[HN Gopher] How I ruined my SEO
___________________________________________________________________
How I ruined my SEO
Author : johnny_reilly
Score : 108 points
Date : 2023-01-15 14:00 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (johnnyreilly.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnnyreilly.com)
| remram wrote:
| Is there really no way to rotate your GA tag without creating a
| new property in Google Analytics? That seems like a glaring
| omission.
| orangepurple wrote:
| No privacy policy and no terms of service might do it
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| What a sad state of affairs when even personal blogs are
| expected to be laden with legal documents.
| cseleborg wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but if a personal blog tracks
| users and sends data on them to someone else, as with GA,
| then it absolutely needs a privacy policy.
| Zagitta wrote:
| It's not that hard to write "we keep none of your personal
| data" as your privacy policy, if you want to track me on a
| personal blog you better get your legal story straight...
| [deleted]
| luckylion wrote:
| That's the first time I'm hearing of suggestions that Google
| will downrank sites without it. Do you have a source?
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| Also intrigued as to whether this could be a cause. I'm
| certainly not opposed to adding one, but I'd be surprised if
| it was necessary. But I'm here to learn!
| orangepurple wrote:
| My Facebook ad campaigns were repeatedly rejected until I
| made that one change. And they never said why it was being
| rejected. It was only that change that fixed it.
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| Definitely need a source.
|
| I had a new website that had minimal text content. At first
| the most popular Google keywords were from privacy and terms!
| Had to change those pages to no robot.
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| It's only an ads thing. Facebook, Google, etc., all require
| to those pages be on a website to run ads. They say nothing
| about Personal websites, but the EU probably does once you
| start using GA.
| dazc wrote:
| Unlikely to be a source but a good benchmark is to have this
| stuff in place because a)It takes almost no effort, b)You
| don't know if it makes a difference or not, and c)There is
| pretty much zero chance it's going to have a negative impact.
| [deleted]
| zuccs wrote:
| This is definitely not a thing.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Screw Google. Optimize your website for real humans. Then
| advertise it outside of Google, for example: have a link to your
| website in your profile.
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| Which profile? I link to it in my GitHub / Mastodon / Twitter
| profiles for instance
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| I think they mean on HN.
| CSSer wrote:
| Ironically, this is exactly what Google recommends you do in
| most cases. This isn't empty, feel-good marketing either. It's
| in their best interest for you to do so.
| pictur wrote:
| Does anyone have a guideline for seo? Is doing the basics enough
| or is there something that creates magic?
| vgeek wrote:
| https://developers.google.com/search/updates/ranking
|
| Your rankings tanking on/around 10/19's update looks like a
| strong correlation. Your GSC with congruent drops in impressions
| and clicks doesn't immediately look like KWs you were top 3 for
| suddenly dropping further down the page-- else impressions would
| be similar but AP/CTR would just be tanking.
|
| If you're using GA and your traffic doesn't have tons of
| seasonality, look at the landing page report month over month and
| see which pages have had the largest drop (can also do this in
| GSC). Then check in GSC and see what those pages' APs have done
| over the same period.
|
| What types of links is GSC showing? Google says they don't count
| bad links, but if they make up a large proportion of your site's
| backlinks, SpamBrain (their spam AI-- publicly announced more
| frequently) may bucket your site that way.
|
| SEMrush, ahrefs, Majestic, Moz OSE are all decent for checking
| who is linking (and maybe disavowing), but LinkResearchTools is
| probably going to focus more on identifying suspicious backlinks,
| if that is in fact what is impacting your site.
| franze wrote:
| looking for correlation with any google change must always be
| the last thing to check for. if you look for correlation, you
| will always find some. there was an domain change and URL
| change with subideal old2new migration.
| vgeek wrote:
| This would probably be captured when looking at GA in the
| landing page report with MoM traffic going to 0 for once high
| value pages. If that is the case, a 301 from old path(s) to
| new is the simplest solution to possibly restore most of the
| traffic? From what I've seen, lots of the SO scraper sites
| got crushed late last year, so if the top traffic driving
| pages historically _have not had URLs changed_ , then maybe
| investigate that further. If they had their URLs changed,
| just redirect the old URLs and hope for the best.
