5 Ways You Do SEO Wrong
There are many discussions about search engine optimization on social media: you’ll find them on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more traditional Web forums. The most popular SEO bloggers are essentially running discussion forums in their comment sections, too. It’s easy to find the worst misinformation being shared in the Web marketing community. Virtually every popular idea that is shared over and over again is wrong. These claims have been repeatedly debunked by numerous SEO bloggers and conference presenters, by search engine employees, and in some cases even by the news media.
What’s worse is that people who are well and widely respected will do their parts to debunk some of the nonsense only to turn around and share other nonsense. It is hard to keep up with all the changes in digital marketing. It isn’t that they haven’t heard the facts. It is that they have rejected the facts in favor of SEO mythologies. A “myth” is not necessarily untrue, but SEO mythologies are largely built on outdated information (because we constantly share it) and really bad analysis. Bad analysis is the hallmark of the most popular SEO “thought leaders”. They are good at presenting their ideas and terrible at vetting them. If this industry had acceptable standards these people would be laughed off the stages of their own conferences.
Let’s take a look at some of the most mistakes that a lot of people are making.
1. You Test Mobile PageSpeed via Desktop Connections
Everyone with any skin in the SEO game seems to have gotten the memo about how important mobile optimization is. There are still plenty of Websites that are not mobile friendly, but that’s an entirely different issue. It’s all but impossible to find a Web marketing meeting, conference, or presentation that doesn’t at least make a statement (if not devoting an entire presentation, panel, or track) to advising everyone to get up to speed on mobile optimization. So we’re good on the preamble. But the devil is in the details, and one of the details that appears to have eluded the majority of Web marketers is a very important one.
Over 80% of the mobile audience across the globe is still connecting to your mobile sites at no better than 3G connections. So when you submit your URLs to “page speed” test tools, do they give you the option of testing at mobile speeds? If not, then what speeds are you testing at? Simulation is killing your mobile testing. You need to get out there in the real world where people actually use their smart phones and test your sites THERE. At the very least, set your testing tools to ONLY test page speeds at 3G. Yes, some people get 4G connections.
What You Should Do: There are several page speed testing tools that allow you to set specifications to 3G and other connection types. I don’t want to recommend one over others. Look at your preferred tools and see if they give you the option of clocking downloads at true mobile speeds, or if their reports at least provide that information. Desktop download speeds of 3-5 seconds usually translate into 15-20 second 3G downloads, but don’t make assumptions. Test at the right speeds.
2. You “Speed Up” Web Pages by Slowing Down Client Connections
Too many people are still talking about using prefetch to “speed up” Websites. Now, there are different kinds of prefetches. DNS prefetching is not so bad unless you’re linking to 100 or more hosts on a page. Every time you instruct a mobile browser to prefetch something, anything, you are using the mobile user’s bandwidth without their permission. That costs people money. Worse, it slows down their Internet connections. Why are you DELIBERATELY slowing down your users’ connection speeds?
Another problem that has only just recently surfaced (and so most of you haven’t even heard this once) is that HTTP/2 runs SLOWER over broken 4G and broken 3G connections than HTTP/1.1. Well, that sucks, doesn’t it? So you convinced your company to invest in HTTPS and HTTP/2 connections because they are so much faster on the desktop but meanwhile people standing in shopping centers around the world cannot download your huge pages.
3. You Mistake “Crawl Budget” for “Crawl Management”
Search engines set and manage “crawl budget”. You just need to manage crawl on the Website. These are two completely different concepts. Even this week I saw at least one well-known, widely respected, knowledgeable SEO specialist talk about “crawl budget” on social media. We should not be having this conversation AGAIN.
Search engine optimization has to manage crawl on the server, which has nothing to do with “crawl budget”. The search engineers may call this “crawl cap” (as Shari Thurow likes to point out) or they may call it something else entirely. But if they speak about “crawl budget” they are trying to talk to us in our terms. And what they usually have to say is: you can’t do anything about crawl budget.
Using “rel=’nofollow'” attributes on internal links hurts crawl efficiency. Some people think it improves crawl. Nope, this is PageRank Sculpting, which is stupid and counter-productive. PageRank Sculpting has always been stupid and counter-productive. PageRank Sculpting is the reason why so many of you still believe that sub-folders (directories) work better than subdomains.
4. You Disavow Harmless Sites that Actually Help Your Site
The Bruce Clay Agency recently shared the top ten domains that people submit to their disavowed sites index. None of those domains should be disavowed. These bad choices in what to disavow reflect the erroneous thinking that has been applied to the whole question of what should be disavowed. In fact, just this week Googler Gary Illyes addressed the very serious disavow problem but I believe he gave out bad advice. He suggested that people should only disavow sites they don’t trust.
So let’s count a show of hands: How many of you trust Websites you have never heard of or that link to your site thousands of times over? In my experience most people would raise their hands. It’s not that you should disavow sites you don’t trust. You’re already doing that and you are disavowing the wrong sites. Suspicious Websites don’t get your client sites penalized.
5. You Use Search Visibility Reports
There are few tools in the SEO industry that waste more time and money than search visibility reports. These reports attempt to show you how many queries a given Website can be found in. These reports do not in any way, to any degree, provide reliable estimates of search referral traffic. You cannot use search visibility reports for competitive analysis. That’s like asking the kids down the street to estimate how many eggs are in your refrigerator (and you don’t let them see your refrigerator).
You cannot use search visibility reports as substitutes for real traffic data. While it would be great to have access to your competition’s Search Console and Bing Toolbox data, you don’t. There is no tool out there that can tell you how much traffic those sites receive. Note: If you subscribe to an SEO tool that collects referral data from real Websites they have a legal obligation to protect everyone’s data. They should be careful about what they show you based on real competitor search referral data. If they are showing you exactly what your competitors share with them, don’t be stupid and blog about it.
Search visibility reports are based on wild guesses. What’s worse, if they use any sort of crawling those crawls are always coming from Web servers or compromised computers (their IP addresses look suspicious to the search engines). And if the crawls don’t complete within 1 hour or less they are probably aggregating search results data from multiple index updates. You just cannot trust search visibility reports in any capacity. Although I used to talk about computing search visibility, I never meant for the industry to treat search visibility estimates as reliable substitutes for real data of any kind.
Courtesy & Copyright
https://due.com/blog/https://creativesaints.com/
https://www.papeel.com.br/
http://graphicwebdesign.in/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-essentials/
https://www.seo-theory.com/7-ways-you-do-seo-wrong/
https://www.seo-theory.com/
https://www.seo-theory.com/basic-crawl-management/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/best-seo-resources/#close