Everything That Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong - Tech SEO Boost 2017 - Patrick Stox

Patrick Stox | @patrickstox #TechSEOBoost
Will Go Wrong
Everything That Can
Go Wrong

Who is Patrick Stox
I write, mainly for Search Engine Land
I speak at some conferences like this one, SMX, Pubcon, etc.
Organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup (most successful in US)
We also run a conference, the Raleigh SEO Conference
Also Beer & SEO Meetup (because beer)
2017 US Search Awards Judge, 2017 UK Search Awards Judge
Some of you may know me from the Wix SEO Hero contest
(I was the one that got disqualified https://beanseohero.com/)

But First, The Most Important Takeaway

But First, The Most Important Takeaway
Bing processes JavaScript

The Typical Enterprise Environment

Multiple Points Of Failure
Multiple infrastructures
Multiple CMS
Middleware systems
Error handling
Redirect handling
Tags in HTTP Header, <head>, Sitemap
Coming from CMS, server, CDN, JavaScript, Tags, Theme, Plugin/Module

Real stuff.

Duplicate International Pages
Hreflang correct, country targeting set in GSC.
Google folded the duplicates together. Info:domain/page for other versions
showed the canonicalized version.
This meant the wrong country-language versions showed in Google.
Solution: rework the whole strategy to have fewer, stronger pages and localize
where needed.

Error Page Cleanup Project
Mapped all the redirects fine.
Put them in meta refreshes (not ideal to begin with).
Someone else had planned to put them in the HTTP Header and had a location:
tag set but with no destination.
Users ended up in the correct location but Google was redirected to nothing
before they could see the meta refreshes.
Solution: move the redirects to the HTTP Header.

Robots.txt Blocking Everything
Intermittent issue, in that sometimes we were blocking everything and other
times everything was normal.
Turned out to be a shared cache.
Solution: Disabled caching of .txt files at CDN.

Removing Subdomain From Index
They added noindex on the pages, but blocked crawlers with a disallow in
robots.txt.
Bots couldn’t crawl the page to see the noindex.
Solution: remove the disallow.

Staging Site Indexed
There’s a canonical to the main website but then they blocked it from being
crawled in robots.txt as well.
It’s the same environment, so we are limited in what we can do.
We should use authentication or IP whitelisting, but can’t in this case until we can
split it.
Solution TBD: Wait until we can split, let it be crawled (they’re worried about
crawl budget), remove in GSC, noindex in robots.txt (unsupported and could
cause issues with the canonical), ignore it.

No Game In Robots.txt
I wanted to do this, and you can. In
fact, you can put a whole website in
there:
http://ohgm.co.uk/host-a-website-
inside-robots-txt/

JavaScript Redirect Calling JS File
Rather than use the page location, this system processed the redirect in a
referenced JavaScript file. This is the only time Ayima Redirect Path has ever
failed me.

Failed To Redirect Index File
A hard coded index.php file was live after a migration and resulted in a huge drop
in rankings for an important page. This version was indexed along with the newer
version of the page, but the rankings dropped off.
Index files usually have special rules for redirecting, but of note is it’s also
important to redirect all versions.

URL Parameter Issue
One setting for a parameter in GSC was set to tell Google it just tracks usage,
when in fact each page had different content.
This knocked several hundred thousand pages out of the index.

Links Followed In Redirect Chains
Looked into many long redirect chains to see if links to pages in GSC showed
any from the previous versions as “via intermediate link”. Standards recommend
no more than 5 hops.
Found one as long as 10 hops that was followed and many that cut off at 6 hops.
Working on processing each in our redirect engine to update to final location.

English Text In SERPs – Non-English Pages
Google only showed English text for what should have been other languages.
Investigation showed Google was being redirected which turned out to be based
on browser language.
Solution (temporary): chose not to redirect Googlebot. This system was going
away in 2 months and it wasn’t worth the fight for a more permanent solution.

Canadian English Page – SERP In French
We were seeing French language SERPs for a Canadian English page.
Going to the page we saw English, but Google’s cache was in French.

React JS
URL: us/en-
us?technologyTopics%5B0%5D%5B0%5D=cat.topic%3AITInfrastructure
Links: href="javascript:void(0);“
So unfriendly URLs and uncrawlable links.
React-router created patterns to match /{country}/{locale}/{category}/{slug}
React JS kind of gives you full control of everything, so just help educate the
devs on what needs to be done.