|
| @OP, if there were in fact high traffic pages that got
| renamed, do a CSV/Excel export in GA/GSC/sitemap/etc., and
| map the old URLs to their new and implement 301's and wait
| and see if traffic starts to return.
| zuccs wrote:
| It's your redirects causing duplicate content and/or indexing
| issues.
|
| Google's index of your old site (excluding tags):
| https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.johnnyreilly.com...
|
| Shows your blog posts were indexed with no trailing slash:
| https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/page/155
|
| Your current 301 sends this to: https://johnnyreilly.com/page/155
|
| Which doesn't have a canonical tag, or 301 redirect, to the
| correct blog post:
| https://johnnyreilly.com/2017/05/20/typescript-spare-rod-spo...
|
| Once that's fixed, I would also jump into GSC and run their
| Change of Address tool
| (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9370220?hl=en).
|
| LMK if you need a hand with this.
| jwie wrote:
| Google claims they don't use GA for ranking signal. Though in
| your case it could be interpreted as mischief, maybe something is
| going on there. You might try recreating a GA4 instance and
| starting fresh. It might be the least painful road to redemption
| if that's the issue.
|
| Without knowing much about docusarus, if the upgrade touched the
| pages' markup in some big way, something like not having h1 tags
| on the pages that would hurt.
|
| The most likely culprit is a ranking algorithm change. I recall
| there was one around in October that wrecked more than a few
| sites.
|
| The good news is you probably didn't wreck your SEO. The bad news
| is you probably can't do anything about it.
| lovasoa wrote:
| I don't think sharing your Google analytics tag was the cause. If
| Google de-ranked unrelated sites using the same Google analytics
| id, we would see black-hat SEOs using that against their
| competitors. This ID isn't a secret.
| supermatt wrote:
| > As I've mentioned, I broke links by not implementing redirects.
|
| Didnt implement redirects for what? The prior part of the article
| doesnt even mention you changed any page URLs.
|
| But if you did, that is most definitely going to have caused
| problems.
|
| Think about it - the pages are no longer there, so they will get
| dropped from the search index, so wont appear in search results,
| resulting in less impressions/opportunities for click-through,
| and you will receive less visitors as a consequence.
|
| You effectively delisted your sites content. The existing inbound
| links will now point to non-existent pages, so they carry no
| "authority" to your site. The content that is on the new URLs has
| no inherent "authority" so its not being ranked as well as it was
| on the old URLs. The search engines will rank it lower (e.g. page
| 10 instead of page 2), so less impressions and therefore less
| visitors.
|
| You will likely be able to (partially) fix this with redirects -
| as sites that still link will still bring authority. But you will
| possibly have lost any history-based authority (that which comes
| from being a reliable and consistent URL), which may not be able
| to be retrieved.
|
| I would recommend going through old access logs to find what your
| old URLs were, and redirect them to the new URLs for that same
| content (not a wildcard redirect to homepage!)
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| > I would recommend going through old access logs to find what
| your old URLs were, and redirect them to the new URLs for that
| same content (not a wildcard redirect to homepage!)
|
| this is great advice and I've done that as much as possible.
| Herewith a giant file of redirects!
| https://github.com/johnnyreilly/blog.johnnyreilly.com/blob/m...
| jacobsimon wrote:
| Which pages or queries in GSC specifically lost traffic? Was
| there a handful of keywords that drove most of your traffic
| that you've lost? Or is it down across the board for all
| articles?
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| I still get traffic, but for things like a webpack define
| plugin post I wrote in 2017 and for 2 CSharp posts. "eslint
| for c#" and "build props"
|
| All my Azure / TypeScript / React / Bicep traffic dried up.
| No idea what replaced me.
| jacobsimon wrote:
| It's a bit annoying but you should be able to see in GSC
| what the ranking change was for particular URLs and
| queries by comparing before October and after October.
| You should also be able to see if the issue is whether
| the pages dropped in ranking or if some articles became
| de-indexed entirely. Take one of the page URLs that has
| dropped in traffic and make sure it's still being
| indexed.
