Technical SEO Trends in 2022 and Beyond

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Key Technical SEO Trends In 2022 and Beyond Barry Adams May 2022

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What is Technical SEO?

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Crawler Indexer Ranker Google Processes

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Crawler Indexer Ranker Technical SEO Google Processes

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Crawler Indexer Ranker 1. Crawler (Googlebot)

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Crawling: Googlebot • URL discovery; ➢ tags in HTML ➢ XML sitemaps ➢ Other sources? • Crawl queue management; ➢ De-duplication based on URL patterns ➢ Crawl prioritisation & scheduling • Crawling; ➢ Fetching raw HTML ➢ Crawl ‘politeness’

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Crawl Management • Robots.txt Disallow; ➢ Strongest crawl management signal ➢ Evaporates crawl budget

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Don't use robots.txt to temporarily reallocate crawl budget for other pages; use robots.txt to block pages or resources that you don't want Google to crawl at all. Google won't shift this newly available crawl budget to other pages unless Google is already hitting your site's serving limit.

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Robots.txt prevents crawling… … but not indexing! • Links on webpages to blocked URLs are still crawled • Their anchor texts carry relevancy for indexing

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Crawl Management • Canonicals & noindex are NOT crawl management; ➢ Google needs to see meta tags before it can act on them ➢ That means Googlebot still crawls those URLs

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Optimise Crawling • Server Response Time

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GSC Crawl Stats

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Page Resource Load

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Googlebot & AdsBot

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Optimise Crawling • Serve correct HTTP status codes; ➢ 200 OK ➢ 301 / 302 Redirects ➢ 304 Not Modified ➢ 401 / 403 Permission Issues ➢ 404 / 410 Not Found/Gone ➢ 5xx Error

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Optimise Crawling • ALL resources consume crawl budget; ➢ Not just HTML pages ➢ Reduce HTTP requests per page

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Optimise Crawling • ALL resources consume crawl budget; ➢ Not just HTML pages ➢ Reduce HTTP requests per page • AdsBot can consume crawl budget; ➢ Double-check your Google Ads campaigns

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Optimise Crawling • ALL resources consume crawl budget; ➢ Not just HTML pages ➢ Reduce HTTP requests per page • AdsBot can consume crawl budget; ➢ Double-check your Google Ads campaigns • Link equity (PageRank) impacts crawl budget; ➢ More link equity = more crawl budget

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Unsolved Crawl Issue

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2. Indexer Crawler Indexer Ranker

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Two Stages* of Indexing Crawler Indexer Ranker 1 2 *At least – indexing is a collection of interconnected processes

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Indexing • HTML lexer; ➢ Cleaning & tokenising the HTML • Index selection; ➢ De-duping prior to indexing • Indexing; ➢ First-pass based on HTML ➢ Potential rendering (not guaranteed) • Index integrity; ➢ Canonicalisation & de-duplication

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Rendering

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Googlebot & Rendering

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Evergreen Chrome

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Possible Rendering Issues in GSC

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Rendering Issues • Inaccessible Resources; ➢ Make sure all page resources can be crawled

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Rendering Issues • JavaScript inserts invalid HTML in the ; ➢ tags in the break Google’s processing of meta tags

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https://developers.google.com/search/docs/ advanced/guidelines/valid-html

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Rendering Issues • HTML vs Render mismatch; ➢ Different content in raw HTML vs fully rendered page

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https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-rendered- source/ejgngohbdedoabanmclafpkoogegdpob

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Google Tools *ALWAYS* Render

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Optimise Indexing • Don’t rely on Google’s rendering; ➢ Use SSR & CDN caching • Minimise page weight; ➢ Fewer page resources = better use of crawl budget faster load speed & CWV less chance of rendering issues • Improve internal linking; ➢ More PageRank = higher chance of indexing

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Key Technical SEO Trends

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IndexNow

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Live Indexing API (?)

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Edge SEO Your Webserver Cloud CDNs Googlebot

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Edge SEO Your Webserver Cloud CDNs Googlebot Change your webpages here

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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 the changed CDN-cached pages; ➢ Your ‘original’ website remains unchanged ➢ Google only sees the changed CDN webpages

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Why Edge SEO? • Faster deployment; ➢ Bypass your developers’ lengthy queues ➢ ‘Ask forgiveness, not permission’ • 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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A/B Testing

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

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The Great AMP Deletion

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Barry Adams ➢ Doing SEO since 1998 ➢ Specialist in Technical SEO & News SEO ➢ Newsletter: SEOforGoogleNews.com

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Thank You [email protected] @badams