with a blog and we get a lot of requests from article writers who assure us all links will be nofollow.

Fjolsvith 7y ago

Does your site show a business that delivers to a target city but is located in a different state? For example, a shed manufacturer.

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

I think your comments about no-index are a bit disingenuous. For example, when I used to blog, having a way to hide content from showing up in a search engine was important to me. I can imagine that for some businesses this is also true. Not to mention people who are new to creating websites and don’t feel ready for their in-progress site to be indexed, or business that are in the process of closing down. I think Squarespace does the right thing by making this option easy for the user to control. It’s weird to me that you encourage people to “blame” them. That sounds like a hidden agenda sort of bias to me.