Tag: seo

OnPage is On Fleek
I’ve gotten back into using Yoast SEO (I like to say, I don’t always use SEO plugins, but when I do I use Yoast), and I noticed they’d added integration with OnPage.org. Of course I did remember this being added to the plugin in general, having chatted about it with Yoast and his crew, but at the time it really didn’t seem like anything I needed.

Flash forward, and it’s 2016 and while I certainly can do all the things it takes to set up a site and make it’s SEO sing, a person can always learn more. So I set up an OnPage account and went to town.

Actually I stared at it.

You know how people say the WordPress dashboard can be overwhelming when you first look at it? Yeah, so was this. There were a lot of options. A lot of options. And a lot were sales things. Then there were a hundred pages of ‘metrics’ which I confess I didn’t understand what it fully meant. While I was still capable of churning out page after page of valuable content, and having context be my SEO queen, some of the nuances of what made pages ‘good’ to search engines was clearly being lost to me.

Like I said, a person can always learn more, so after feeling dejected at myself, I decided to sit and study up. How was I going to master all this and understand how to make my site better and the content more search engine friendly? I knew once I got people to the site, the content would be useful, but getting them there was the nature of advertising (something difficult to target when no one aims ads for lesbians) and word of mouth.

Thankfully OnPage has a tool Navigator, and once I started using it everything became clear. It walked me through the basics of setting up my site. It detected I used WordPress, it directed me to install an SEO plugin (Yoast of course) and then gave me step by step tasks to get those simple, basic wins.

The first 18 tasks were things I’d already done, like hooking up Google Analytics, signing up for Google and Bing Webmasters, submitting my sitemaps, etc etc.

And then I hit the section about Keyword Pages.

That confused me since I knew the page that the keyword “kima greggs” should point to is https://lezwatchtv.com/characters/kima-greggs/ (pretty obvious when you see it, right?). I clicked on the link to complete the task and was surprised.

The bottom part of the page was a list of pages on my site, and none of them was the right URL. Oh dear. I entered it in manually and hit save. That presented me with new tasks:
- Add the keyword kima greggs in the meta title
- Add the keyword kima greggs in the meta description
- Add the keyword kima greggs to the content of your page
- Add the keyword kima greggs in the headlines (<h1> to <h6>)
And then there were a lot more which were pretty easy but those… Well those led me down a path that will be continued later.

The lesson to take here is that if you’re trying to figure out how to optimize SEO past the easy basics, OnPage can teach you about how you’re doing it wrong. It can teach you how to do it right. And eventually you can optimize things with the conscious understanding of why the code does what it does.
28 November, 2016
Not Spilling SEO Juice
Once in a while I still get people who ask me to do things for them. Some offer to pay, most don’t, but a common thread lately has been “How do I redirect and not screw up my SEO?”

They tend to ask it nicer, but that’s what they mean. And to be honest, the question surprises me in 2016. I’ve read email after email about people who swear “I renamed my domain/page and now my SEO crapped out!” And to each and every one I ask “Did you redirect it properly?”

I think what’s happening is that the problem is so clear cut, people are overthinking. That is, bar none, the biggest mistake I feel anyone ever makes. They overcomplicate a problem and mire themselves in the hell of debugging. I do it all the time.

Let me tell you a story. When we started LezWatchTV, we had some pretty non-SEO friendly URLs. Our taxonomy for TV stations was “show-tags” and it went on and on with worse and worse names. Finally I sat down and drew out a map of what the ‘best’ SEO names would be for what I needed, and it was very short:
- TV Stations: stations
- Character Traits: cliches
- Show Tropes: tropes
- Characters: characters
- Shows: shows
Five items. And to do the recdirects, I put this in the .htacess file:
```
RedirectMatch 301 ^/show-tags/(.*) /stations/$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/character-tags/(.*) /cliches/$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/lez_cliches/(.*) /tropes/$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/lez_tropes/(.*) /cliches/$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/lez_chars/(.*) /characters/$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/show-characters/(.*) /characters/$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/tv-shows/(.*) /shows/$1
```
That’s all I needed. I took all the old, bad names and I redirected them to the good names. But I had to throw in an added wrinkle. I’d originally decided shows would have cliches and characters tropes, but I realized that was wrong and flipped them a week later. That meant I had things like /cliche/law-enforcement which had to be redirect to /trope/law-enforcement and for that, there was nothing to be done save a massive section like this:
```
# BEGIN Great Big Redirect Section
RedirectMatch 301 ^/cliches/bisexual-love-triangle(.*) /tropes/bisexual-love-triangle$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/cliches/coming-out(.*) /tropes/coming-out$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/cliches/gay-for-ratings(.*) /tropes/gay-for-ratings$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/cliches/law-enforcement(.*) /tropes/law-enforcement$1
[...]
RedirectMatch 301 ^/tropes/athlete(.*) /cliches/athlete$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/tropes/cross-dresser(.*) /cliches/cross-dresser$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/tropes/firefighter(.*) /cliches/firefighter$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/tropes/teacher(.*) /cliches/teacher$1
```
This goes on for 24 character clichés and 18 show tropes. It had to be done manually.