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| at the point of the observed drop I hadn't changed any page
| URLs, no. Apologies for lack of clarity.
|
| I had changed image URLs when they migrated from being PNGs to
| WebPs. Following that there was the SEO drop off (within 6
| weeks or so)
| franze wrote:
| ok, as I was curious
|
| this was your old site blog.johnnyreilly.com (note:hosted on on
| the blog subdomain)
| https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.johnnyreilly.com...
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://blog.joh...
| archive.org picks it up until december 2022
|
| this is your current site https://johnnyreilly.com/ (note: no
| subdomain()
| https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ajohnnyreilly.com&pws=...
| archive.org seems to pic it up late december 2022, start 2023
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://johnnyre...
|
| between old pages and new pages you have a redirect chain
| https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/page/201/ -> 301 ->
| https://johnnyreilly.com/page/201/ ->
| https://johnnyreilly.com/page/201 final destination (which does
| not seem to be the correct new URL)
|
| you had an domain movie, URL change and a subideal old 2 new
| migration if you do not want to loose traffic with URL changes,
| follwo this spec to the letter
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
|
| if you do not do this correctly a traffic pattern like yours must
| be expected.
|
| if you do this now you might be abble to recup about 50% of your
| old traffic, might
|
| additionally you haver massive self made internal duplicate
| content (tag pages show full pages), soft 404 (non existing pages
| i.e.: https://johnnyreilly.com/page/fake-url-for-soft-404-error-
| ch... trigger HTTP 302 redirects and then even more behaviour)
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| yeah I'm hoping that my redirect story is now quite good - see
| dynamic redirect code here:
|
| https://github.com/johnnyreilly/blog.johnnyreilly.com/blob/m...
|
| as to the duplicate content, Docusaurus generates /tags/ and
| /pages/ content by default that I strip from from my sitemap
| manually.
|
| Thanks for the links!
| PerilousD wrote:
| I gave up on following the Google SEO bandwagon years ago. I
| write for people and most definitely NOT for Google. I get around
| 800 real users a month on my site across about 20 countries - top
| 3 being U.S U.K and for some reason China. I get maybe 20 or so
| emails asking questions or just saying thanks and they have to
| track me down to send those emails there's no "email me" link on
| the site. If you want to "monetize" your site then SEO away
| otherwise setup a Google site owner/developer account for the
| "advice" (page not mobile friendly for example) but ignore the
| Googley crap unless you like running on THEIR treadmill.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| Seems like a lot of majoring in the minor here. After such an
| event, someone once told me to go fishing for a week and come
| back to focus on what really matters. It was helpful advice.
| dceddia wrote:
| Of the things on the list, the redirects jumped out to me as the
| most likely culprit. Second guess would be the algorithm change.
| You could look at individual pages before & after - mainly the
| top performing few, looking at what queries they ranked for
| before and now, and what their average position was. Hopefully
| the fix to the redirects will kick in soon!
| bmac27 wrote:
| As others have said, this strikes me as a multi-faceted problem.
|
| It's possible Google devalues those sharing (even inadvertently!)
| GA tags in the rankings, although I don't think there's been any
| public proclamations from Google on that. But if that were the
| sole culprit, only your GA instance would reflect that. The fact
| that you're losing real traffic (as reflected in what the 3rd
| party tools are telling you) makes me think that's probably not
| the case/or at least the only thing that's happening.
|
| Not implementing re-directs would also definitely be a culprit.
| But if it's just images you failed to re-direct, that's likely
| not the main thing either unless you were getting a majority of
| your traffic from Google Images.
|
| Since this happened post-Core Update, I would want to know two
| things:
|
| 1. What keywords dropped and what replaced you 2. Whether the
| drop was site-wide or isolated to individual categories or groups
| of pages.
|
| Regarding #1: Was what replaced you a big, high authority
| publisher? Or was the content simply more comprehensive or
| otherwise a better match for the user's intent? Very likely could
| be E-E-A-T-related, in terms of the algos determining that you
| don't have the authority/expertise to rank for what you were
| ranking for previously.
|
| Investigate those possibilities first and you should be able to
| better map out a plan for re-gaining that traffic.
