My HCU recoveries have not stopped improving. Thanks for your graciousness, lord Google. #SEO

This is a test to see how fast Google crawls this page. ciffonedigital.com/services/ For substance below is some content from my Linkedin post today. Next week I'll be starting my 4th "disappeared from Google" audit of the year on a Webflow site. I was skeptical before but now I'm confident in saying this is a trend. Webflow is not like WordPress where for a minimally viable setup you could install an SEO plugin and deselect the "discourage search engines from this site" option. Neglecting technical SEO can result in extreme consequences and it's not forgiving. Things like URL structure, site architecture, canonicalization, hreflangs, and sitemap customizations must be taken into account before launching a site. And if you also need custom attributes added to the <head>, then that can be a problem. You must remember that with Webflow you're working with client-side rendering and it provides limited support for adding client-side JS to your pages. There is no ability to add server-side files or programming of any kind. The only things you get without any configuration are a basic robots.txt, and a sitemap.xml (of which URLs are added automatically). Everything else has to be intentionally configured...and properly. You can set a global canonical tag but it's protocol-sensitive. If you set this without [ https:// ] it's totally moot Without the canonicals end up looking like //contact, //about, //blog You also have to be mindful that the staging domain is a reachable URL. Remove the brackets and go do this search 👇 site:*.webflow[.]io You see what I mean.

So what’s the consequence of violating this rule? What happens to TrustPilot?

From what we know so far, the August Update seems like an HCU refinement. My key advice 👉 TALK TO PEOPLE Insights from SEO tools < Insights from real users Assessing usefulness and originality is an inherently human thing. As you likely know Google updated their core update advice page. There's one particular line I encourage SEOs to pay attention to: "Consider how you can improve your content in meaningful ways. For example, it could be that rewriting or restructuring your content makes it easier for your audience to read and navigate the page." 👉 Rewriting OR *restructuring* - it's not just about the helpfulness of the content itself. If your layout and structure are 🗑 people will be less likely to engage with your super helpful content. Since the HCU I have significantly divested in SEO software and re-invested that budget into UX tools. As far as SEO-specific tools go I'm running very lean. @Contentsquare + @hotjar and @mixpanel are now a key part of my stack and the results have been great. I'm getting far more ROI and use out of those two than I ever did with $400+/mo SEO software. I'm also using @SurveyMonkey to conduct user surveys and @usertesting for testing designs and UX. So that's my advice, you can take it or leave it. And if you disagree feel free to leave a comment below about how I must not know how search works. ✌ #SEO

Google probably decided to revert to pagination because infinite scroll was getting too expensive. With their level of traffic, I suspect it caused substantial resource consumption and performance bottlenecks. Along with the complex error handling, session management, and state persistence required to run smoothly, they probably decided it wasn't worth it. #SEO #Google

I rarely see HTTP 503 served for temporarily unavailable pages despite it being one of the more proper ways to convey that message for SEO. 503, combined with a Retry-After header tells search engines that the page is not permanently gone but will be available in the future. For users, we can handle this with a custom 503 page. I've even done this for products before, displaying related products and a "get notified" form. Google will keep the URLs indexed for about ~48 hours (1-2 days), after which they'll drop out, but it's nothing to be concerned about. 503 enjoys a high crawl frequency, and in my experience, as soon as a page is back up, these pages are reindexed very quickly. Several years ago I tested this with pages down for 1-2 weeks and the average time to re-index was ~2.5 days. Ranking is usually very similar if not the same as before when pages become available again. If it's slightly off, positions should return to normal within a week. #SEO #TechnicalSEO

