On April 27th, the Zinc Digital marketing team took to the road and visited Brighton to experience the biggest digital marketing event of the year: brightonSEO. It’s a place to learn about the newest developments in SEO, which is an industry that’s all about adapting and learning.
Fili Wiese from Search Brothers led a conference providing help to those webmasters and site owners who struggle to optimise your website for search robots.
So, if you have ever wanted to know more about why Google does or does not index or crawl your content, then this is a technical blog post just for you.
Below are the top headlines and considerations for what you need to focus on in 2018 to achieve better website indexing.
1. Google bot needs to access your website; consider the importance of and issues of canonicalisation.
2. Be aware of error 5xx’s; how much time Google takes to download your pages.
Why invest in page speed?
Google bot is very conservative in the sense that it does not want to crash your website. If it feels it may crash your site, the bot will slow down and impact how much of the crawl will be completed.
3. Google search bot is chrome based, consider issues around crawling javascript and indexing issues.
4. Consider your web content and how available it is for users across multiple devices.
What is your crawl budget (prioritisation)?
You should know which pages of your website Google crawls.The first crawl may be the top down, then moving to a random crawl with a crawl scheduler as not all URLs are crawled equally.
5. Google may try to crawl URLS which dont exist in its search for new contents. It’s therefore important to manage 404 URLs correctly.
6. Links help discovery and prioritisation towards crawl, it’s important to have contextual internal links as well as a well planned menu architecture.
7. Google still loves new content, planning content around your crawl schedule is often overlooked.
8. External linking (new links coming to website) are still an important factor for assisting with indexing. Building links to new pages is consideration to drive bot and user traffic to your new content.
9. Do not link to internal redirects is still recognised as a major faux paux, it’s worth auditing your incoming links to ensure that they are correctly assigned you could be losing SEO authority from simply having your audience and publishers incorrectly link to your webpages.
10. Using breadcrumbs in your site navigation is a well recognised strategy for helping Google discover and crawl your website, even in 2018.
11. Avoid duplicate content, this is unlikely to be crawled as a priority by Google Bot.
12. Canonical URLs can be ignored by Google, but Google cannot ignore a 301 redirect, it is well worth reviewing your URL redirect strategies.
Sitemaps – How do you get the best results?
13. It may sound obvious but do not include necessary URLs. Only those which should be priority or will return conversions and value for your business or organisation are required.
If you care about SEO we recommend to audit your website regularly, every 12 months; if you have questions about indexation and your website then give Zinc Digital a call on 01604 59 89 99 we’d love to hear from you.