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| My site is definitely page based rather than image based.
|
| I'll confess to complete ignorance when it comes to keywords.
| I'm a total novice in this area.
|
| I still get traffic, but for things like a webpack define
| plugin post I wrote in 2017 and for 2 CSharp posts. "eslint for
| c#" and "build props"
|
| All my Azure / TypeScript / React / Bicep traffic dried up. No
| idea what replaced me.
|
| For what it's with, with no false modesty, my content is pretty
| good. It's the sort of thing I'd hope to find when I Google.
| [deleted]
| hluska wrote:
| Good comment! I'd add in one more question so we can put the GA
| tag issue to rest.
|
| Does the writer have access to Google Search Central? They
| rename this product every six minutes. It used to be Google
| Webmaster Tools and it's likely called something new now. Are
| there any manual actions or security alerts in there??
|
| If Google performs a manual action or picks up certain types of
| security problems, they will tank traffic. But they usually
| report to give webmasters the chance to fix it.
|
| I'd avoid ahrefs and the like and start right with google
| tools.
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| No manual actions / security alerts I'm happy to say. Good
| callout
| hluska wrote:
| That's good. Any noteworthy increase in error codes??
| Perhaps a mass of 404s??
|
| I'm specifically wondering about how you deal with
| redirects and what you tell the robots.
| hluska wrote:
| What about duplicate content? Have you tried searching
| direct quotes from your writing?
| pmig wrote:
| Can Google Search Tool site verification via Google Analytics
| have played a role?
|
| So all the new pages that use your tag get linked to your Google
| search tool property.
| longtail_dragon wrote:
| Of the possibilities you listed in the article, my money is on
| the failure to do the redirects. Luckily, it may not be too late
| to fix that, if you haven't already.
|
| If you're interested, email me at tobes@longtaildragon.com, and
| I'll pull a report of every URL that needs a redirect.
| zsj888 wrote:
| The other issue you may need pay attention to is your backlink
| profile. I ran an quick audit, 19% of your ahrefs links are bad.
| You probably need disavow them.
| anon1094 wrote:
| Johnny is correct and this most likely has to do with the 404
| backlinks and accidental misuse of Google Analytics.
|
| I recently did a comprehensive SEO audit for a web3 brand that
| saw a similar drastic drop in traffic. Here are some other things
| to keep in mind to rank better on Google. 1. One
| H1 per page
|
| SEO experts agree the best practice is to use one H1 per page.
| Headers help keep content structured for both Google and readers.
| If there are multiple H1s, convert them into proper H2-H4s to
| improve the content's hierarchy. 2. High-quality
| content >1000 words
|
| According to Yoast, chances of ranking in Google are higher if
| you write high-quality posts of 1000 words or more. If you have
| some sparse content that is less than this add a few more
| detailed sections. 3. Google PageSpeed score >90
|
| Google PageSpeed says that improving performance increases
| rankings and user experience. The ideal Google PageSpeed score is
| >90. Make sure your pages takes less than 2s to load, and ideally
| less than 500ms. Reduce JS and additional requests on important
| pages. 4. Add title tags and meta descriptions
| with primary keyword
|
| Google recommends matching H1 tags to title tags to prevent
| inaccurate article titles from showing up on search results. It's
| also best to include the primary keyword in the meta description
| too. 5. Improve primary blog page with multiple
| sections
|
| Your blog's primary page is your chance to showcase your best
| content, not just an archive of your latest posts. Separate your
| posts into sections like best, classics, and latest. Add H1 to
| make it clear to the audience what the blog is about. Add H2
| subheadline to clarify.
|
| By the way Johnny, you can see the full SEO audit on my
| Twitter[0].
|
| If you're open to it, I'd love to do a full SEO audit for your
| blog. Let's get those numbers back to their original state.
| Please DM me on Twitter.
|
| P.S. - I worked with a software company[1] to build out their
| docs using Docusaurus so I'm familiar with how it works.
