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Articles by Patrick Stox Contributors
SEO Community Spotlight: Raleigh
SEO communities around the world are struggling to get back to normal after COVID-19. Ahrefs is looking to highlight different communities globally to see if we can reignite some of them. If you want your community featured, send me a message. Raleigh, North Carolina, is where I’ve called home for more than a decade. It’s a community that I know and love, so I’m featuring it first. It also has one of the largest and oldest SEO communities in the world. But why Raleigh? And what makes it special?
The Story of Blocking 2 High-Ranking Pages With Robots.txt
I blocked two of our ranking pages using robots.txt. We lost a position here or there and all of the featured snippets for the pages. I expected a lot more impact, but the world didn’t end. Warning I don’t recommend doing this, and it’s entirely possible that your results may be different from ours. I was trying to see the impact on rankings and traffic that the removal of content would have.
How to Use PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a tool provided by Google that analyzes a page’s performance and provides suggestions for improving its speed and user experience. PageSpeed Insights works by analyzing a webpage’s HTML, CSS, fonts, and JavaScript, and provides suggestions to optimize the performance of the page. This includes things like compressing images, minifying code, and reducing the number of HTTP requests made by the page. Let’s look at PageSpeed Insights more closely.
Is It OK to Remove 301 Redirects After a Year? We Tested It
In 2021, Google’s Gary Illyes said on Twitter that redirect signals consolidate permanently to the new location after one year. This means that, in theory, signals to the original URL are permanently passed to the new one after a year. If the redirect is removed and the original page is restored, the original page has to build brand-new signals on its own. Even though the old links still point to the original page, they count for the page that was the redirect target for over a year. Sidenote.
Does Going Viral Help With SEO? Not Really
I wanted to find out how going viral impacts SEO for different businesses. I thought that with all the news coverage and links these sites received that their businesses would be booming and they’d be ranking for everything. Spoiler alert: I was wrong. There has to be some merit to it though, right? Even Google’s John Mueller seems to be on board with digital PR. To learn more, I looked at dozens of sites. Some are from when I judged search awards. Others are from various Slack groups.
Canonicalization: What It Is & How It Works
Canonicalization is the process that search engines use to determine the main version of a page. That is the page that will be indexed and shown to users. The chosen version is canonical, and ranking signals like links will consolidate to that page. This process is sometimes referred to as standardization or normalization. According to Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes, ~60% of the internet is duplicate content. Canonicalization is complex and often misunderstood.
Core Web Vitals Data Study w/ CrUX & 5.2M Pages - Ahrefs
Subscribe for weekly updates Leave this field empty if you're human: Core Web Vitals (CWV) are the speed metrics part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. The metrics measure visual load with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), visual stability with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and interactivity with First Input Delay (FID). We wanted to look at the data to see how websites were doing and if we could glean any important insights.
What Is Googlebot & How Does It Work?
Subscribe for weekly updates Leave this field empty if you're human: Googlebot is the web crawler used by Google to gather the information needed and build a searchable index of the web. Googlebot has mobile and desktop crawlers, as well as specialized crawlers for news, images, and videos.
What Are Redirects? Types, SEO Impact, & More
A redirect is a way to send people and bots to a new URL when they request the old URL, but the page has changed locations. When you move to a new address in the US, you set up mail forwarding with the United States Postal Service (USPS). If someone sends mail to your old address, USPS will look at their mail forwarding rules and realize you no longer live at the old location. They’ll take the mail and deliver it to your new location instead of the old one. That’s also how redirects work.
9 Easy Local Link Building Tactics
Subscribe for weekly updates Leave this field empty if you're human: Every major local SEO organic and map pack study and survey shows links as one of the most prominent ranking factors. So if you want to rank yours or your client’s local business higher in Google, then you’re going to need backlinks.
What Are Core Web Vitals & How Can You Improve Them?
Article stats Linking websites 188 Tweets 76 Data from Content Explorer Shows how many different websites are linking to this piece of content. As a general rule, the more websites link to you, the higher you rank in Google. Shows estimated monthly search traffic to this article according to Ahrefs data. The actual search traffic (as reported in Google Analytics) is usually 3-5 times bigger. The number of times this article was shared on Twitter.
The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO
Since this is a beginner’s guide, let’s start with the basics. What is Technical SEO? Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines like Google find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. The goal is to be found and improve rankings. How complicated is technical SEO? It depends. The fundamentals aren’t really difficult to master, but technical SEO can be complex and hard to understand. I’ll keep things as simple as I can with this guide.
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