Technical SEO archives

Sometimes I encounter new “SEO hacks” that people apply, that are actually anti-patterns. One of these new anti-patterns I noticed is the pattern of 301 redirecting all your 404 pages to your homepage. Let me explain why this is a lot like cleaning up your room by throwing everything into a drawer and what the …

Before Google can rank your content, it needs to discover it, be permitted and able to evaluate it, and index it. If any of these processes go wrong, you might find that your pages don’t show up in the search results. Most of the time, you can rely on Google to correctly index your content, all by itself. …

Search engines crawl your site to get the contents into their index. The bigger your site gets, the longer this crawl takes. It’s important that the time spent crawling your site is well spent. If your site has 1,000 pages or less, this is not a topic you’ll need to think about much. If you intend on …

Every page on the web has an address, a URL, which stands for ‘Uniform Resource Locator’. Sometimes, content moves from one URL to another URL. That’s when you need a redirect. A redirect automatically makes a browser go from one URL to another URL. A redirect can point to any other URL: it doesn’t need …

It seems that SEO experts are, more often than not, “cat people”. That’s why the first website which I’m looking at in this series belongs to the Cats Protection charity – a UK organization dedicated to feline welfare. I’m going to explore their website and see where they have issues, errors, and opportunities with their technical SEO. Hopefully, …

My husband – Joost de Valk – and I often have discussions on how technology will change our day-to-day life. Joost is an early adopter, while I am much slower and more reluctant to technological change. Our discussions are pretty heated. So, what’s Joost’s opinion on the future of voice search? How dominant will voice search …

Do you have a recipe site? If so, you might already be using structured data to mark up your recipes so they can get highlighted in the search results. Good work! But, Google recently made some changes that might make your implementation incomplete. It also expanded the possibilities of structured data for recipes by bringing …

Perhaps you heard about Google Duplex? You know, the artificial assistant who called a hairdresser to make an appointment? Fascinating technology, but what is it exactly? And does it affect search or SEO? In this post, I’ll explain what Google Duplex is. And, I’ll raise some ethical issues I have with it. Finally, I will …

Optimizing how your content looks when it’s shared on third-party platforms like Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp can drive improved visibility, clickthrough, and conversions. But it’s not as simple as just picking a great social image and adding it to your page… When you share a URL on Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms, they’ll typically show …

HTTP/2 is a newish protocol for transporting data that will drastically speed up the web and can help your SEO. The ‘old’ HTTP1.1 protocol only allows web servers to send files down a single line one at a time, and that line has to open and close after each file has been sent – a …