I watch a lot of WordCamp presentations, and I pick up on a lot of ‘advice’ people give. Some of it is, I feel, useless. Today I want to tackle all the SEO advice I’ve seen and read lately that doesn’t matter as much as it might, or at least, not enough to make me change.
Before that, though, I want to stress the one part of SEO that will matter, now and forever, no matter what Google does, and that is to have Good Content. Second to that is to have a good network of people who link to you, share your posts, and retweet them. Human interaction is the best measure of your SEO. If people are sticking around, you’re going to be okay.
Don’t Use Dates in Your URLs
While my SEO hero, Yoast, isn’t a fan of dates in URLs, here’s what he says:
“Putting the date in the URL has very few benefits, if any. I’m not a fan because it “dates” your older results, possibly getting a lower click through over time.”
So I use them here, and on my personal blog, as example.com/%year%/%postname%/ for a couple reasons, but it boils down to the fact that dates matter with the content I provide. The first thing I look at when I see a post about a technical subject is when was it written. Then I read the post to see if it mentions a specific version of the product. If there’s a notice at the top like “Read the updated version…” then I’ll go open both and read the older and the newer.
The point is, as Jen Mylo might say, technology changes. And because of that, it should be obvious when a post took place. So I firmly think dates matter for the humans. And since they don’t matter for SEO, use what makes you feel good. Of course… shorter URLs are better. I’d suggest more people use categories if they could manage to only post in one category at a time. Still, go to https://halfelf.org/recovering-your-cape/ and you’ll be redirected because WordPress is really good.
Use Related Posts
I can see why people think this is important. Establishing cross-links between your old posts can pull new readers over. But I find this is more important in getting the search engines to scan your older content. I cross link between posts manually all the time, not to get better SEO, but to help my readers see where I came from before. So I don’t need to have them automagically made for me. This comes back to good content. My good content is relating posts in the best way possible, and making sure they’re the best links to relate.
Always Use Images
Images are pretty, I agree, but I think it’s more important to use images that matter. You don’t have to use images all the time. Certainly people like them, it breaks up the monotony of a post, but for SEO, you should worry more about your alt/description fields than having an image. Also remember to compress your images, please. It’ll make your site run faster which will help your SERP. When in doubt about an image, leave it out. Or use something silly.
Source: WikiCommons
Never Change Your URLs
While this is just good advice, as long as you have good redirects for your old links to the new ones, you won’t lose your Google Juice. So yes, you can change your URLs. I do it all the time, but I’m proud to say that links from fifteen years ago still work. They redirect to the new URLs, of course, but they work because of those redirects, and my Google Juice is amazeballs.
Keep Posts under 600 (or 750) Words
I laughed a lot here. While people like Otto marvel at my verbosity, and other people tell me “Your posts are too long!” when I cut a post back from 2000 words to 1000 it’s not because of SEO, it’s readability. If a 4000 page post is the most popular on your site and CNN links to it, I’m pretty sure your SEO won’t get hurt. Your post should be as long as it needs to be to clearly and accurately communicate what you’re trying to communicate. That’s your rule. Keep with it. Now, if your human readers tell you that you’re too verbose, that’s something else.
Use Subdomains
I’m going to quote Matt Cutts (aka Mr. Google) here, on the subject of sub-domain vs sub-folder:
“They’re roughly equivalent. I would basically go with whichever one is easier for you in terms of configuration, your CMSs, [and] all that sort of stuff.”
Can we move on now, please?
Use Menus
Okay, yes, you should use Menus, but I’ve seen people stuff every possible link into a menu, and then be upset no one sees the menu item that’s four tiers down. I barely use menu tiers, or if I do I limit them to one, and only one, sublevel. So the SEO advice of jamming everything into a menu is just useless, and given how people are using it like keyword stuffing, I bet Google’s next release (Penguin, Panda…. Pterodactyl?) will check if the CSS or HTML5 code indicates a menu and, if so, ignore it. I know I would.
Anything Else?
What do you think is just plain ol’ outdated or wrong SEO advice?
Comments
16 responses to “SEO Advice I Ignore”
All good points. The date thing has bothered me for a long time. It’s an ethical-accuracy-relevance issue with a big impact. Search needs to find a way to identify the current and the classic/authoritative, but I suppose the big problem with that is how it would potentially give a near monopoly of attention to a few winners.
Do you think it’s a problem that searching for the right/best/authoritative products, opinions and technique in fields where these things constantly evolve still generates a flat list? You get no indicators of what is important but dated information, dated but also updated, or simply the most recent. Chains of dialogue aren’t mapped out, and even the most recent contribution may not be obvious or appear ahead of much older material. People who least understand information in an evolving context are probably least equipped to cope with the results they get when they are looking for answers.