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/dericksozo/status/1613171898430488578
|
| [1]: https://medium.com/solidstateso/shortcat-documentation-
| case-...
| CSSer wrote:
| One H1 per page is a myth dispelled directly by John Mueller at
| Google[0].
|
| [0] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/h1-headings-for-
| google/4...
| moneywoes wrote:
| Thoughts on AI driven content and SEO?
| Growtika wrote:
| With your approach I'm sure you'll get back to normal traffic
| very soon.
|
| I think your conclusion is right. It's not one thing that cause
| the drop but a combination of things.
|
| Let's forget one sec about the traffic you had before and focus
| on the current situation.
|
| - Page speed: It's one of the most important ranking factor. You
| don't have to get 100 score, but passing the core web vitals
| score and having higher score on mobile is recommended.
|
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjohnnyrei...
|
| A cool trick to improve the result fast is by removing the lazy
| load effect from the LCP: https://i.imgur.com/rOOWm91.png
|
| - Add a robots.txt You have plenty of pages in the site, it might
| be good to make sure only things you want to be indexed are
| getting crawled. https://i.imgur.com/ONSiQjQ.png
|
| - Add bio (one liner) here: https://i.imgur.com/SXbWVwU.jpg Great
| smile. The bio should show your readers your expertise in the
| topic. If you want to take it to the next level, Quora is a great
| inspiration. In every Quora answer you can write a different On-
| liner/byline.
|
| - Internal linking: I love your blog archive. It's a great idea.
| Try to make more strategic articles stronger. More internal links
| to the article will signal search engines this page is indeed
| important.
|
| - Add Privacy policy & Terms of use pages
|
| I can help you with analyzing the traffic drop if I'll understand
| which pages were your largest traffic generators. Let's try to
| understand what happened to those pages, and how it's possible to
| make them stronger.
|
| I worked with several large companies who had traffic drop after
| migration. Sometimes companies spend so much time and effort
| looking for the reason for the drop instead of just focus on
| recovering.
|
| I'm up for analyzing the drop but if the reason is not obvious
| (Google Penalty for example), I recommend to focus on the future
| rather than the past.
|
| I would love to help you (As a case study) with analyzing what
| caused the issue, and to give tips on how to move forward and get
| more traffic.
|
| Edit: We wrote a SaaS SEO guide that cover several related
| topics: https://growtika.com/saas-seo/
| dazc wrote:
| > Add a robots.txt
|
| Likely not the cause but not having a robots.txt can cause
| weird crawling problems.
|
| Since it takes two minutes to set up, why not. And, here's a
| tip, don't try and be clever, keep it simple:
| User-agent: \* Disallow:
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| Yeah I'd love to get your help! My email address is
| johnny_reilly at hotmail dot com or you can DM me here:
| https://twitter.com/johnny_reilly or here
| https://fosstodon.org/@johnny_reilly
| Growtika wrote:
| Edit II:
|
| Few more tips:
|
| - The drop might be related tO Google algorithm update. This
| link can help with understanding if the traffic drop is in
| correlation with your traffic drop:
|
| https://ahrefs.com/google-algorithm-updates#october-2022-spa...
|
| - Google search console: Check if there was any penalty More
| info here:
|
| https://searchengineland.com/google-penalties-manual-actions...
|
| EDIT III: This thread might be useful
|
| You can find more related threads of people who suffer traffic
| drop after Google algorithm update (October 2022):
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fsupport...
| lelandfe wrote:
| > You don't have to get 100 score, but passing the core web
| vitals score and having higher score on mobile is recommended
|
| Note that they don't have a CWV score yet due to low traffic.
