4 ms·

Excellent insights and a well written article. One suggestion - it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO features

Excellent insights and a well written article. One suggestion - it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO features enabled.

gurgeous 7y ago
You can read the HTML to see if a particular SEO feature is present. Or there are tools for this. There's some talk in the office about taking my report and turning into a scanner that you could point at any website, which would be an interesting project.
walshemj 7y ago
There is a tool called Screaming frog its the swiss army knife of SEO. For small sites you can get use the free version you wont be able to save any results and are limited to the number of URLs you can crawl.
seanwilson 7y ago
> - it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO features enabled. You could try my Chrome extension for this which automatically checks multiple pages at a time for technical SEO factors: https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/ All the SEO factors checked for and the reasoning behind them are explained here (mostly based on advice from Google): https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/ https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/
- hnick 7y ago
  This looks great and I gave it a try. Is there a reason you ignore robots.txt? Example result is 'thin content' on our shopping cart, which we say not to index obviously :)
  - seanwilson 7y ago
    Checkbot ignores robots.txt here because Google can still index pages even when they're included in robots.txt files. If you don't want pages to be indexed, you should use a "noindex" tag instead of robots.txt. It's a common misconception that robots.txt stops indexing when it doesn't. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en > Important! For the noindex directive to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex directive, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.
    - hnick 7y ago
      Thanks, that makes perfect sense. And I'm definitely guilty of that misconception. This would definitely be last on a long list of things to clean up for my site.
jmngomes 7y ago
My basic checklist for that is the output from the SEO audit on Google's Lighthouse: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/

Excellent insights and a well written article. One suggestion - it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO features enabled.

gurgeous 7y ago

You can read the HTML to see if a particular SEO feature is present. Or there are tools for this. There's some talk in the office about taking my report and turning into a scanner that you could point at any website, which would be an interesting project.

walshemj 7y ago

There is a tool called Screaming frog its the swiss army knife of SEO. For small sites you can get use the free version you wont be able to save any results and are limited to the number of URLs you can crawl.

seanwilson 7y ago

> - it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO features enabled. You could try my Chrome extension for this which automatically checks multiple pages at a time for technical SEO factors: https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/ All the SEO factors checked for and the reasoning behind them are explained here (mostly based on advice from Google): https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/ https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/

hnick 7y ago
This looks great and I gave it a try. Is there a reason you ignore robots.txt? Example result is 'thin content' on our shopping cart, which we say not to index obviously :)
- seanwilson 7y ago
  Checkbot ignores robots.txt here because Google can still index pages even when they're included in robots.txt files. If you don't want pages to be indexed, you should use a "noindex" tag instead of robots.txt. It's a common misconception that robots.txt stops indexing when it doesn't. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en > Important! For the noindex directive to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex directive, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.
  - hnick 7y ago
    Thanks, that makes perfect sense. And I'm definitely guilty of that misconception. This would definitely be last on a long list of things to clean up for my site.

jmngomes 7y ago

My basic checklist for that is the output from the SEO audit on Google's Lighthouse: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/