Post dates are relevant (and important) to people, not to robots. I write (well, when I have time to write) for people, not robots. And when I find non-dated content, I tend to value that content less, not more, because I have no way to verify whether or not it is still relevant, or obsolete.
SEO “experts” telling people to obscure post dates just tells me that SEO “experts” are mostly snake-oil salesmen, who focus on staying one step ahead of robot/search-engine algorithms instead of focusing on the single, most-important aspect of SEO: write good content.
(This issue just might be a pet peeve of mine…)
@Chip Bennett: I will note that dates in my URLs are not needed though dates on my post content (which you’ll note I also have) are a different matter. I feel that the date in the URL is a way to see without loading a page that this might be old and moldy. Might. 😆
@Chip Bennett & Mika: With the introduction of “Structured Data” there is no longer a need to specify the date in the URL of the post.
Take a look at search results #2 & #3 – https://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+silly+plugins
At number 2 is wpmudev who do not have dates in their URL but the result does show the date “Oct 18, 2012”.
At number 3 even though this site reveals the year in the URL Google displays the exact published date as “Dec 30, 2013”
To quote another example of Joost’s site take a look at search result #1 – https://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+robotstxt+example
The result clearly mentions the article’s date as “Feb 10, 2012” moreover it displays breadcrumbs in the place of the URL. So even if Yoast.com’s URL contained the date it wouldn’t be displayed by Google.
Hiding dates to trick a user is a bad but why use them in permalinks when you can display them the right way with permalinks 😉
@Jesin: Human readability. If I see a date in the URL, then no matter how far I scroll down the page, I still know “Ah, this was from 2014”
I should have been more clear: I honestly couldn’t care less about the date in the URL; I care about the date in the actual page content. Rendered page output is the intended, human-readable content. URLs are browser-readable content. 🙂
Congrats to the awesome TidyRepo for adding review dates to their posts. They have the best SEO strategy — super writing that’s focused and very useful. 😉
I’m not so sure I care about dates in URL’s but (and I am going slightly off piste here – sorry!) what I really really really really REALLY hate is when you have a post without a date.
How, as a reader, I am to tell if the post I am reading is still relevant if it hasn’t got a date. Especially if it’s technical content 🙁
Like the post, and love what you do on the WordPress support forums.
@chris odell: Yeah, if there’s no date in the URL, there damn well better be one in the post headers. Which is kinda SEO too, when you think about it 🙂 Post content.
@Ipstenu (Mika Epstein): Google made an update (Penguin?) that penalized dated/old material, and after that completely dateless/undateable sites became common. You have to rely on the first comment (if there are any) to guess the approximate publication date. This would be a great topic to research a little and write about.
@Dan: FWIW, Google doesn’t use the date in your URL (or your post content) to determine date:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIfCERXLlDM
I suspect dates have more to do with updates (that is if you have a ton of old posts on your site and never update…) than origin of post.
Penguin, FWIW, was aimed at people who had ‘unnatural’ traffic or who splogged.
@Ipstenu (Mika Epstein): Correct, but Google does look for any post date on your content, and it puts this in the excerpt for the search result. An old date is presumed to turn people away, so SEO gurus often advise getting rid of publication dates.
I remember this bad idea caught on around one of the algorithm updates that only concerned freshness/recency. Penguin, Panda, Puffball, I have no recollection. It was toward the end of 2011. That was also when there stopped being a performance loss in WordPress for dropping the month/date structure from permalinks, and Yoast was advising that for SEO. Combined with awful advice like this a lot of people decided that dates should be stripped out from all content — even comments! 😮
@Dan Knauss (@newlocalmedia):
So … wait. Google just puts it in the excerpt but doesn’t downgrade you, but ‘experts’ think it’ll chase people off? That doesn’t mean Google’s penalizing you 🙂
Yeah, yeah I misspoke. Technically they aren’t, but that’s how it’s interpreted, so it amounts to an incentive Google has created to remove, obfuscate, or re-date old material.
It would be nice if there was a benefit for making publication dates clear, for meaningful updates to old content, and penalties for BSing either one. People ought to act as if the former is true, which it kind of is — writing well and in such a way that’s honest, informative, clear and well-organized for readers is the only SEO that really matters.
I like, and use, years in urls. If everything is flat, I trust it much less.
I also like lots of words. I generally only write “long form”, because I use other avenues for short form. Posting the equivalent of a tweet to my blog feels silly. To me. You do what you like. I write tutorials and rants. It’s fun.
So, yes, I agree with most of this. But long posts are good to. They’re great for long term writing, where you organize thoughts over time. I have a post that took me 5 months to write, in stages. Hey, I’m picky and forgetful.
@Otto: Well there’s long form blog posts (aka useful stuff) and then there’s long form 60 pages later of tutorials 😉 I love long posts. I feel like I can get all my words out and explain them better than 140 characters.
And I hate bug reports on Twitter.