Providing critical CSS is one of the biggest quick wins for page speed, yet only about 30% of WordPress sites I look at do it 🙅‍♂️ Of those, they're using WP Rocket or some other plugin - which is fine but I'm not the hugest fan of depending on a plugin for this. There are 2 main benefits: 1. Reduces render-blocking 2. Speeds up your first paint Here are 2 ways I get it without a plugin: 1. Developer tools -> coverage tab -> extract the class definitions marked with green in the coverage report (google "critical css" 3rd result) 2. Use a generator: I often use Critical CSS because it's quick/easy, they have an API, and it's only $3/mo 🤷‍♂️. It is easier for me to keep track of sites too Below are the two functions from the 2nd screenshot that you can use to implement it by either pasting it directly into your functions php or file upload: function add_inline_css_to_head() { ?> <​style> /** Your Critical CSS here **/ <​/style> <?php } add_action('wp_head', 'add_inline_css_to_head', 1); ----------------------------------------------------- function add_inline_css_to_head() { $​css_file_path = get_template_directory() . '/css/your-css-file.css'; if (file_exists($css_file_path)) { $​css_content = file_get_contents($css_file_path); if ($css_content !== false) { echo '<​style>' . $​css_content . '<​/style>'; } else { error_log('Failed to read the CSS file: ' . $​css_file_path); } } else { error_log('CSS file not found: ' . $​css_file_path); } } add_action('wp_head', 'add_inline_css_to_head', 1); ----------------------------------------------------- Make sure the priority level doesn't conflict with any other functions that your theme might use. #SEO #TechnicalSEO #PageSpeed

Recently took a gamble on an HCU victim 🎲 -> This was a legal site that at its best was ranking page 1 for ~100 keywords related to a low-volume high-ticket type of lawsuit. Despite violating many aspects of Google's Guidelines, it never had a manual action but I identified link spam, security problems, poor UX, and evidence of SQL injection. Much of the content was "unhelpful" as well. I trusted my gut instinct. The site owner wanted to do whatever was necessary to get going again. Here's what I did: 👉 Designed a brand around the new site with a legit logo and color palette 👉 Registered a clean branded domain 👉 Identified all of the most helpful quality content the existing site had 👉 Worked with the site owner to evergreen/re-work the content 👉 Built out a completely new site with a good UX and optimized structure 👉 301 redirected old site URLs to counterparts on the new site Everything went smooth on the technical side -> no issues with canonicals or anything like that. The old site URLs were de-indexed within a couple of weeks and in almost exactly a month the whole new site was indexed. I have intentionally left the old site up and intact, and plan to just let it fade away peacefully. The new site is picking up quickly already beginning to generate traffic. I was told by many in the industry this wouldn't work but I did it anyway... I was lucky 😅 Big thanks to @GiordMarco96 for the traffic visualization 🙏 #SEO #TechnicalSEO

For all of the people trying to turn off AI Overviews on Google here ya go: Download the Chrome extension Tamper Monkey and follow these steps: 1. Click on the extension and hit dashboard 2. Select new script 3. Edit the //@ match line to only run the script on Google (shown at 00:12) 4. Copy and paste the code from the Github link below and hit file > save You'll still see the AI Overview for a split second while it tries to enter the DOM before it gets deleted. At any time you can turn it back on by clicking the extension and toggling the script off. github.com/mikeciffone/delet… #SEO #Google

This is not ok lol that thread features non-medical experts debating the right and wrong ways to take prescription medication. Who am I supposed to tell about this here...🤔 @rustybrick @lilyraynyc @searchliaison ?

Craigslist's dynamic content & client-side rendering prevent individual listings from being indexed. For a lack of other relevant pages to show, spam is allowed to creep in. Looking at images, we can see what Google wants to do; it's trying to show individual listings and categories. If you click on one it just brings you to a page like this: /search/pta?purveyor=owner#search=1~gallery~0~0 Not an actual listing page. I would probably do static URLs for main categories and submit sitemaps for each local subdomain.

I’d like to see lists of queries that Reddit is outranking these victims for. How many are low CLV, high informational intent / is this really affecting your bottom line? If yes because of ad revenue, I get that, but I’d ask different questions. #SearchEngineOptimization

What in the world could Google Search want with my consented GA4 data? #SEO #Google

Plot twist: congressional whistle blower claims March Google Update unfairly targeted conservatives, House Republicans to launch investigation and threaten to repeal section 230 until someone pays them off. #SEO #Google

If you're concerned about how SGE and #OpenAI are going to affect search; I would start by translating as much of your content as possible into machine-readable formats. Along with quality and authoritativeness, fast information retrieval and semantic richness are priorities for any of these systems. This is also critical for displaying your content in rich results, which...I would consider an SGE result as a massive rich result. #SEO #GoogleUpdate

#GeminiAI launch and X today is straight out of a Silicon Valley episode 😂

This site was "hit by the HCU". It has unaddressed malware, link spam, and CWV issues, all contributing to its current state. Far more than "helpful content" is needed here to recover. #SEO

$75/mo to read Financial Times after I forget about this subscription? Take a hike! @RocketMoneyApp you know you want me to tho 😉