Last month Google demoed a new technology called “MUM” at their Google I/O conference which uses AI to provide answers to complex user queries, and already articles have started to appear asking Will Google’s MUM Kill SEO? As someone who has been doing SEO for the past 15+ years, this question obviously interests me. So …
Initial Thoughts on Core Web Vitals & WP Rocket
Core Web Vitals is officially set to be incorporated into Google’s algo in May, so like many other SEOs out there I’ve been working to update all the sites I manage so that they excel in Google’s site performance metrics. One tool that’s been a great help so far is WP Rocket, a WordPress plugin …
Fixed: XMLRPC Stopped Working After Switching To HTTPS
I’ve taken advantage of some down time over the past few weeks to migrate all of my sites over to HTTPS (a topic for another post). However, one issue that I’ve run into is that XMLRPC stopped working on my WordPress site following my update to HTTPS. I didn’t change a single line of code, …
Why A/B Testing Is The Perfect Complement To SEO
If you’ve been in the online marketing space for a while you’ve probably heard of A/B testing. What is A/B testing, you ask? Optimizely (a leading A/B testing software company) defines the term as follows: “A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which …
How To Make The WordPress Twenty Eleven Theme Fully Responsive
Since the Google’s mobile update recently rolled out, I decided to update my salsa team’s website from the Twenty Ten theme which I’d been using to Twenty Eleven, which is very similar in terms of design, but more mobile friendly. Aside from transferring over some of the customizations I’d made to the previous theme, I …
Facebook Like Drop March 2015
A few weeks ago Facebook announced that they would be changing the way Facebook likes are counted. Basically, the update makes it so that inactive accounts, that is accounts that have been voluntarily deactivated or memorialized accounts (deceased Facebook users), will no longer count towards the total number of likes for Facebook pages. Facebook claims …
Experiments In Adding Social Profiles To Google+
A couple weeks ago, Rand Fishkin tweeted out a link to new guidelines that Google published for adding social profile links to your Knowledge Graph card: If you're in Google's Knowledge Graph, you can now get your social profiles included, too: https://t.co/fU7vVYmT00 pic.twitter.com/35BTy0UmO9 — Rand Fishkin (@randfish) enero 16, 2015 I took a look at …
Allvoices Changes Their Terms Of Service (And It’s Hilarious)
This morning I received an e-mail from Allvoices about a change in their terms of service. Allvoices, if you are unfamiliar with them, is a content farm site similar to Examiner.com. As you can imagine, content farms like these have been hit hard by Panda and they are all struggling to survive in the new …
The Canonical Is Not A Tag
I was trying to explain what a canonical tag was the other day, and I realized (not for the first time), that the canonical tag is not actually a tag. If you break down HTML syntax, it looks something like this: If you apply that to the syntax of a “canonical tag”, which is usually …
Adding The Vary HTTP Header In WordPress
I finally finished building a mobile site for Salsa Vida SF, which was definitely a learning experience. Since responsive design sucks I used dynamic serving for the mobile site (using the Any Mobile Theme Switcher plugin), and basically rebuilt the site from scratch, allowing me to completely re-optimize the site experience for mobile. One of …