Search Engine Optimization

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content to human users and search engines. In my recent experience, our site was hacked, and the hacker used cloaking to make the hack harder to detect.  For real-time example below, the hacker showed the page about "Tennis skort in black" to search engines, but showed a different page about "Traffic control service" to users. Tennis skort in black" to search engines : Content to Search Engine Eyes Traffic control service to users Content to Human Eyes

 Our website generates an automatic blog post page with service page content which we did not create. Service page (Original) - https://scgroup.global/facility/security/ Blog post page with service page content (Auto generated blog page) - https://scgroup.global/blog/security/ Please see the attached screenshots. Screenshot1 Screenshot 2:  

Crawl rate limit: The crawl rate can go up and down based on a couple of factors: UP: If the site responds really quickly for a while, the limit goes up, meaning more connections can be used to crawl. Down: If the site slows down or responds with server errors, the limit goes down and Googlebot crawls less. Crawl demand: The two factors that play a significant role in determining crawl demand are: Popularity: URLs that are more popular on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresher in Google index. Staleness: our systems attempt to prevent URLs from becoming stale in the index. Factors affecting crawl budget: According to Google analysis, having many low-value-add URLs can negatively affect a site's crawling and indexing. Faceted navigation and session identifiers On-site duplicate content Soft error pages Hacked pages Infinite spaces and proxies Low quality and spam content Source: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2017/01/what-crawl-budget-means-for-go...

We have affected and injected many low value (Spam links injection) URLs by "Japanese keyword hack" malware on my company WordPress website. It is negatively affected our website's crawling and indexing. Example: Screenshot   Solution: After the hack has been fixed, we asked Google to re-crawl our website URLs by the following crawl request methods.  Inspect the URL using the "URL Inspection tool" and requested indexing. XML sitemap: Resubmitted in Google - https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml Inserted the following lines in our website robots.txt file - https://example.com/robots.txt. Sitemap: https://example.com/post-sitemap.xml Sitemap: https://example.com/page-sitemap.xml

How long does it take to see improvements in rankings after making significant changes in terms of quality? It can take months: John: How long does that take? Yeah it’s hard to say, it’s really hard to say. On the one hand, we have to recrawl the content, like if you make significant changes on your website, we have to recrawl that. And to recrawl that across a larger site, that can take a bit of time, especially if you make bigger changes like across everything, if you change the structure of your website, I would assume something like that, just purely from a technical point of view, would take, I don’t know, maybe a month. And for understanding the quality changes overall, I would see that as something where it probably takes a few months on our side to actually understand that this website has significantly changed. So not something that you can fix in a week, it’s probably more like, I don’t know, there, four months something like that if you make significant quality changes. S...

[1/14] Remember, there are situational "ranking factors" that are out of your control. You can't have a direct impact on things like: - perceived relevance - searcher habits - seasonality - competitor activity But you should be aware of them, and adjust strategies if needed. [2/14] Let's take perceived relevance. Why perceived? Because a Search Engine can only make an assumption on the searcher's meaning and intent. This is improving astonishingly, but if you're simply far away from the perceived relevance then you have no chance... [3/14] That is, unless, you: 1. Study the SERPs to better understand the perceived relevance of a query 2. Identify ways of ranking there 3. AND assess if your brand *can* rank there Easy peasy. [4/14] Actually a good quality in an SEO is someone who sets realistic expectations and knows when it's not worth time or resources hunting to rank for a query where they are likely irrelevant. Pick your battles, yo. [5/14] ...

The nature of SEO is VUCA. VUCA(volatility, uncertainty, complexity, & ambiguity) is an acronym that is used to describe the nature of a challenging situation. - Volatile: unexpected algorithm updates & daily ranking fluctuations. - Uncertain : content in the most important ranking factor but the majority of other factors are unknown. - Complex: interdependent systems(content, optimization, tech) & tasks. - Ambiguous: 'effort vs impact' not straight forward. Because of this, do you think working in SEO has made your thinking more nuanced/ make better decisions?