Now let’s ask the big question. Did I lose any SEO Juice by doing this?

Not a drop. Because I used a 301 redirect and I used it properly (calling it well above my redirect for WordPress). This is exactly what Google’s webmaster docs tell you to do:

If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommend that you use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page. The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location.

Still not sure? Here’s what Joost (of Yoast SEO) says when asked if you should use a 301 or a 302 redirect:

The answer is very simple. You should never use a 301 redirect if you ever want to use that url again. So if you’re redirecting one url to another and you’re sure that the old url is never going to be used again, it’s a 301. If you’re not sure, it’s a 302. That’s it. Good luck!

This is, again, straightforward. If you’re never using the page again (which I’m not), you use the 301 redirect.

By the way, if you’re using Yoast SEO Premium, then you should still have access to their redirect tool. Personally I feel that’s a change that should be on the server level, not a plugin.

Okay, so what happens if you forget to do this? Your SEO will tank. However this can be fixed! Again, if you’re using Yoast SEO and you set up Google Analytics and webmaster tools with it, you have a handy Search Console which will let you see what the errors are. If you don’t, but you use Google (and really this is where it’s quite helpful), you’ll go to your Search Console > Crawl > Crawl Errors page and check out what’s listed.

Remember to check desktop and smart-phone pages. As long as you keep those old URLs redirecting properly to their new home, your juice will be safe and sound.
26 October, 2016
Yoast SEO: Selective Stopwords
Stopwords are those small words that should be removed from URLs. You know like ‘a’ and ‘and’ or ‘or’ and so on and so forth. They make for ungainly and long URLs and really you should remove them.

If you happen to use Yoast SEO for WordPress, and you want to disable stopwords, there’s a simple way about that. Go to SEO -> Advanced and disable the feature for stopwords.

If you want to kill it with fire and prevent everyone on your site from being able to activate them ever, you can toss this into an MU plugin.
```
add_filter( 'wpseo_stopwords', '__return_empty_array' );
remove_action( 'get_sample_permalink', 'wpseo_remove_stopwords_sample_permalink' );
```
The first filter makes the stopwords kick back nothing, and the remove action stops the process from running. You probably only need the second one, but better safe than sorry, I always say.

But … what if you want stop words removed, but you don’t want them removed on certain custom post types? Welcome to my world! I wanted to remove them from two post types only.

Enter my frankencode:
```
<?php

/*
Plugin Name: Yoast SEO Customizations
Description: Some tweaks I have for Yoast SEO
Version: 2.0
*/

// Unless we're on a post or a post editing related page, shut up
global $pagenow;

$pagenow_array = array( 'post.php', 'edit.php', 'post-new.php' );
if ( !in_array( $pagenow , $pagenow_array ) ) {
	return;
}

// Since we are, we need to know exactly what we're on and this is a hassle.
global $typenow;

// when editing pages, $typenow isn't set until later!
if ( empty($typenow) ) {
    // try to pick it up from the query string
    if (!empty($_GET['post'])) {
        $post = get_post($_GET['post']);
        $typenow = $post->post_type;
    }
    // try to pick it up from the query string
    elseif ( !empty($_GET['post_type']) ) {
	    $typenow = $_GET['post_type'];
    }
    // try to pick it up from the quick edit AJAX post
    elseif (!empty($_POST['post_ID'])) {
        $post = get_post($_POST['post_ID']);
        $typenow = $post->post_type;
    }
    else {
	    $typenow = 'nopostfound';
    }
}

$typenow_array = array( 'post_type_shows', 'post_type_characters' );
if ( !in_array( $typenow , $typenow_array ) ) {
	return;
}

add_filter( 'wpseo_stopwords', '__return_empty_array' );
remove_action( 'get_sample_permalink', 'wpseo_remove_stopwords_sample_permalink', 10 );
```
There was something funny to this, by the way. Originally I didn’t have the $pagenow code. Didn’t need it. But when I left it out, Yoast SEO broke with a weird error. It refused to load any of the sub-screens for the admin settings!

