Google Webmaster Central Blog

I still think an even better path to success is to allow entirely disabling linking for non-admins. Google no longer treats "nofollow" as strongly as it used to: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-t…

Google changed the interpretation of those a year ago. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-t…

Reviewers are meant to send back their review units. A lot of professional reviewers refuse free review units entirely and purchase the items themselves. Google has posted a warning on their Webmaster Blog about providing free review samples, they will take action against companies that do it: "Bloggers should use the nofollow tag on all such links because these links didn’t come about organically (i.e., the links wouldn’t exist if the company hadn’t offered to provide a free good or service in exchange for a link)." https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/03/best-practices-for-bloggers-…

Here's the actual announcement: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-t…

Except... they were correct. Google has now clarified that they're removing the code behind the undocumented items, with noindex called out explicitly. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-… It wasn't officially supported / the recommended way - but it worked (in many cases.)

I had no idea that googlebot (and others) will sometimes POST to urls[0] - this seems like a terrible idea. I imagine what happened to this guy is that somebody coded up a site that used his as a service and google spidered it and went crazy trying to follow the links. It sucks, but that is what robots.txt is for. Anything that requires more than just serving a page should be blocked. You can drive yourself insane reading your logs trying to guess what bots are trying to achieve. They seem to excel at spidering exactly what you don't want while ignoring the content that would actually be useful. The one time I did have a problem with a misbehaving crawler was with something called 80legs[1] [0] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/11/get-post-and-safely-surfacin… [1] https://sheep.horse/2012/8/80legs_is_a_pain_in_the_neck.html

Did you try create_react_app? I find it way easier to setup my frontend using it than to use webpacker, even being used to both rails and react. You type "yarn build", and you have properly fingerprinted js and css files ready to use, with an `index.html` file that includes them. It's great to only focus on backend in rails, and it brings all the cool thing from js dev for free: babel, webpack, yarn, live reload, import of css files, etc. SSR is indeed still a problem (I've build a cache system that will render pages with chrome headless, for that), but gladly, it's about to be solved (at least for the SEO part): https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/12/rendering-ajax-crawling-page… The biggest problem yet to be solved: properly handling 404 status.

Progressive Enhancement was laid out clearly actually so that basic content should be accessible to all web browsers and basic functionality should be accessible to all web browsers. As for google, they also recommend using progressive enhancement and they even removed their ajax SE scheme posting about this wherein they even give a recommended trick for compatibility testing. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawlin…

But is Fathom supposed to be for annotating your own web site, or analyzing others'? If the former, then I'm truly bewildered, but it's not clear which it is. As for rel=next/previous, I don't use them because Google makes it clear that these will make it treat the whole sequence like one paginated document in the index, contrary to their original semantics. I'd love if someone could correct me on this. [0] http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/61573/is-it-just-me-or-d… [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.3 [2] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-…

I found the non-paginated version to be very responsive and quick. Personally, I prefer non paginated results as long as they're quick, and some user testing studies indicate this as well[1]. UX folks seem to prefer not to paginate[2]. Who loves pagination? Usually advertisers. [1]https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.h… [2]http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/21375/is-there-a-point-to-pagina… Coding horror had an interesting article awhile back about this https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-end-of-pagination/

This is cool! It's worth pointing out that, for SEO reasons, Google now renders Javascript pages [1] without methods like this. The performance benefit is definitely still a plus though. [1] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-bett…

To me infinite scroll or not is more about what kind of content is it, statistics like generated clicks and of course UX, than the questions what's more difficult to implement. With the abundance of ready to use opensource solutions, I'm sure most devs don't need to implement infinite scroll or a pagination mechanism themselves but they just use a component that does it out of the box and solves all those technical problems for them. To be sure what works best for your users and type of content, I would do two versions, one with pagination and one with infinite scroll and let the numbers decide which technique makes the user click / visit content and maybe which technique does the user spend most time on the website. I'm not totally against infinite scroll, for a social network news feed I think it's a good use case. Also all the potential problems listed have a solution and also some of the problems also exist when using a pagination. For example letting a user bookmark a page url with a pagenumber on a website with lots of new content is bad, as the content on the page number XY will have changed after few hours / days. Some good solutions if you really want to implement it on your own are listed in this google blog post: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-frien…

> If Google really wanted to improve the quality of the web they had excellent tools to achieve that: the weighing of the various elements that go into the ranking algo Doesn't Google already do this [1]? There are unintended consequences to increasing speed's weight in search rankings. Principally, it disadvantages smaller players. (Also, the New York Times would consistently rank under Buzzfeed.) > you are now a very willing pawn in the endgame for the domination of the world wide web Most people get news from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter [2]. The minority of us sharing links to newspaper articles probably also have direct relationships with publishers. For example, I read the New York Times, Washington Post, Economist, Bloomberg and other papers directly on their sites because I subscribe to their newsletters. > maybe you should be [concerned] Maybe, but I don't think so. The things I read about in the newspapers AMP gives me faster access to yield better (i.e. more serious and more actionable upon) avenues for my attention. In every context where AMP is a worry journalism's decline seems more important. [1] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-sear… [2] http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/new-pew-data-more-americans-are-getti…

