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Re: Five Years Later: Sites Still Being Migrated To Google's Mobile First Indexing

Ted Kubaitis — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 14:34:37 -0000

It's slow, buggy, and doesn't scale well. I bet the engineers hope and pray for someone to invent something else to replace it already. You can see it in your log files... Mobile GB requests are very SLOOOOOWWWWWWW. Guessing on the cloud cost side they are a lot more expensive too.

Re: Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On Saturday, August 6th - PRU Tremors Or Something Else?

Ted Kubaitis — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 11:56:57 -0000

Hey Kevin,

I actually have had a lot of similar accounts lately. Many of them have been related to the URL Parameter Tool that went away in mid April. It seems to be hitting a lot of websites now for some reason. In addition to the SEO KPIs going to shit, the indexed page count in GSC skyrockets. You can look in your apache web logs and find Googlebot interacting with sorts and filters and adding and removing products to the cart and other similar interactions that Googlebot should not be getting into. If your GSC indexed page count is higher than your actual number of pages then I would look at the URLs Googlebot is crawling for clues. The good news is that it can be fixed with robots.txt, canonical URLs, and redirects/URL rewrites. The bad news is that in some cases it can takes weeks or months to clean up if a bunch of duplicate URLs are indexed and competing in Google already and simply being filtered as duplicates now. https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

Re: IndexNow Is Growing But Should You Pay Attention?

Ted Kubaitis — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 10:26:50 -0000

It is a brilliant idea and Google didn't think of it... so they hate it and won't use it and will stubbornly stick to using warehouses of servers to randomly crawl the Internet instead.

Re: Google Isn't Done Rolling Out The Helpful Content Update

Ted Kubaitis — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 10:43:06 -0000

This tweet accurately covers this update: https://twitter.com/DataCha... ( Thanks Matt for sharing this with me! LOL )

Re: Google: Growth Of Microdata Is Fairly Stagnant

Ted Kubaitis — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 10:55:50 -0000

Meh... the world "moved on". JSON-LD does what meta tags failed to do. Inline schema is difficult to write, difficult to read, and more technical in implementation. It was as nifty idea that was dead the moment JSON-LD hit the scene. I'm glad the extremely few people who MUST have it (heck if I know why) have the option, but it is even more of a pain in the ass for web developers as modern databases have JSON features built in so if you set JSON-LD up correctly it can be as easy as an SQL query and a print statement.

Re: Google: There Is No Percentage To Measure Duplicate Content

Ted Kubaitis — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 09:58:51 -0000

Both Martin Split and Gary Illyes have mentioned the comparable fingerprints that they have to determine how similar or dissimilar any two pages are. Going to chuck this one up to JM doesn't know everything the search team has in play.

Re: Google Search Console Verified Sites Do Not Get Crawled More

Ted Kubaitis — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 15:15:41 -0000

Often they don't get crawled at all. (Lately)

Re: Google: Links Will Be Less Important As A Ranking Factor In The Future

Ted Kubaitis — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 09:48:18 -0000

I listened to the podcast directly... the answer was John speaking to a public Q&A session and the context was his predictions about the distant future... so not an official google announcement or anything. Just John's opinion about the future.

Re: Google: Size Of Your H1 & Header Fonts Doesn't Matter For SEO

Ted Kubaitis — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 09:50:30 -0000

My H1 is bigger than yours.

Re: SEO Tricks Make Browsing The Web For The Visually Impaired Really Bad...

Ted Kubaitis — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 10:47:05 -0000

John Mueller, I'm sorry the system Google built is so obviously flawed as to reward these things. SEOs have been telling you about it for 20 years. Denial and Deaf ears I suppose. In recent years most top SEOs have been advocating aria-hidden usage to protect the impaired. But what protects them better than trying to change the whole world is changing the one Google that created the problem. I am shocked you take no responsibility for this.

Re: Google On The Most Expensive Pages To Crawl & Does It Matter

Ted Kubaitis — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 10:37:03 -0000

If cost didn't matter then crawl budgets would be unlimited, CWV & AMP wouldn't have been big Google pushes. Indexing limits in GSC wouldn't exist. Google would get on board with IndexNow. Priority wouldn't matter in sitemaps. Google wouldn't be so slow to process sitemaps. And the number of search results findable per keyword wouldn't be down to 168 on average from 1000 several years ago. So this is false on many levels.

Re: Google: Links Have A Lot Less Significant Impact For Ranking Today

Ted Kubaitis — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 22:12:16 -0000

This is GREAT NEWS! This means Google will remove the section on Link Spam from the webmaster guidelines. Why keep it? Links don't work anymore and Google is too smart for that. Links wont impact rankings so they are policing for nothing.

That is, UNLESS, nothing has really changed and they are misleading us. If they believe what they are saying then it will be reflected in the actual guidelines and it will be independently verified by the testing of thousands of SEOs.

Ball's in your court Google. Confident enough to bluff with removing the link spam rules from the guidelines?

If not then that is informative too.

