What is new in SEO in 2019? - Radicke.com
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What is new in SEO in 2019?
David Radicke www.radicke.com
Erich-Kästner-Str. 15 xing.com/profile/David_Radicke
69190 Walldorf (close to Heidelberg)
Born 14.10.1970
married, 1 son
Self employed since 2006
Education
• 1999 MBA, San Franciso State University (SFSU), San Francisco, USA
focus on eCommerce + Corporate Finance
• 1994 Diplom-Betriebswirt (BA), Berufsakademie Mannheim and BASF AG
focus on computer science + business
Work focus
• Onsite SEO for news publishers, content portals, online shops, corporate sites
• SEO relaunch consulting
• Coaching + Workshops
2
Projects + references as consultant and manager
• Welt.de: SEO consulting + relaunch
• Gruner & Jahr (several publications): consulting SEO + relaunch
• Commerzbank.de: consulting SEO + relaunch
• WDR.de, MDR.de, BR.de (German public news stations): relaunches, SEO-consulting
• Sheego.de (online shop Otto Group): Interim SEO management
• Onmeda.de (health portal): interim SEO management
• WAN-IFRA: SEO-Workshops in Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, Darmstadt
• Carwale.com India: SEO consulting
• …and many more…
• Web.de: product manager Search + Local Search
• Bild.de: Senior product manager eCommerce, Shopping, Search
• DealTime.com (now Shopping.com): Director Business Development Germany
• BASF AG Singapore: Business Development Manager Asia (Petrochemicals)
3
Apologies!
My job is to search for mistakes!
I DO find potential for optimization on EVERY site!
So please don´t take offense if I point out some issues on
YOUR site in this workshop!
It´s not personal, it´s business!
4
Apologies!
I only wear SEO glasses!
There might be (good) reasons against stricly following SEO
rules
(legal, editorial, ressources)
5
Mobile first!
Mobile First!
Every morning should start with a
look at your mobile site!
Every new service, every new design
should start with the focus on mobile!
Every testing should be done first
with mobile phones!
We should all look at the website
much more often with a mobile
phone!
6
Speed is really important!
When many newspapers have the
same content (stories), it is important
to have a fast site!
Desktop and Mobile…
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/i
nsights/?hl=de&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thehin
du.com%2Fsport%2Fcricket%2Findian-premier-
league-2019-chennai-super-kings-vs-rajasthan-
royals-in-
chennai%2Farticle26695483.ece&tab=desktop
7
Speed is really important!
You will always find examples where the competition is even slower…
Do not focus on those!
Compare yourself to the fastests sites!
8
Speed is really important!
Similar article, much Slower than competition
https://www.thehindu.com/sport/cricket/live-scores-indian-
premier-league-2019-kolkata-knight-riders-vs-kings-xi-
punjab/article26654985.ece
See
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190327_X4_5dc33bdae78c9
a5ecd4d1898eb175709/
667 Requests! 3,2Mb!
https://indianexpress.com/article/sports/ipl/kkr-vs-kxip-ipl-2019-
kolkata-knight-riders-vs-kings-xi-punjab-eden-gardens-live-
score-streaming-5645905/
See
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190327_S3_42972ec3aa17c
00f5a3495b029163b0b/
Speed is really important
Similar section, much Slower than
competition
https://www.thehindu.com/elections/
See
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/1903
27_33_439b282fb3c9b63bed58503cea9
660d6/
https://indianexpress.com/elections/
See
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/1903
27_PB_207ac1703895f67b30af89785cb
292b1/Less is more
Case of Airbnb Germany
vs. small local German
competitor HometoGo.de
Indexed URLs
Hometogo.de: 5000 (!)
Airbnb.de: 1 Mio
11Less is more
Indexed URLs
Hometogo.de: 5000 (!)
Airbnb.de: 1 Mio
12Less is more
Google visibility
Hometogo.de: 50
Airbnb.de: 30
13Less is more
Hometogo.de:
Concentration on the important search
phrases.
• Here: „Vacation Apartment Berlin“, or
„Vacation house Mallorca“ essen
• Build great landing pages for those
queries
• Only 5000 landingpages for [vacation
house + City] or [vacation apartment +
Vacation area]
They Do NOT index the single offers
(houses / apartmements)
14Less is more
Hometogo.de:
From the beginning: they disallow and
noindex everything!
15Less is more
Airbnb.de
Index everything! Every offer, every hotel,
every apartment.
So they have 50.000 results for /Berlin
16Less is more
Hometogo.de:
Only 400 results for /berlin
Great landingpages for every suburb, main
attractions, price ranges that has good
search volume!
17Less is more
Airbnb.in for Paris
See URL
18Less is more
Hometogo for Paris
See nice URL!
19Crawl-Budget and Index-Budget 20
Crawl-Buget and Index-Budget
• Crawling is expensive for Google (cpu time, electricity)
• Parsing (reading the content) is expensive for Google
• Rendering the content (client side JS rendering!) is VERY expensive for Google!