| But a 39 performance score from the simulated Lighthouse is
| often more than enough for a passing grade. That is: if a Moto
| G4 can do _OK_ , your normal users will likely do great.
|
| For instance, a site I made[0] has a 22 from Lighthouse, but a
| passing CWV grade, so further improvement to the LCP, FID, and
| CLS would confer no direct Google SEO benefit.[1] (But it may
| help things like bounce rate, which may confer second-order
| benefits)
|
| > by removing the lazy load effect from the LCP
|
| Indeed. Even better, making it high priority instead of normal:
| https://addyosmani.com/blog/fetch-priority/
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/TGD1sj2.png
|
| [1] "For example, a page with an LCP of 1750 ms (better than
| the "good" LCP guidance) and another one with 2500 ms (at the
| "good" guidance) would not be distinguished on the basis of the
| LCP signal" -
| https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/104436075/core-...
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| This is very helpful, thank you. Raised a ticket against
| Docusaurus to track this:
| https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/issues/8552 will
| experiment
| kshay wrote:
| > It's not one thing that cause the drop but a combination of
| things
|
| Let me propose a bold generalization based on observations of
| sites of all sizes wrestling with Google over the last 20
| years, and to which there are certainly exceptions (this case
| may be one):
|
| It's always one thing.
|
| Of course, there are always a multitude of improvements that
| can be made to nibble around the edges and get incremental
| improvements in various metrics. And a gradual change in
| traffic may have several simultaneous sources.
|
| But when the effect is an identifiable precipitous drop in
| search traffic, almost all the time, it turns out there was a
| single reason, whether a change Google made or a change the
| site made.
|
| This may be a totally unhelpful observation, and feel free to
| ignore it. But in these situations I've come to find it's more
| fruitful to look for A Cause than to approach it as "a little
| here, a little there."
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| I've listed all the causes I can think of. Does any strike
| you as "the one"?
| kshay wrote:
| Honestly, the thing about other sites using your GA tag
| seems like the biggest red flag/potential for some Google
| algorithm to have actively started penalizing you. The
| timing doesn't quite track, but maybe some interaction
| between that and the spam update?
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| Thanks for the tips!
|
| > A cool trick to improve the result fast is by removing the
| lazy load effect from the LCP: https://i.imgur.com/rOOWm91.png
|
| Haha, ironically I'm responsible for wholesale lazy loading of
| images in Docusaurus:
|
| https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/pull/6598
|
| Generally that's a good thing, but it's not good for title
| images that appear "above the fold". I wonder if there's
| something we could do to determine whether an image is "above
| the fold" and so not apply lazy. Something to ponder.
|
| > Try to make more strategic articles stronger.
|
| Not sure I follow your meaning here, do you literally mean
| applying bold to certain articles? Or something else?
| slorber wrote:
| We could apply lazy loading only after the 2nd image maybe
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| Yeah - primitive but probably reasonable. Would be happy to
| experiment with that. I've also been pondering things we
| could do around open graph images as well, would be nice to
| use image CDNs like Cloudinary for open graph images in the
| same way we can for blog images
| https://johnnyreilly.com/2022/12/26/docusaurus-image-
| cloudin...
| birken wrote:
| Changing all images to be lazy loaded is not a good idea
| for SEO reasons (and perhaps not a good idea for regular
| usage of the site either). If it were, browsers would
| just do it automatically. Using hints on your images is
| only useful if you are doing it strategically, which
| means only lazy loading images that are offscreen on the
| initial page load. Otherwise you are not actually giving
| useful hints to the browser on how to load your page in
| the correct manner, and thus you are just better off
| letting the browser use whatever internal logic it has to
| decide how and when to load the assets.
|
| Basically you can think about the optimal, minimal set of
| resources to render your page being:
|
| - HTML
|
| - Required CSS
|
| - Above the fold images
|
| Then at that point, download all of the other things to
| make the page work in the way you want (javascript, etc).
