tools

Updated on 7/29/23: OpenAI shut down its AI content detection tool on July 24, 2023 based on low accuracy. The tool now 404s so I removed links to the tool from this post. Updated on 2/1/23: OpenAI’s AI content detection tool (AI Text Classifier) was added to the list. GPTZeroX was also included (an upgrade … Read more

If you are confused when Google reports redirects as other categories, like “blocked by robots.txt”, “soft 404s”, “noindexed”, “404s”, and others, it could be Google silently following the redirect and reporting the status of the true destination url instead. My post covers the situation in detail, and provides examples of this happening in the wild. … Read more

When performing SEO audits, crawling is ultra-important. For SEOs and site owners, there are several options available from local crawlers to enterprise crawlers (SAAS services). I’ve been extremely vocal over the years about my favorite crawling tools, which are Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, DeepCrawl, and more recently, JetOctopus. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb are typically local crawlers, … Read more

Last month I published an article on Search Engine Land explaining how to use the new URL inspection API to build a multi-site indexing monitoring system. By using Analytics Edge in Excel with the new URL Inspection API from Google, you can check the indexing status for the most important urls across multiple sites on … Read more

While helping companies that have been heavily impacted by Google’s broad core updates, the topic of “authority” comes up often. And that’s especially the case for companies that focus on “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topics. For example, sites that focus on health, medical, financial, etc. all fall under YMYL. If you’ve read my … Read more

When performing a competitive analysis, it’s smart to run a keyword gap analysis to determine the queries that competitors rank for that your site doesn’t rank for. It can often yield low-hanging fruit that your content team can execute on. As part of that process, it’s also smart to analyze Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) … Read more

For site migrations, I’ve always said that Murphy’s Law is real. “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” You can prepare like crazy, think you have everything nailed down, only to see a migration go sideways once it launches. That’s also why I believe that when something does go wrong (which it will), it’s … Read more

On January 11, 2021 Google announced improvements to GSC’s Index Coverage data. With the update, which is clearly apparent in the reporting, Search Console removed the generic “crawl anomaly” issue (and mapped those to more granular issues), changed how urls are reported that are blocked by robots.txt, added a new issue called “indexed without content” … Read more