The Latest in Technical SEO for News Publishers

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#NESS22 The Latest in Technical SEO for News Publishers Barry Adams

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#NESS22

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#NESS22 #NESS22 Last Year…

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#NESS22 #NESS22 Crawling Indexing Serving Google Processes

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#NESS22 #NESS22 Crawling Indexing Serving Technical SEO Google Processes

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#NESS22 NESS22 1. Crawling (Googlebot) ➢ URL discovery ➢ URL prioritisation ➢ URL de-duplication ➢ Queue management ➢ HTTP response parsing ➢ TTFB monitoring ➢ Resource management ➢ … ? Crawling

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#NESS22 NESS22 Priority for News Publishers ✓ Rapid crawling of newly published articles Crawling

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#NESS22 #NESS22 2. Indexing Crawling Indexing Serving

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#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

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#NESS22 NESS22 Priority for News Publishers Indexing ✓ Flawless indexing of articles

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#NESS22 #NESS22 What’s New in 2022?

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#NESS22 NESS22

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#NESS22 NESS22 New and Updated GSC Reports • Simplified Coverage report • Improved Core Web Vitals report • New reports: ➢ HTTPS ➢ Video Indexing ➢ Merchant Listings

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#NESS22 NESS22 Simplified Index Coverage Report

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#NESS22 NESS22 Why pages aren’t indexed

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#NESS22 NESS22 Improved CWV Report • More URL-level data

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#NESS22 NESS22 New Report: HTTPS

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#NESS22 NESS22 New Report: HTTPS

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#NESS22 NESS22 New Report: Video Pages

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#NESS22 NESS22 New Report: Video Pages

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#NESS22 NESS22 New Report: Merchant Listings

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#NESS22 NESS22 New Report: Merchant Listings

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#NESS22 NESS22 GSC API supports Discover & News https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/10/search- analytics-discover-gnews

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#NESS22 NESS22 New robots tag: indexifembedded https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/01/robots- meta-tag-indexifembedded

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#NESS22 NESS22 Google Confirms: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling- indexing/valid-page-metadata

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#NESS22 #NESS22 Edge SEO

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#NESS22 NESS22 Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) Your Webserver Cloud CDNs Users

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#NESS22 NESS22 Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) Your Webserver Cloud CDNs Googlebot

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#NESS22 NESS22 Edge SEO Your Webserver Cloud CDNs Googlebot Change your webpages here

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#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

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#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

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#NESS22 NESS22 SEO A/B Split Testing

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#NESS22 NESS22 SEO Split Testing Case Studies https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/newsletter/

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#NESS22 #NESS22

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#NESS22 NESS22

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#NESS22 NESS22 The Great AMP Deletion

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#NESS22 NESS22 https://kurtgessler.medium.com/what-happened-when-we-disabled- google-amp-at-tribune-publishing-2fa65a2f2a40

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#NESS22 NESS22 Google has removed AMP from documentation

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#NESS22

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#NESS22 NESS22 Caveat: You need good Core Web Vitals

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#NESS22 NESS22 https://datastudio.google.com/s/i5xOURZw1zQ

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#NESS22 #NESS22 Google Giveth and Taketh Away

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#NESS22 NESS22 September Core Algorithm Update(s)

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#NESS22 NESS22 News & Media is down overall https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/ winners-losers-of-the-september-2022-core- update-product-reviews-update/

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#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