The Latest in Technical SEO for News Publishers

Slides from my talk at the 2022 News and Editorial SEO Summit where I gave an overview of the newest developments in technical SEO for news websites.

More info: https://newsseo.io

Transcript

1. #NESS22 The Latest in Technical SEO for News Publishers Barry Adams
2. #NESS22
3. #NESS22 #NESS22 Last Year…
4. #NESS22 #NESS22 Crawling Indexing Serving Google Processes
5. #NESS22 #NESS22 Crawling Indexing Serving Technical SEO Google Processes
6. #NESS22 NESS22 1. Crawling (Googlebot) ➢ URL discovery ➢ URL prioritisation ➢ URL de-duplication ➢ Queue management ➢ HTTP response parsing ➢ TTFB monitoring ➢ Resource management ➢ … ? Crawling
7. #NESS22 NESS22 Priority for News Publishers ✓ Rapid crawling of newly published articles Crawling
8. #NESS22 #NESS22 2. Indexing Crawling Indexing Serving
9. #NESS22 NESS22 2. Indexing Indexing ➢ Index selection ➢ HTML tokenisation & parsing ➢ Rendering* ➢ Meta tag processing ➢ Canonicalisation ➢ Index sanitation ➢ Calculating PageRank ➢ Quality evaluations ➢ … ? * Not for news articles
10. #NESS22 NESS22 Priority for News Publishers Indexing ✓ Flawless indexing of articles
11. #NESS22 #NESS22 What’s New in 2022?
12. #NESS22 NESS22
13. #NESS22 NESS22 New and Updated GSC Reports • Simplified Coverage report • Improved Core Web Vitals report • New reports: ➢ HTTPS ➢ Video Indexing ➢ Merchant Listings
14. #NESS22 NESS22 Simplified Index Coverage Report
15. #NESS22 NESS22 Why pages aren’t indexed
16. #NESS22 NESS22 Improved CWV Report • More URL-level data
17. #NESS22 NESS22 New Report: HTTPS
18. #NESS22 NESS22 New Report: HTTPS
19. #NESS22 NESS22 New Report: Video Pages
20. #NESS22 NESS22 New Report: Video Pages
21. #NESS22 NESS22 New Report: Merchant Listings
22. #NESS22 NESS22 New Report: Merchant Listings
23. #NESS22 NESS22 GSC API supports Discover & News https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/10/search- analytics-discover-gnews
24. #NESS22 NESS22 New robots tag: indexifembedded https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/01/robots- meta-tag-indexifembedded
25. #NESS22 NESS22 Google Confirms: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling- indexing/valid-page-metadata
26. #NESS22 #NESS22 Edge SEO
27. #NESS22 NESS22 Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) Your Webserver Cloud CDNs Users
28. #NESS22 NESS22 Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) Your Webserver Cloud CDNs Googlebot
29. #NESS22 NESS22 Edge SEO Your Webserver Cloud CDNs Googlebot Change your webpages here
30. #NESS22 NESS22 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 & indexes the changed CDN-cached pages; ➢ Your ‘original’ website remains unchanged ➢ Google only sees the changed CDN webpages
31. #NESS22 NESS22 Why Edge SEO? • Faster deployment; ➢ Bypass your developers’ lengthy queues ➢ ‘Ask forgiveness, not permission’ ➢ No reliance on client-side JavaScript • No CMS constraints; ➢ Change pages directly regardless of your CMS capabilities • Testing; ➢ Perform narrow tests on specific site sections ➢ A/B testing for SEO
32. #NESS22 NESS22 SEO A/B Split Testing
33. #NESS22 NESS22 SEO Split Testing Case Studies https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/newsletter/
34. #NESS22 #NESS22
35. #NESS22 NESS22
36. #NESS22 NESS22 The Great AMP Deletion
37. #NESS22 NESS22 https://kurtgessler.medium.com/what-happened-when-we-disabled- google-amp-at-tribune-publishing-2fa65a2f2a40
38. #NESS22 NESS22 Google has removed AMP from documentation
39. #NESS22
40. #NESS22 NESS22 Caveat: You need good Core Web Vitals
41. #NESS22 NESS22 https://datastudio.google.com/s/i5xOURZw1zQ
42. #NESS22 #NESS22 Google Giveth and Taketh Away
43. #NESS22 NESS22 September Core Algorithm Update(s)
44. #NESS22 NESS22 News & Media is down overall https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/ winners-losers-of-the-september-2022-core- update-product-reviews-update/
45. #NESS22 NESS22 The Dangers of Chasing Algorithms… • It’s hard to make sense of Core Algo Updates; ➢ Inherently inscrutable due to Google’s reliance on ML • Avoid wasting resources on ‘busywork’; ➢ Fixing those wayward 301-redirects and occasional 404s isn’t going to make things magically better • Double-down on your strengths; ➢ Best immunisation for Google’s whims is brand power
46. #NESS22 NESS22
47. #NESS22 Thank You Q&A