• If YOU were to pay for the crawling/parsing of your website, which pages would
you want to be crawled?
• Which pages should be crawled often?
21Crawl-Buget and Index-Budget
• When your URLs are in the index,
Google will give them attention
• That means: whatever is indexed,
will also take away a part of your
budget
22Crawl-Buget and Index-Budget • How to tell Google where to spend the „budget“? • Links! • Links from the homepage • Links from the articles • Links from the tag pages • XML-sitemaps • Html-sitemaps So all of these should really only „link“ to pages that are worth the „money“! 23
How to limit crawling and indexing? • Disallow in the robots.txt • Meta-robots „noindex, follow“ • X-robots noindex • NoFollow links • Rel-canonical • „hide“ content via Google Search Console All of these have disadvantages and are NOT perfect! 24
How to limit crawling + indexing?
Disallow means:
• do not crawl the
URLs in the
directory
/archives.php
• Google still „finds“
and „knows“ the
URL, but NOT the
content
25Crawl-Buget and Index-Budget
Disallow means:
• The URL is still in the Google
Index!
• (it is not normally displayed to
a normal searcher, but it still
is there!)
• If there are (external) links to
these URLs, Google can
guess what the content is an
still display them for
searches!
26Crawl-Buget and Index-Budget
No-Index means
• Please crawl the URL and
parse the content!
• So crawler „money“ and
parser/rendering „money“ is
wasted, if you do not want to
have it indexed
• (it is not normally displayed to
a normal searcher, but it still
is in the index)
27Crawl-Buget and Index-Budget
Google is not smart.
• If you disallow something in
the robots.txt, Google will
NOT see (read) the meta-
robots noindex.
• So these noindex print
articles are all in the index!
28Crawl-Buget and Index-Budget
Rel-canonical means:
Please crawl, parse, render, index.
• But really, we have a better version of this URL with
identical (!) content.
• So please be so kind as to show the searcher other
page we are referencing here.
• Google so: „Yeah maybe. But if this page=100 is
linked 10 times from internal and external URLs
we´ll choose this one. Besides: this page is NOT
identical to the one you are referencing. So what is
your point?“
• Oh, and as this page is marked as „identical“ and
„unimportant“ I do not crawl it and do not follow the
links on it…
29Crawl-Buget and Index-Budget
Google is not smart.
• Although you tell Google:
there is a better (identival)
version of this page, Google
still crawls, indexed and
shows the canonicalized
pages!
30Crawl-Budget and Index-Budget
So how to use Crawl-Budget wisely?
• Difficult! Many different opinions with experts!
One thing all experts agree on:
• Avoid unnessary URLs from the very beginning!
• Do not publish them, do not link to them!
• If you still need them: hide them from Google (behind a log in wall)
31Crawl-Budget and Index-Budget
What is missing: a command like
• „Google, do NOT crawl NOR index NOR follow NOR show this URL“!
• Rel-canonical is clearly the worst solution! It is just a „hint“ not a command.
• Many people say: noindex is the best of the (imperfect) options. (only works without
disallow)
• Although noindex URLs are still crawled, Google understands that the URLs are not
important and crawls them less (=is wasting less crawl budget)
• BUT: if „noindex, follow“ are crawled less (or not at all), the links on them are also
worthless (so it is NOT a perfect solution for archives!)
32No more noindex for pagination / archives
• Surprise!
• Noindex is crawled
only as much as a
404-error page???
• (or not at all)
33Are pages really seen by users?
• Please check your
analytics data!
• How many of these
„following“ pages have
been views by humans in
the last 12 months?
• Can you track logfiles for
googlebot access?
• Does the googlebot
access these pages at
all?
34No rel canonical for archives
• The chronological
archive also has rel-
canonicals
• (to hindu.com/archive/)
35Which pages are really seen by users?
• Please check your
analytics data!
• How many of these
„following“ pages have
been views by humans in
the last 12 months?
• Can you track logfiles for
googlebot access?
• Does the googlebot
access these pages at
all?
36No more rel next/prev
Surprise!
Google has not used
rel-next/prev for
years!
37No more rel next/prev
• There should not be any paginated (news) articles on more than 1 page anyway!
• For paginated archives (p1, p2…) I would leave it in for now…
• For new projects, I would not include rel-prev, rel-next any more
38Canonicals only to join/merge content
• No so new, but
rel-canonicals are
NOT good for
normal pagination
and archives!
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-friendly-pagination/275557/
39Canonicals only to join/merge content
• These are canonicalized pages
that Google indexed anyway!
• Thousands of them.
• Rel-canonical is just a „hint“,
not an order to Google
• Rel-canonical is meant for
IDENTICAL content of several
possible URLs (like different
sorting order)
• So it was never meant for
archives!
40Canonicalized pages not crawled?!
