Technical SEO Trends in 2022 and Beyond

Key Technical SEO Trends In 2022 and Beyond Barry Adams
May 2022

What is Technical SEO?

Crawler Indexer Ranker Google Processes

Crawler Indexer Ranker Technical SEO Google Processes

Crawler Indexer Ranker 1. Crawler (Googlebot)

Crawling: Googlebot • URL discovery; ➢ <href> tags in HTML
➢ XML sitemaps ➢ Other sources? • Crawl queue management; ➢ De-duplication based on URL patterns ➢ Crawl prioritisation & scheduling • Crawling; ➢ Fetching raw HTML ➢ Crawl ‘politeness’

Crawl Management • Robots.txt Disallow; ➢ Strongest crawl management signal
➢ Evaporates crawl budget

Don't use robots.txt to temporarily reallocate crawl budget for other
pages; use robots.txt to block pages or resources that you don't want Google to crawl at all. Google won't shift this newly available crawl budget to other pages unless Google is already hitting your site's serving limit.

Robots.txt prevents crawling… … but not indexing! • Links on
webpages to blocked URLs are still crawled • Their anchor texts carry relevancy for indexing

Crawl Management • Canonicals & noindex are NOT crawl management;
➢ Google needs to see meta tags before it can act on them ➢ That means Googlebot still crawls those URLs

Optimise Crawling • Server Response Time

GSC Crawl Stats

Page Resource Load

Googlebot & AdsBot

Optimise Crawling • Serve correct HTTP status codes; ➢ 200
OK ➢ 301 / 302 Redirects ➢ 304 Not Modified ➢ 401 / 403 Permission Issues ➢ 404 / 410 Not Found/Gone ➢ 5xx Error

Optimise Crawling • ALL resources consume crawl budget; ➢ Not
just HTML pages ➢ Reduce HTTP requests per page

just HTML pages ➢ Reduce HTTP requests per page • AdsBot can consume crawl budget; ➢ Double-check your Google Ads campaigns

just HTML pages ➢ Reduce HTTP requests per page • AdsBot can consume crawl budget; ➢ Double-check your Google Ads campaigns • Link equity (PageRank) impacts crawl budget; ➢ More link equity = more crawl budget

Unsolved Crawl Issue

2. Indexer Crawler Indexer Ranker

Two Stages* of Indexing Crawler Indexer Ranker 1 2 *At
least – indexing is a collection of interconnected processes

Indexing • HTML lexer; ➢ Cleaning & tokenising the HTML
• Index selection; ➢ De-duping prior to indexing • Indexing; ➢ First-pass based on HTML ➢ Potential rendering (not guaranteed) • Index integrity; ➢ Canonicalisation & de-duplication

Rendering

Googlebot & Rendering

Evergreen Chrome

Possible Rendering Issues in GSC

Rendering Issues • Inaccessible Resources; ➢ Make sure all page
resources can be crawled

Rendering Issues • JavaScript inserts invalid HTML in the <head>;
➢ <body> tags in the <head> break Google’s processing of meta tags

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/ advanced/guidelines/valid-html

Rendering Issues • HTML vs Render mismatch; ➢ Different content
in raw HTML vs fully rendered page

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-rendered- source/ejgngohbdedoabanmclafpkoogegdpob

Google Tools *ALWAYS* Render

Optimise Indexing • Don’t rely on Google’s rendering; ➢ Use
SSR & CDN caching • Minimise page weight; ➢ Fewer page resources = better use of crawl budget faster load speed & CWV less chance of rendering issues • Improve internal linking; ➢ More PageRank = higher chance of indexing

Key Technical SEO Trends

IndexNow

Live Indexing API (?)

Edge SEO Your Webserver Cloud CDNs Googlebot

Edge SEO Your Webserver Cloud CDNs Googlebot Change your webpages
here

Edge SEO • CDNs store cached versions of your webpages;
➢ Global coverage with edge nodes worldwide ➢ Usually also results in faster crawling and better CWV • You manipulate your CDN cached pages; ➢ Cloud Workers enable a range of functionality • Googlebot crawls the changed CDN-cached pages; ➢ Your ‘original’ website remains unchanged ➢ Google only sees the changed CDN webpages

Why Edge SEO? • Faster deployment; ➢ Bypass your developers’
lengthy queues ➢ ‘Ask forgiveness, not permission’ • No CMS constraints; ➢ Change pages directly regardless of your CMS capabilities • Testing; ➢ Perform narrow tests on specific site sections ➢ A/B testing for SEO

A/B Testing

SEO Split Testing Case Studies https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/newsletter/

The Great AMP Deletion

Barry Adams ➢ Doing SEO since 1998 ➢ Specialist in
Technical SEO & News SEO ➢ Newsletter: SEOforGoogleNews.com

Thank You [email protected] @badams

Technical SEO Trends in 2022 and Beyond

Technical SEO Trends in 2022 and Beyond

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