After some backpacking of “Okay, was it working before…?” I determined it was the call for global $typenow; – a global that isn’t used at all in the Yoast SEO source code that I could find. Still, by making my code bail early if it’s not even on a page it should be on, I made the rest of the WP Admin faster, and that’s a win for everyone.
10 October, 2016
Google Knowledge Blindspot

With the new release of Yoast SEO 3.6, I decided to test out their new walk-through setup.

As someone who’s been studying SEO to one degree or another since the 1990s, SEO in and of itself is no great mystery to me. The bare bones of how it works, how you make good content, is understandable. But what Yoast SEO does, and what I like it for, is it makes it obvious to people without my experience what is needed. It also takes the generally good SEO of WordPress (and a good theme) and optimizes it for the myriad, constant changes that Google does.

For that, the walk-through is a wonderful idea. I like it. I think new users will love it. I think it’ll lessen the barrier to those people who are told “You need a website!” but no one is willing to (or able to) sit with them and help them get started.

Initially I was super impressed. Yoast had clearly studied the aspects of walk-throughs that had worked and that didn’t, lifting pages from other complex plugins that needed to be used by, perhaps, non-technical savvy people.

Being asked what kind of site I was running was brilliant. For the purposes of this test, I decided to use my community/wiki/library – LezWatchTV. And right away I ran into a problem.

The tool wanted me to say if I was a company or a person.

Well … Neither. I’m a community site. Or maybe a group? Either way, the two designations didn’t really apply properly. Where was “Other”?

This couldn’t be Yoast making a boneheaded maneuver, I realized. Few people know better than Joost and his crew what WordPress is used for. They’re smart people. They’ve seen more of the Internet than most of the rest of us and they know well how it’s used. So could the screwup be Google or Schema.org?

I went to Schema.org to look up how they would classify the site, and determined that DataCatalog was the most appropriate. Alright, knowing there was a good classification, I looked back at Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is a weird thing. It’s Google’s attempt to figure out how to answer your questions. You know how you can type in “How do I do X?” into Google and you get that interesting formatted answer?

That’s from their Knowledge Graph. But more importantly, so is this:

The more you dig into it, the more you realize that the only boxes like that are for people or companies. So the breakdown is that Google has not yet figured out how to flag non-people non-companies.

This means my ultimate question of ‘what I am?’ has become a little more existential than I’d wanted, and a little simple. It’s not a person, therefore it must be a company. And while that is entirely, totally, daftly incorrect, it’s also less incorrect that a person.

Thanks, Google.

5 October, 2016
Referrer Madness

Everyone’s heard of Semalt by now. They are, weirdly, an actual company run by actual people, who are entirely weird and annoying.

I should explain. I’ve talked to them in email and twitter, and I’ve read about them all over the net, like everyone else has. They’re an ‘SEO’ company who trawls the net via bots, just like Google and everyone else, tracking you and your competitors. Here’s how they explain it:

Semalt is a professional webmaster analytics tool that opens the door to new opportunities for the market monitoring, yours and your competitors’ positions tracking and comprehensible analytics business information.

That sounds vaguely legit when you look at it on the surface. They’re based in the Ukraine, which explains the imperfect English, and showed up right around the time Russia was invading, so most of us made Putin jokes and moved on. They’re not actually doing anything bad, they’re just acting like a regular bot, scanning your site…

Except they’re not.

When asked, they’ll tell you that Semalt crawler bots visit websites and gather statistical data for their service, simulating real user behavior. Their crawler bots, and yes, they admit they’re bots, don’t click on advertising banners or extend links. And all the visits are automatic and random.

This means their goal is to get a bot that acts like a human. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust anything when I can’t see it’s brain, and I certainly know better than to believe in true random when it comes to software. But what gets me is how you stop the bot from scanning.

