Out of nowhere, autumn is upon us once again. The clocks have gone back forwards back, you've told Alexa to switch the central heating on, and the leaves... oh the autumn leaves!
But the cold and the rain and the dark and the pervasive fucking leaves don't stop our beautiful little industry from ploughing on through, like a nerdy little beaver fighting a never ending flood of artificially intelligent Google bots that just go on and fucking on and never ever stop.
We've got this people. And I've got your back, sharing more knowledge bombs below from extremely awesome people in our industry who share what they know because we're all in this together. And winter is coming.
Recent Tech SEO Stuff We Love
A deep dive into BERT: How BERT launched a rocket into natural language understanding
via @dawnieando
We couldn't not include an 'optimizing for BERT' post, right??
WHOA. Ok, chill out. Calm down! That isn't what this is. It was just a joke. Relax already. What I suggest you do is read Dawn's 10,000 word opus on BERT, as this will give you a thorough grounding on how search engines have historically attempted to deal with natural language, and why BERT represents such a massive breakthrough. Then you can go back to Twitter and at least know what you're talking about when shouting down would-be BERT optimizers.
How we optimized our Crawl Budget by removing 72% of Skroutz indexed URLs while growing to 30 million sessions
via @bgiannak
This is proper enterprise technical SEO, but should still be super interesting even if you don't deal with massive sites. There's also a bunch of takeaways at the end that pretty much apply to sites of any size.
How Much Content is Not Indexed in Google in 2019?
via @bart_goralewicz
This is sort of but not really about how much content is indexed in Google. It is Bartosz Góralewicz, and therefore inevitably about JavaScript(!), and specifically, how rendering JavaScript affects indexing. You get a ton of content here - a video of the presentation, the slideshare (200+ slides!) AND a write-up. Enjoy.
Other Stuff You Should Check Out
- SEO is not a black box
A nice little post about how to think about (and talk about) SEO, and how to correctly assess why SEO sometimes doesn't work.
- Fucking SEO Tips
This made me laugh. Perhaps I just have the sense of humour of a 13 year old boy. Perhaps you do too?
- Quora Marketing: ~1 Million Views Generated. Here’s How to Replicate Our Success
Really comprehensive post on how Ahrefs use Quora as part of their marketing strategy (with great success), that also explains exactly how you can do the same thing.
- Uber’s Self-Driving Car Didn’t Know Pedestrians Could Jaywalk
If we can for a second ignore the fact that 'jaywalking' is an offence in the USA, and instead focus on the salient point... Uber trained their self-driving cars to deliberately plough into humans unless they were using a pedestrian crossing. Frightening.