| Anything else is delaying the initial page-load. Because
| your images are lazy loaded, your page load looks like
| the following:
|
| - HTML
|
| - Required CSS
|
| - Some above the fold images (profile.jpg, etc)
|
| - Massive, >300kb blobs of javascript (runtime-main.js,
| main.js)
|
| - Above the fold images in the post
|
| This is not good. It doesn't make sense for your page to
| download 300kb of javascript before downloading the 18kb
| image that is above the fold. Now you can partially solve
| this problem by making the javascript asynchronous, but
| that still is just another band-aid on the problem, as
| then the javascript and above the fold images would
| download concurrently, which is still not optimal.
|
| What you want to do is have above the fold post images be
| loaded eagerly (the default), and then lazy load ones
| that are lower on the page. If you aren't going to do
| that, you probably are better off just not having the
| images being lazy loaded at all, _especially_ if your
| page includes 300kb of javascript which is likely going
| to be much larger than the combined size of all the
| images on the page.
| Growtika wrote:
| That's cool. Just for fun, try to remove the lazy load effect
| from the LCP, let's see how it effect the score.
|
| As for the strategic articles, I mean that you'll increase
| the internal links certain articles you think can rank
| higher.
|
| On October you had 3300+ keyword that were ranked 11-100 on
| Google
|
| https://i.imgur.com/ZGU0Ezk.png
|
| It dropped to 165 keyword now. That's an insane drop, but I
| wonder how much traffic these thousands of keywords brought
| you since there weren't rank too high.
|
| I would like to dive into the keyword that ranked 4-10, on
| Google (50 keywords). And they keywords that ranked 1-3 (15
| keywords)
|
| By understanding on GA which pages brought you the most
| traffic/ranked the highest you can make them stronger by
| adding more internal links to these pages, look at it as kind
| of first aid ;)
|
| EDIT:
|
| Few tips:
|
| - The 'Recent posts' widget is great. It get your article
| indexed faster. What about adding a widget below for 'Popular
| articles'? Place 5-10 articles there.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/MBquX6M.jpg
|
| - Make sure you implement time stamp to your articles the
| right way
|
| https://i.imgur.com/b5usnJJ.png
|
| https://i.imgur.com/0vpXdyE.png
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| tell me more about the timestamp. Where does that data get
| derived? I thought that should be in great shape since I
| set lastmod in my sitemap based on git commit date
|
| https://johnnyreilly.com/2022/11/25/adding-lastmod-to-
| sitema...
| phphphphp wrote:
| Generally, if you make good changes, you'll see a short-term dip
| before a long-term increase. The challenge is differentiating
| between bad changes that have caused long-term harm, vs. good
| changes that are experiencing the natural short-term dip.
|
| A website may build good reputation with a search engine which
| has ranking benefits but at the core of search engine ranking is
| individual pages: you must protect your well ranking pages at all
| costs. That means _never break any links_. If you break links,
| your pages will drop out of search engines, and it can take years
| to rebuild the lost reputation for those pages. The model for
| thinking about SEO should be page-based, not website-based.
|
| The good news is that if your website was able to rank well once,
| it'll rank well again, because as much as we might tinker with
| the structure of a website, what matters most is the content, and
| you're still distributing that same content... you just might
| have set yourself back a year by breaking a bunch of links. Easy
| mistake, c'est la vie.
|
| The ideal strategy for experimenting with SEO is to do it page by
| page, experiment with different changes on different pages and
| measure the impact. Don't make wholesale changes to the structure
| of every page until you're confident that you're doing something
| that works.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Your site's performance, reflected on its page speed insight
| score, is showing 45. This is unacceptable for a blog; it should
| be close to 100 for text-based pages like you have. Does the site
| contain scripts, deep dependency trees, or analytics?
|
| Could this have changed during the performance drop?
| zuccs wrote:
| Whilst it still should be fixed, Google isn't tanking a site
| for its PageSpeed score.