HTTP To HTTPS – Content Security Policy
Everyone read https://searchengineland.com/http-https-seos-guide-securing-
website-246940?
Add Content Security Policy (CSP) which you can set to auto-upgrade-insecure-
requests and fix your mixed content issues.
Still may have issues with canonical tags and internal links.

Also Referrer Policy
https://searchengineland.com/need-know-referrer-policy-276185
This lets you control how the referrer is sent and can pass it when going from
HTTPS to HTTP websites, which may be important for some websites to show
they sent traffic out.
We launched a new section set to no-referrer, which dropped the referrer even
for internal traffic. It’s now no-referrer-when-downgrade which still drops when
going to an insecure page. It’s more of a problem for us because we separate
no-referrer and direct traffic in our analytics unlike GA.

Changed Links In CMS To Relative
Yep, all of them. Including the canonicals. Issue was fixed but pages need to be
re-published and this is an older CMS without much support.

Why Are 404s Hard?
Throwing 200 instead of 404 on error pages.
Just blanket redirect everything that should 404.
^These are wrong, don’t do this.

What About 418?
https://www.google.com/teapot

UTF-8 Characters
Be sure to check your whole tech stack if using UTF-8 characters in the URL.
Just because a CMS supports it doesn’t mean everything does.

301s, 302s, 307s
Everyone knows about 301s, but still some people think that because they’re
called “permanent” they can be removed after a period of time. Nope.
We use a lot of 302s to keep original URLs indexed when offloading to a different
place or when doing temporary moves.
307s make it interesting. These are usually browser cached from HSTS and
there could be a 301 or 302 behind them. You can use fetch in GSC or a browser
with no history or incognito mode to see if it’s a 301 or 302 behind this. It matters.

AMP
Cable connection (70Mbps)
50 sites tested, ~1 second avg difference from the prerendering vs direct load.
Perceived speed is a lot faster.
https://searchengineland.com/the-amp-is-a-lie-278401
Why this is hard for an enterprise:
• Analytics support (IBM Digital Analytics working on it.)
• Legal requirements for hosting content.
• Could make our own cache, but wouldn’t get prerendering.
• Business/tracking reasons for scripts that would invalidate cache.
• Extending prerender spec to more than one page could kill AMP (Feature Policy could
solve the issues with bandwidth, CPU, security, etc.)

Final Thoughts

You May Not Ever Fix Everything
There are lots of older systems that aren’t supported but happen to be cheaper to
keep running than to get rid of them or fix them.

Get Ahead Of Problems
Look at any new system on the way.
Setup automated testing with server side scripts, selenium, chrome dev tools
extensions, etc.
Middleware to let multiple systems interact with each other.

Technical SEO Isn’t Always The Answer
Pick your battles. Sometimes there’s more than one right answer or even if the
way you want is technically right, it may not be right for the business needs.
Know when to push and when to take a step back.
Look at things like page consolidation and content topics.

Will What You Ask For Make A Difference?
You really need to know this ahead of time. If there’s no noticeable outcome then
everyone will be less likely to work with you in the future.
I just did a whole deck at Pubcon challenging conventional wisdom on hreflang
tags and pointing out where even tools got it wrong.
https://www.slideshare.net/patrickstox/pubcon-vegas-2017-youre-going-to-screw-
up-international-seo-patrick-stox

Tips To Troubleshoot
Info: operator can help with duplicates, hijacking, folded pages.
&filter=0 to Google search URL to show more pages in consideration set.
Site: operator for parameterized pages, sections you may not know about, etc.
Site:domain.com keyword check who is eligible for featured snippets
For JS, use inspect element and fetch and render, not view source and cache.
There’s more here:
https://searchengineland.com/tips-make-better-technical-seo-285329

Machine Learning + Search
Talk to me later.
Useful:
Keyword Classifier (based on ontology/taxonomy and a lot of data points)
Duplicate Content (doc2vec that looks at several levels and goes well beyond
phrase match duplicate content checkers)
Meh:
Mapping old content to current for redirects (site: + keyword was faster)
Finding cannibalization (again, a site: search was faster)
Finding internal link opportunities (again, site: search was faster)
Determining link relevance. (LDA)

Want To Work On These Issues Every Day?
We’ll be hiring again soon (early 2018).
Twitter https://twitter.com/patrickstox
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickstox
Ask for email (because spam)

Thank You All
Special thanks to Paul Shapiro, Catalyst, and all the sponsors
like Stat, DeepCrawl, and Rio SEO

Everything That Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong - Tech SEO Boost 2017 - Patrick Stox

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Everything That Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong - Tech SEO Boost 2017 - Patrick Stox