• All these pages might appear
in the google index, if they are
linked to!
• They also also probably not
crawled at all!
41Google chooses different canonical
• Nobody understands this!
• Google ignores canonicals (but
we don´t know why)
• Maybe they have too many
links?
42Still in the index (in spite of canonicals)
• Still, many of them are in
the google index.
• Of course we will only
find them if we
specifically look for them!
43• Now what?
• How should we link to ALL articles in the archive (which is important!)
• And how to „hide“ the paginated pages / archive pages?
• If we turn them to DO-index, there will be even more „weak“ pages in the Index!
• If we delete the rel-canonicals there will be even more weak pages…
44• I am really not sure…
• If you ask 10 SEO-experts, you will get 12 answers
45Less is more
Possible answers to discuss
• Consider NOT publishing (or keeping) every single snippet of text
• Consider NOT publishing stories you know are duplicates (print version)
• Consider deleting (404/410) or redirecting (301) stories that are too short (=too
weak)
• Consider 404/410 or 301 URLs that have NOT received traffic in 18 months (or
very little traffic) difficult to find out
46More relevant links!
Possible answers to discuss
• Link MORE between stories (relevant to relevant!)
• Every article MUST statically link to 5-10 other relevant (!) URLs
• Link more between topic pages (relevancy!)
• Use automatic in-text links and always link to relevant URLs and topic pages!
• (link from phrases and words)
• Set up a system to priorize the most important 1000 pages / topics!
47Chronological archive
• I still do like the
chronological archive for
newspapers
• But do we really need it
for print?
• I would allow indexation
of all „day“ pages (there
are „only“ 365 every
year)
48Chronological archive
• I still do like the
chronological archive for
newspapers
• Can we improve the
pages to make it more
useful?
• Which day is this? What
happened on this day?
• Can we only link the
most important 300
stories per day?
49Rethink the topic pages / tag pages
• Rethink the topic pages!
• This way, most of them
do NOT make sense!
50No more noindex for pagination / archives
• Rethink the topic pages!
• It would be much more
important to see the
DATE of the article!
• Many do not have
images… switch to
text only? (It is faster
anyway!)
51Clean up topic pages / tag pages
Possible answers to discuss
• Clean up your tags and topic pages. You have too many of them!
• You might have redundant tags / topics / main sections (example „elections“!)
• In articles, do not link to tags/topics, when you have a main section!
• Many of your tag pages and topic pages are too „thin“ only link to very few
stories
52Best topic page?
Build topic pages that are useful for the reader!
• What would a reader expect on the best topic page?
• Maybe use not only image teasers, but more text links?
• Display date, so that reader knows if something is new or old
• Concentrate on the most important 100 topics. Really improve these pages
• No more 100s of following pages for so many topics: nobody looks at those
• First page: 10 images, 300 text links (date + headline)
• Only most important topics have following pages that have 300 Text links
each
53Idea for good (hybrid) topic page Example (German)
https://www.mdr.de/thueringen/woelfe-in-
thueringen-100.html
Top (static)
• Headline: Information and News about Wolfes in
Thuringia
• Static image
• static (FAQ) text (maybe in accordions like here)
mobile first!
Body (dynamic)
• placement of 5-10 news image teaser, sorted by
latest date (show date!)
• Up to 300 text links to stories with the tag (show
date + headline)
• Important: this page MUST be linked to from all
„Wolf“ stories
• Everybody in the company must know: THIS is
the best page for „wolfes“ on the domain!Same for main section?
Could this be improved by a few lines
of static introduction?
• Maybe a section „what is Lok
Sabha again – and how does the
election work?“further down?
(most people in Germany do not
know much about the German
election system… different in India?)Build „evergreen“ content!
Build a lot of „how to“ and advisory
content
• I suggest: 20% of online journalist
time should be spent on building +
maintaining (!) these!Build „evergreen“ content!
• Use „w“ questions.
• Use structured content (tables,
lists, bullets)
• For big pages, use table of
content (like wikipedia with
#jumps)Build „evergreen“ content!
• This will go into voice search!
• Build it, so it can be read loudly easily
• use
https://pending.schema.org/speakable
(although not really supported, yet)Build „advisory“ content!
• Start with a few of these „improved topic pages“
• Do some journalists have a special interest or interest they could try out here?
• Sports? A local team?
• Politics
• Technology?
• Religion?
• Food?
• Restaurants in Chennai?
• Elections?
• Everybody must know: we have a current page explaining „xyz“ and always link to it,
where it fits.Build „advisory“ content!
• Make a plan, which topics make
sense for this!
• Start with a few!
• Everybody must know: we have a
current page explaining „VVPAT“ and
link to it, where it fits
• Maybe republish (redirect to new
URL) the URL to qualify again for
Google News when the topic is
trending hot!
• Maybe combine the function with
your topic / tag pages?Do you have any questions? 61
Thank you! 62
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