The frequent readers among you are no doubt already familiar with UpBuild’s core company values. Today, we’re announcing a new initiative that will strengthen our commitment to three of those values in particular — purpose, betterment, and transparency — by making our collective expertise available to you, when you need it, absolutely free of charge. We’re calling it the UpBuild Help Desk.
[Read more…] about Introducing the UpBuild Help DeskThe Great Featured Snippet Shake-Em-Up
Well, it happened again: Google went and made new rules, and gave us a startling reminder of how deeply we had dug in on the old ones. On some level, we SEOs go to bed every night believing that the game will be the same tomorrow as it was today, even as we constantly attend and deliver talks about how much it has changed over the years. I don’t know where that disconnect comes from, but it’s probably just an impulse to protect our sanity; if we really took time at the end of each day to reflect on how many times the very definition of our job and our industry has changed since we first got started, who knows how many more tomorrows we could bring ourselves to face.
Featured snippets first arrived in 2014 and sent shockwaves through the content strategy world immediately. The fact that Google had created a special class of search results page that offered an organic position superior to #1, and that access to that position could be (in theory, anyway) attained on content alone, shook up a lot of our old talking points.
[Read more…] about The Great Featured Snippet Shake-Em-UpYou Can Now Take Up Less Space in the SERPs If That’s What You Want
On September 24, Google announced the imminent rollout of new preview markup — namely one new HTML tag and three new meta robots attributes — that promised site owners stricter control over the preview snippets that represent their pages in search results. By “preview snippets”, they mean the descriptive paragraphs in each search result that show below the page’s title and URL. You know, these:
If you’re in SEO, the phrase “meta description” began knocking around in your head after reading that sentence; isn’t that what they’re talking about? Why don’t they just say that? [Read more…] about You Can Now Take Up Less Space in the SERPs If That’s What You Want
How to Prepare Your GTM Container for a Site Redesign
If you’re like me, you long ago committed to using Google Tag Manager as your one and only platform for configuring your site’s event tracking (and — though it perhaps isn’t the optimal way to go about it — maybe your structured data markup too). To set this up in GTM, you had to create Custom JavaScript variables that used CSS or jQuery selectors to identify the correct elements on the page, and then create tags that arranged those variables into scripts that would pass data to Google Analytics, and/or to Google Search, in a comprehensible format. Those CSS or jQuery selectors were precisely tuned to the unique HTML of the pages where the tags needed to fire, relying on the signature attributes —like id or class — of the key elements in order to identify them. You might have had to go through a frustrating trial and error process to configure some of those variables so that they would populate correctly every time, on every page, but you got there.
And now you hear that the site is going to be redesigned from top to bottom, and the HTML signatures you relied on are all going to vanish or change. PANIC!
Solving the Google Tag Manager 404 Error Message
Google Tag Manager is top of the heap and still growing in popularity as a tag management solution, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be, given its ease of use, clean interface, and shall we say tempting retail price of $0.00. Despite the reservations I always feel when I find myself becoming dependent on a new Google product, I’ve quite liked the experience of using it, and one of the great strengths of that experience is how marvelously not buggy the platform is. Google Analytics, by contrast, has probably thwarted me with 20 or more crazy inexplicable bugs in my seven years’ experience using it (their issue tracker lists the total number of issues tracked as “many”), but GTM hasn’t even let one come to the surface that I’ve been aware of, and I’m not exactly new to GTM either at this point. The other day, however, our fearless leader brought to my attention something that sort of qualifies as a bug, and given that 1) lots of people are finding it frustrating, 2) I completely understand why, and 3) the fix is dead simple but also completely counterintuitive, I thought it would be worth taking a few minutes to outline a solution.
I’m talking about the error message that shows in the Chrome console or in Google Tag Assistant when you’ve placed code for a new container on a site, but have yet to publish the container. In the console, it reads: “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404”, and it looks like this:
