tools

Beyond The 1K Limit – How To Bulk Export Data From GSC By Search Appearance Via Analytics Edge (including How-to, Q&A, and FAQ)

Google has been releasing new features in the search results more and more recently that can have a big impact on SERP treatment, click-through rate, and potentially traffic. Three of those features are part of Google’s “best answer carousels” and include Q&A, How-to, and FAQ snippets. Q&A has been live for a while already, while … Read more

Exploring Google’s New How-to Snippets In Search And On Smart Displays: SERP Treatment, Fresh GSC Data, Video Templates, Monetization, and more

Google is always working to enhance features in the search results (SERPs). Over the years, we have seen the SERPs change from ten blue links to a mix of images, videos, featured snippets, one-box results, immersive mobile results, and more. There are many features beyond ten blue links now, which was covered by John Mueller … Read more

A Holly Jolly Load Balancer Christmas – How Google Treated A Major Site Performance Problem From A Crawling And Ranking Perspective [SEO Case Study]

Ah, the holidays. Who doesn’t love a festive atmosphere, ugly Christmas sweaters, eggnog, singing Christmas carols, and major performance problems that can take down your site? Wait, what was that last part??The holidays are always interesting for me SEO-wise. Every few years, I receive an SOS from a site owner right around Christmas Day based … Read more

Searching For Buried Treasure – How To Find More Of Your Featured Snippets Using Google Search Console (GSC), Analytics Edge, And SEMrush Position Tracking

A few years ago, I wrote a post about how to surface your featured snippets via SEMrush’s powerful SERP features widget. I love using SEMrush to plug in any domain and view (many of) the featured snippets it has. It’s a quick an easy way to conduct competitive analysis from a featured snippets standpoint. Remember, … Read more

How To Find The True Size Of Your Site Using GSC’s Index Coverage Reporting (And Why It’s Important For SEO)

So, how large is your site? No, how large is it really?? When speaking with companies about SEO, it’s not long before I ask that important question. And I often get some confused responses based on the “really” tag at the end. That’s because many site owners go by how many pages are indexed. i.e. … Read more

How To Use Scroll Depth Tracking, Adjusted Bounce Rate, and Average Time On Page As A Proxy For User Engagement and Content Quality

I was helping a company a few months ago that got hit hard by recent algorithm updates. When digging into the audit, there were a number of problems that were surfaced, including content quality problems, technical SEO problems, user experience issues, and more. From a content quality perspective, the site had an interesting situation. Some … Read more

Night of the Living 302s: How SEO Crawlers and GSC’s Index Coverage Reporting Helped Me Surface A Sinister 302 Redirect Problem [Case Study]

I recently started helping a new client that has seen a continued drop in search visibility over time. After getting up to speed on the site, its history, business model, etc., I started a thorough crawl analysis and audit of the site. The crawl analysis involves performing an enterprise crawl and then subsequent surgical crawls … Read more

The Magically Moving Meta Robots Tag And The Potential SEO Danger It Brings [Case Study]

{Update: Google’s John Mueller replied to my question on Twitter about this situation. You can read John’s feedback here.} {Update 10/27/18: My client’s dev team figured out the problem and I provided more information about that below.} I’ve been helping a client with a large-scale CMS migration recently and came across a very interesting, and … Read more

Meet Newsguard, A Team Of Quality Raters For News Publishers – And Another Way To Check Site Trust, Credibility, and Transparency

Update: April 2022 I just published a post explaining how sites can use NewsGuard’s nutritional labels to avoid manual actions for violating Google’s medical policy (for News and Discover). This is based on helping sites that received manual actions in January of 2022. —– Based partly on the August 1 Google algorithm update, there’s been … Read more

How Sinister Mobile Popups Only Triggering For Uncookied Users (and Googlebot) Could Impact SEO, Usability, and Monetization

Users hate popups. But they really hate mobile popups. They are annoying, inhibit the user experience, and can cause serious user frustration. But mobile popups can also cause problems from an SEO standpoint. First, Google has a mobile popup algorithm that can demote pages using an interstitial or popup when users visit from the search … Read more

More data awaits: How to juice up your Index Coverage reporting by adding directories to Google Search Console (GSC)

Google’s new index coverage reporting is killer. For a long time, the SEO community wanted something more powerful than the simple index status report in the old GSC. You know, something we could really sink our SEO teeth into. And we finally received that in the form of the new index coverage reporting in the … Read more