Re: Google: Links Have A Lot Less Significant Impact For Ranking Today

Ted Kubaitis — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 22:35:24 -0000

Additionally... Google Retired url parameter tool saying the bot has it handled and it impacts almost no one. But now infinite crawls and googlebot doing things it shouldn't is the biggest source of new SEO customers. You can find new customers by searching for it in Google! keyword + inurl:sort=

Check out the date on this one!

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

Guess we should assume this current claim will end as well as the last claim did?

Re: Poll: SEOs Are Mixed On Importance Of Domain Age For Google Rankings

Ted Kubaitis — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 13:57:26 -0000

For a long time I had access to several thousand domain names that were registered in the 90's but never used. I tested them a ton. Google treated them no differently than a brand new domain.

What Google does treat differently is websites that have been in Google's database a long time. A.K.A. How long has it been used as a website.

So the whois create date age is a scam to rip you off. The age of the website in Wayback Machine is much more important. Possibly because of Ryan's explanation below, but we also know in the past google delayed credit for backlinks for new websites (historically known as being in the sandbox). That isn't true today but it could come back. There is also a specter of link building activity prior to certain updates is grandfathered in where doing those things today might be more problematic. So age MIGHT play a role in other ways situationally.

Re: Google's John Mueller: Expired & Repurposed Domains Are SEO-Flotsam

Ted Kubaitis — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 10:59:59 -0000

I sense a reduction in expired domain bidding coming. Say it again Google! Say it again!

Re: Google: There Is No Helpful Content Score Or Threshold

Ted Kubaitis — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 20:28:18 -0000

I found this content unhelpful. Honestly wtf.

Re: Google: There Is No Helpful Content Score Or Threshold

Ted Kubaitis — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:58:12 -0000

Not your fault, but why never call them out for BS answers. Think about it & read the guidelines. Ugh that was the worst answer.

Re: 500/503 HTTP Status Code On Robots.txt Can Remove Your Site From Google Search

Ted Kubaitis — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 02:06:42 -0000

The worst negative SEO attacks rely on this google behavior for pages in general… not just robots… but thank you google for giving a recipe to weaponize attacks on robots txt files…. Now they can slow loris 1 url to get the job done. wTF seriously

Re: Google: Disallowing Crawling Is Not A Super Fast Way To Deindex A Site

Ted Kubaitis — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 02:10:48 -0000

Agree … google has a very long memory… think years.

Re: Google Gives Official Names Of Some Search Features With Visual Elements Gallery

Ted Kubaitis — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 02:12:01 -0000

I like this. Good start. Tired of trying to do it myself. About time.

Re: New Google Search Status Dashboard Tells Us When Crawling, Indexing Or Serving Goes Down

Ted Kubaitis — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 02:13:00 -0000

Jury is out. If their data doesn’t match our observations there will be words. But if they do a good job then this is good. Deferring judgement until I see good data.

Re: Google:Unique Text, Infographics & Video Does Not Make Content Good, Accurate & Helpful

Ted Kubaitis — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 10:55:49 -0000

"Rhinoplasty Plano"-style keyword tuned Lorem Ipsum Latin boilerplate text STILL ranks #1 in Google today... after ALL the spam updates and helpful content updates. So if we are supposed to believe Google's AI is sooo smart how come the most widely known and most basic and obviously detectable examples are still beyond Google's ability to detect and fix?

A lot of this crap is going on 5-10 years old now. Shouldn't anything be fixed by now?

If Google is failing hard on the easy problems then there is no basis for believing they are any good at the harder problems. It feels like it is all bluffs and lies.

Proof is needed to demonstrate that any of these claims are real. Show us that you can filter obvious and flagrant spam. Ransomware networks, misleading users with cloaking, Serving bing search results in Google searches... You keep talking like you have game but you get an F on all of it.

Here is all I ask going forward... At a minimum ... if you make a claim... cite some examples as proof.

Re: Google: Spam Update Hits Won't Be Fixed By Removal Internal Duplicate Content

Ted Kubaitis — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 11:09:28 -0000

Latest update was a LINK spam update right? Or is that changing now too?

Lets get our stories straight.

Re: Most SEOs Aren't Concerned About ChatGPT Threatening The SEO Industry

Ted Kubaitis — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 11:15:52 -0000

SEOs that test and prove things for themselves have the analytical skills to find best practices in any environment. SEOs that only did as they were told... they are !@#$ed. But they always were.

Good SEOs adapt quickly. Can Google?

Re: Google's John Mueller Said SEO Skills Needed For 2023 Are Curiosity & Persistence

Ted Kubaitis — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 10:53:13 -0000

Rare agreement. SEOs need to be curious enough to challenge their beliefs and test claims about how SEO works. They need the persistence to keep doing it even though the whole industry treats you like crap for wanting to deal in facts.
As evidence simply try to have a rational discussion about fundamental forces in SEO in any of the large SEO groups and watch it devolve into mocking ridicule despite data and testing. Take note of which side of the debate brings data and which doesn't. I know I am about to get harped on too... All I suggested here was to talk and observe... shocking. :-)