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| No - it's because it's a Docusaurus site and so runs React /
| JavaScript. It was like this before the drop and so is unlikely
| to be the cause. It's been Docusaurus for about 2 years now
| jcims wrote:
| Scott's Cheap Flights just rebranded to Going. Would there be a
| good way for him to forecast the SEO impact of that change (which
| seems on the surface to be probably large)?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Title:
|
| > _How I ruined my SEO_
|
| Conclusion:
|
| > _I 'm not quite sure_
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| Yup - I am not quite sure! But I reckon it's fairly likely that
| the post contains the "how" of how I ruined my SEO. The hope is
| that a knowledgeable someone can say what I did wrong.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Title suggestion: "How did I ruin my SEO?"
| pwython wrote:
| Yea he should of phrased the title as a question. As his last
| paragraph goes:
|
| > I'm hoping someone will read this and tell me what I did
| wrong.
| nottorp wrote:
| Spelling nazi hat on
|
| > Yea he should of phrased the title as a question.
|
| ... he should _have_ phrased ...
|
| Spelling nazi hat off
| locutous wrote:
| That's the grammar Nazi hat.
|
| Pedant hat off.
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law ;-)
| nottorp wrote:
| Grammar looks fine to me. "Have" is just misspelled :)
|
| And no, Godwin's is about comparing something in the
| topic to Nazis, not self identifying as a "XXX Nazi".
| Veuxdo wrote:
| Usually Hacker News strips out "How" (and "Why") at the start
| of article titles to prevent this. I'm not sure why there are
| exceptions sometimes.
| exolymph wrote:
| You can edit it back in after submission.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Yes, true. I've noticed, though, that more often than not
| HN's deletion of "How"/"Why" makes the title better when it
| comes to my submissions. I'd estimate 95% of the time I let
| the HN-auto-edited version stand.
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| Oh I didn't realise it did that! I assumed I'd copied and
| pasted incorrectly when I submitted it and added the "How"
| back after the fact.
| franze wrote:
| Confusing post for me.
|
| Ad redirects? are we talking page URL redirects or just image URL
| redirects?
|
| the GSC pattern looks a lot like page URLs changed. did they?
|
| I would recommend to this kind of analysis
| https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/a/google-update
|
| so basically
|
| - did the page URLs change?
|
| - 4 SEO tests
|
| - and then winner/loser pages analysis.
|
| Update: 4 SEO tests are better outlined here
| https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/a/seo-basics
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| There's no ads.
|
| Over time I've change page URLs, partly as a migration from
| Blogger to Docusaurus, partly due to just changing page URLs
| without thinking about it.
|
| I've changed image URLs by switching from PNG to WebP and back
| again.
|
| Thanks for the link will check it out.
| franze wrote:
| that was the latin "ad" aka "about"
|
| mobile friendly tests fails see
| https://search.google.com/test/mobile-
| friendly/result?id=SAu...
|
| and google can not render the page correctly
|
| also test with GSC page inspect -> render page -> see
| screenshot
|
| if this correlates with the software update (and the page
| URLs) did not change, then this is the strongest contender.
|
| check the crawling metrics in GSC google search console
|
| js, css average load time should be max 200ms- or it is some
| other asset delivery issue
|
| html not more than 400ms average response time
|
| note: i am the author "understanding seo"
| https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news (think
| seo for hackers) feel free to mail me, contact in profile
|
| everything points either to an page URL change or 4 SEO tests
| issue - from my point of view
|
| written on a mobile in the metro, so can not check in detail
| right now
| quesera wrote:
| > that was the latin "ad" aka "about"
|
| Latin "ad" is more like "to" or "toward", but I've never
| seen it used to mean "about". FWIW.
|
| You might be aiming for "ab", with which autocorrect will
| likely refuse to cooperate.
| franze wrote:
| additionally misconfigured /tags/
|
| i.e.: https://johnnyreilly.com/tags/authorisation shows the
| full content of the first one, this is also the ones which
| get indexed, see https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahtt
| ps%3A%2F%2Fjohnnyr...
|
| a.k.a. massive self made internal duplicate content
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(page generated 2023-01-15 23:01 UTC)