I just checked out the included templates. At least the first 20-30 are all ad templates, one of which is a full-screen mobile interstitial! That's the same element that just got an SEO finger wag from the Google Webmaster Central Blog[0]. _Just_ as the list of templates started getting interesting with some Youtube slider-thing integration, it came to an end. So yeah, this seems to be aimed at folks who need to build ads quickly and don't want to have to be HTML5 pros. With that said, there's a "my templates" feature so maybe you can use it to maintain your Star Trek fan website, or business portfolio website, too. I'd just hesitate to recommend that in general, as my experience with GUI HTML5 builders has been that they aren't the best IDEs or text editors and I really quickly start to need one in order to be efficient. [0] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-…

> 1. The footer becomes unusable Yep, so just put it in the fixed sidebar. > 2. Performance degrades Not really, if you've developed this the right way - which is render only items that are currently visible and derender the ones that are above the current scroll canvas. > 3. Analytics is harder to implement > 4. Bookmarking and the back button become problematic I put those together, because they are relevant. Anyway Google suggest how to remove this [1] and even presents a demo [2] 1 : https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-frien… 2 : http://scrollsample.appspot.com > 5. People may suffer from choice paralysis As other people here suggested, this depends on the content. If you work in e-commerce there is quite a habit people to scroll infinitely with a huge amount of products ( disclaimer - I'm the sole developer of `www.bagaholic.me` - bags price comparison website ). > 6. The scrollbar becomes unusable and untrustworthy Not a significant reason at all. Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook proved that. > 7. It’s generally hard to use I think stating that, without some stats is kinda "opinionated". Again based on the content a valid context with fixed sidebar, header is a must.

They removed the special preference: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.h…

Lighthouse is a lab tool [1] for testing the performance of web pages. It specifically helps you measure your Core Web Vitals [2]. There are many, many research and case studies [3] correlating improved website performance to improved business metrics (such as conversions). Google Search has also signaled that the Core Web Vitals will become a ranking signal [4]. Disclosure: I work on Lighthouse and web.dev [1] https://web.dev/how-to-measure-speed/#lab-data-vs-field-data [2] https://web.dev/vitals/#core-web-vitals [3] https://wpostats.com/ [4] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.h…

Wish granted! https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.h… I don't have an issue with providing amp as a service if it doesn't get treated more favorably than fast non-amp pages.

Yeah, just what've been saying for some time now. As Google is struggling for growth, it'll squeeze ad revenue off the extant web, turning it into a piece of shit even more than it is already. The same thing happened with eg. free PHPbb forum providers in early 2000s which were plastered with banner ads more and more (many mobile sites are like this already). I don't see a way that Google can win this race to the bottom, and neither do I see any reason for content creators to even bother with Google Search and Google Analytics; they will just direct your visitor's precious profile data to your competitor spending more on AdWord bids than you. FYI: see also [1] and [2] as additional upcoming measures by Google [1]: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/03/announcing-mobile-first-inde… [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCLxiN_dpjU

> there's nothing wrong with a static site with no cert Not really. Google says "switch to HTTPS or lose ranking": https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

Google says it themselves : "https as a ranking signal" https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

> Conspiracy theory: This change is dictated by the Google AMP team that wants to take over the world without us knowing I was just about to write this but I don't necessarily think it's that far off. With signed exchanges, AMP pages have the ability to hide the fact you're accessing content through Google [1]. In 2016 Google wrote about testing 'mobile-first indexing' because more people are using mobile devices than desktop browsers [2]. [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp#about-signe… [2] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/11/mobile-first-indexing.html If Google can control the URL narrative (keeping users from bouncing off AMP pages) it's just one more ability for them to be MITM.

That might change. Google are changing their search ranking metrics to include the new Core Web Vitals metrics[1]. One of those is "Cumulative Layout Shift", or how much the page changes the layout over time. Using a font that isn't performant will cause the page to render, and then to move around once the page loads, which could push your site down on Google's search results page. [1] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.h…

Maybe they are trying to push their signed exchanges / "AMP real URL"[1]? Last I understood, Firefox says they won't support it, ever. Apple is less vocal about it, but doesn't appear to be working it. [1] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/instant-loading-amp-pages-fr…

I don't think this is true anymore? https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/10/introducing-recaptcha-v3-new…

Page speed is already a penalty factor in ranking. Think they introduced this last year edit: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-s…

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+paywall+policy first result: https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/40543?hl=en >We‘ve removed the First Click Free requirement for publishers on Search and News. Read more about the new policy on our blog[0] [0]https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/10/enabling-more-high-quality-c…

Googlebot actually used to support a noindex rule in robots.txt, but they are removing it. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-…

But that requires that Googlebot be allowed to crawl the page in robots.txt in the first place. How do you tell Googlebot to not crawl your site and to not index it either? Previously, one could use the undocumented "Noindex" directive in robots.txt, but this will be disabled soon: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-…

#1 is being fixed for supporting browsers (Chrome so far). https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/instant-loading-amp-pages-fr… You can see it for a number of sites already. For example, search for an AMP result from collins dictionary.