Everyone uses a robots.txt file to block bots from scanning things they don’t need to scan. If you use WordPress and have pretty permalinks on, go to http://example.com/robots.txt and you’ll see a default file, made by WordPress, to block various folders like wp-admin from being scanned.

Semalt ignores these. They also ignore things like bot rate limiting, and they use IPs from around the world to scan your site (arguably to get a better idea of real speed and response), so they end up acting a little like a DDoS attack. Worse, they claim to act like a ‘user’ but I never have a link to my wp-admin pages from the front of my site, which means their bot is checking for WordPress and going there not because a user would have any reason, but simply because Semalt knows WordPress is there.

They have a form you can fill out to have it removed if you want, but we’ve been using robots.txt for years, and I simply fail to understand why they’re ‘better’ than the standard.

Besides that, what’s the real issue here? Semalt is screwing up my stats. They’re using referrer links to check my sites out, which means I have a bunch of referral links like this:

semalt.com/competitors_review.php?u=https://halfelf.org

Those links tell me someone linked to me, and generally I go back and check them out to see if they’re something I want to talk to or work with. These are not. Worse, they don’t really act like ‘real’ users, despite the claim. Karen Francis has a great explanation as to why Semalt is ruining your bounce rates in Google, and a couple good ways to block them.

Am I blocking them? No, not right now. Do I trust them? Not at all. They make it ‘easier’ for someone else to compare themselves to me, which is laudable, but they do it in a way that makes it harder for me to understand how my sites are doing. And that, to me, is the epitome of the goal of all black hat SEO companies. They gain at someone else’s loss.

27 August, 2014
WordPress’ SEO Sucks

“what to say when someone asks you to suck them off”

Not the sort of term anyone would really associate with this site. So imagine my surprise when I saw my search stats in Jetpack:

That sentence is at the end of my list of Search Engine Terms. I tweeted that I was astounded, and wondered how far down the SEO hole one had to traipse to find my site. As it turns out, not very far at all:

Fourth. That’s it. That’s how high I ranked. So the next logical question would be to ask what I did to make my site rate that high on random searches? Nothing. I don’t have anything ‘special’ on this site. I have a good theme, certainly, but I don’t use any WordPress SEO plugins, and in fact, I’ve never (until now) used “what to say when someone asks you to suck them off” like that, all in a row.

What’s the magic?

It’s not WordPress.

What Makes WordPress so darned Awesome (by Jen Mylo)

That is, it is and it isn’t WordPress. WordPress is SEO optimized out of the box, and your content totally matters. And it’s content that probably landed me so high. You take good content, you add in people linking to your content, you promote yourself with friends who pass it on, and magically your hard work becomes content!

Last week someone told me they wanted to “automate the posting of [original] content” and I was completely bewildered at the concept. The issue, as I understood it, was that posting original content to 100 blogs meant writing original content 100 times. And you can’t automate that. By definition, posting unique posts means … you make unique (aka different) posts. This person went on to say it was time consuming to make 100 posts and create 100 custom links to them. I sat back and blinked a few times, and thought “Well, yeah.”

I say it over and over. A website is work. If people could magically install WordPress and boom, money, then I wouldn’t have a job helping people speed up sites or debug strange conflicts, or a million other weird things I do every day. WordPress can make publishing on the web a heck of a lot easier, but it will never be effortless because effort is what makes your site amazing. Effort and attention are crucial to keeping your site going.

Every time I hear about someone trying to find the quick and easy way around content creation, I shake my head. There isn’t a quick way, there isn’t an easy way, and there isn’t a simple way. Unless you like writing and think that it’s any of those things. But even then, you can’t just write and expect magic to happen. You have to write, and customize, and care, and water, and fertilize your website.

So how did my site get ranked so highly about sex when it’s about tech? If you read the post that got linked, it’s about how you suck. “My question is you suck” is the title, and in there, I talk about what to say when someone says you suck. It’s actually a pretty logical result, when you think about it for a moment. But because enough people link to me, and enough people used the word ‘suck’ in their links, and enough people shared the link, I’m respected by google and score crazy high on a totally non-relevant search.

That’s how you work the system.

Sorry about that, to everyone who is vastly disappointed, having come here via the search result.

10 March, 2014

Tag: seo

OnPage is On Fleek

Not Spilling SEO Juice

Yoast SEO: Selective Stopwords

Google Knowledge Blindspot

Referrer Madness

WordPress’ SEO Sucks

It’s not WordPress.