Summary of SEO 101 Episode 386
John and Ross discuss the feasibility of “algorithm-proofing” a website, insight into the past indexing issues with Google, and news on the increased use of descriptive text with images in search. They follow-up with insights from the new Google Podcast, whether link building is “wrong” in Google’s eyes, and they answer a question about sitelinks in search results.
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Notes from SEO 101 Episode 386
NON-SEO News
GENERAL SEO NEWS
Replay: What SEO practitioners can do to make sites ‘algorithm-proof’
Google Structured Data Testing Tool Going Away
To be replaced with the “Rich Results Testing Tool” which recently come out of Beta. SEOs are not happy it is going away because the rich results test tool does not validate and test all rich result types.
Google Images adds more facts about images with the Knowledge Graph
Google said “when you search for an image on mobile in the U.S., you might see information from the Knowledge Graph related to the result. That information would include people, places or things related to the image from the Knowledge Graph’s database of billions of facts, helping you explore the topic more.”
The Google Indexing Issue From A Month Ago Was A Crawling Issue
From the new Podcast “… the crawling was happening so fast that it was overwhelming the indexing side. He said indexing was overwhelmed by the crawlers.”
“Gary added that it now set up monitors on Twitter to look for complaints about indexing with Google. This was alerted to Google early on because they have tools that look at Twitter for indexing issue reporting, that can find these issues earlier than some of their other dashboards use. Interesting.”
Google Clarifies Structured Data For Multiple Items On A Page
“Google has updated the structured data policies page, specifically the section on having multiple items on a page with structured data. It added whether you nest the items or specify each item individually.”
Mueller Files
“Search Off the Record” Podcast – John’s got a podcast with Gary and Martin
To Say All Link Building Is Bad Would Be Wrong
“There are lots of ways to work on getting links that are fine, and useful for both the site and the rest of the web. To say all link building is bad would be wrong.”
Google: JavaScript Redirects Not A Good Idea
Questions from SEO 101 Listeners
Ross and John also welcome some SEO-related concerns from listeners. Please listen to the show to find out their detailed answers to these questions.
Vinayak Jhunjhunwala: “Another noob question for y’all.
One of the problems that I am facing currently is not being able to get the site links to show up on Google SERP.
I get weird site links when I search for my company name (Slang Labs) which is automatically generated by Google. The ones that are being generated by Google don’t even show the meta description. For some pages it shows the page title, for others, it picks up the H1 tag. It’s just a big mess. Our most valuable pages aren’t even showing up.
Any suggestions to fix this? How can I get site links which I want? Any way to fix the existing ones that are showing up?”
End of Show Notes
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