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Will Hattman

We Need a Real Mobile SEO Methodology

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A maddening issue plagues the SEO community, a stone in our collective shoe that we keep trying to ignore, but that at least once a year rolls right back under the most sensitive part of our foot. We keep walking because the fast pace of the industry and the day-to-day needs of our clients make it so we don’t have time to stop, untie the laces, and pop the shoe off to shake the stone out. But sooner or later we’re going to have to, come what may.

I’m speaking of the disconnect between the primacy of mobile devices in search — both in Google’s eyes and users’ — and the desktop-exclusive perspective that we professionals remain locked into. Daily Google search queries on mobile outpaced desktop years ago, and the Google Speed algorithm update promised for July of this year, in which mobile page speed becomes an official ranking factor, constitutes Google’s third big effort to jam home the same mobile-first message in as many years (following the “Mobile-Friendly Search Results” update in 2015 and the “Mobile-First Index” update of 2016, and heck, you might even count AMP here too). But SEO practitioners simply cannot adopt a felt, experienced appreciation for this changed landscape, for the simple reason that desktop computers are still, overwhelmingly, the devices that we use to do the work. [Read more…] about We Need a Real Mobile SEO Methodology

Filed Under: SEO

Why We’re Not Going to Write Inline Semantic Markup Anymore

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This post started as a bit of a kiss-off to Bing. This is not to suggest that we at UpBuild have any beef with Microsoft’s eternal underdog of a search engine; while it’s unlikely to ever have the market share Google does, Bing can be a useful source of traffic, especially for specific niche markets, and it’s always best not to put all one’s eggs in Google’s basket. But since the founding of our fair company, there has been this one thing, this one feature of our standard SEO package that always required an undue sacrifice of time and effort almost exclusively for Bing’s sake, and during one of the industry discussions we had on our recent Team Day, we decided we weren’t going to take it anymore. [Read more…] about Why We’re Not Going to Write Inline Semantic Markup Anymore

Filed Under: SEO

What Google’s Disavow Links Tool Is and Isn’t For

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October will mark the five-year anniversary of Google adding the Disavow Links tool to what was then still called Google Webmaster Tools, and anecdotal evidence I’ve accumulated in that time suggests that only a small fraction of the total people aware of its existence actually understand how it’s intended to be used.

I’ve spoken to people in the business who almost reflexively say the word “disavow” in mentioning that they detected backlinks that seemed fishy, or, in the case of the particularly trigger-happy, backlinks that they just didn’t remember acquiring (as if someone at an enterprise-level company should be expected to record, let alone remember, every backlink that its website gets). “The site that gave us this link looks weird. Can we disavow it? Google lets you do that now, right?” Well, yeah, in the sense that they did create this tool and we do have access to it. But the disavow tool is not to be reached for the minute you notice a link that arches your eyebrow. It’s to be kept behind emergency glass and used only when you’re as sure as you can possibly be that 1) the link is toxic, and 2) there is no other way to remove it.

Use the disavow tool wisely, and you unleash one of the most fearsome foes that spam has ever seen. Use it nonchalantly, and it will come back to haunt you. So let’s talk about the rare conditions that actually might inspire you to consider this nuclear option called the Disavow Links tool, the better to keep you from exposure to radioactive fallout. Or something. [Read more…] about What Google’s Disavow Links Tool Is and Isn’t For

Filed Under: SEO

A 10-Minute Hreflang Tag Tutorial

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International SEO is a complex affair that demands reckoning with questions far beyond the scope of traditional SEO. First, there are the concrete matters of where your product or service is sold, and which languages your company offers customer support in. Beyond that lie more nuanced considerations like the level of locality at which you want to be competitive in search within each country, the extent to which your product (or at least your branding) differs from country to country, and the breadth of geographical distribution of your site’s servers.

These considerations, along with the others that spiral out from them, will inform your optimal web infrastructure, your messaging, and nearly everything else, and accordingly they’ll have to be hammered out carefully over the course of conversations with just about every department you’ve got. [If you’re starting down this road in earnest right now, do yourself a favor and look to this post from Aleyda Solis, by consensus the world’s foremost expert on the subject, on State of Digital, then move on to the checklist post she wrote for Moz as often as you need to.]

Once you’ve gotten those questions answered, and you’ve finally got a site (or network of sites) that covers your entire global customer base, there will be this one last — crucial but comparatively simple — step: setting up your hreflang tags. Introduced in 2010 by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the hreflang tag is an HTML element that webmasters can use to tell search engines what language and country a given page is intended for, and where (if anywhere) its translations or equivalents for other countries can be found. Failure to use them properly could result in Google serving up the wrong version of a page to a particular location, or placing translations of the same page in competition with one another for rankings within the same area. So while hreflang tags aren’t a panacea for international SEO, the efforts you make in addressing all the big-picture concerns from the above paragraph will be fruitless without them. And compared to all of the stuff in the above paragraph, they’re relatively simple. So, in the interest of keeping to my 10-minute promise, let’s assume that you’ve got all that stuff figured out already, and skip to this, your last step. [Read more…] about A 10-Minute Hreflang Tag Tutorial

Filed Under: SEO

Why You Should Never Blanket-Redirect All Your Invalid URLs

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Here’s a conversation I’ve found myself having too many times with clients over the years not to feel like it would be worthwhile to make my sentiments public. So here goes: it’s well-intentioned but short-sighted to configure your server to redirect all invalid URL requests to the homepage.

At first blush, the idea seems like it would offer a clear enough user experience benefit to be worth considering. Instead of the cold-water shock of a 404 page — which, however gentle, is still at its core a message that the user has done something wrong — you’re offering the front door of the site, from which the user would theoretically have the easiest time finding the page he or she was originally looking for (or any other). But the signal of the 404 error page is sent in two ways: in the form of the error message and available options presented to the user, and in the form of the 404 response code presented to the server making the request. There’s a reason why that code exists.

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