Hello again from the depths of the Google Page Experience Update! My last post was written around the time that this update began to roll out, and it was intended to explain the update and define a “good” page experience in as complete a way as I could manage without pitching the reader into a swamp of details. This one is coming not long after the rollout was expected to be complete, but since I don’t feel any closer to understanding the algorithm’s basis for assessing page experience than I did in June (as I don’t believe anyone in SEO does), I’m going to use this occasion to offer up a list of five tactics for improving your page experience (however good or bad it might be now) that are universally applicable, measurably valuable, and above all, easy. After all, we’ve never needed to “understand” the algorithm before in any kind of meaningful depth in order to be able to do SEO, so let’s take the same attitude now. Here are five things you can do right now that are guaranteed to improve your page experience.
[Read more…] about 5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Page ExperienceUpBuild’s Answer to the Google Page Experience Update
On June 15 came the news that the gradual rollout of Google’s Page Experience Update had finally begun. It’s expected to take until August to complete, but the beginnings are upon us, and when it’s done, it’s going to put page performance and usability closer to the forefront of SEO than they’ve ever been before.
[Read more…] about UpBuild’s Answer to the Google Page Experience UpdateGoogle Analytics 4: Crawl Before You Walk
Welcome to the latest installment of my ongoing unofficial series that I’ve just spontaneously decided to name “Google Changes Everything”. Today, we’ll be discussing Google Analytics 4, which as of its October 14 announcement constitutes the biggest change that Google has ever made to the most important piece of marketing software that they (or anyone else) ever created. I hope to give you a sense of the big changes that this new iteration has brought to this extremely popular web analytics platform, and to cover everything that I feel you need to know as you begin to use it.
[Read more…] about Google Analytics 4: Crawl Before You WalkWorking from Wherever
This post is about how to do a work-from-anywhere job during times when you don’t actually know where you’re going to be from one day to the next. I didn’t expect to be writing this post until Oregon’s wildfires thrust me into the middle of that experience one week ago today; now, I am finding it difficult to imagine writing about anything else.
See, here’s the sad part. After three months of a rather strict lockdown, we Oregonians were even more excited than usual for the arrival of summer because we knew we could congregate outdoors at greatly reduced risk. Sure enough, June ushered in a bunch of socially distant backyard hangs, and they really were a soothing tonic. We got to see our friends’ actual faces, scratching that ancient itch for immediate social contact that we’d tried to ignore all spring. Never mind that we still had to constantly maintain six feet of distance, refrain from sharing food or drinks, undertake rigorous and convoluted bathroom access protocols, and put up with the thousands of mosquitoes that didn’t get the Covid memo; it was all worth it! We knew that fall would bring an end to this blissful phase before too terribly long, but being that September is typically the nicest month of the year in Oregon, my wife and I had booked thirst-quenching social activity of this kind for every weekend through the end of the month. We could make plans again! Things were looking up.
As Deadwood’s Al Swearingen once said, “announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.”
[Read more…] about Working from WhereverRich Results, Poor Test
Google’s announcement a few weeks ago that they’re phasing out the Structured Data Testing Tool in favor of a new, totally insular successor called the Rich Results Test definitely didn’t add any smiles to my summer.
The key difference between the tools is that this new one will not validate any structured data entities unless and until those entities drive rich results in Google Search. In other words, Google is deprecating a standards-based tool in favor of a results-based one, a change which, despite their predictable efforts to frame it as an “upgrade” (🥳), carries the message that structured data shouldn’t matter to you unless they generate rich results for your website in Google Search — that is, unless your search traffic can benefit directly from them today (and with all due thanks to Google, of course). Ask not what you can do for the semantic web; ask what the semantic web can do for you.
