Apologies that this edition of Sitebulb Monthly is a couple of weeks late. I don't know if you heard but the UK suffered a few inches of snow the other week, which shut down the entire nation.
Onto the good stuff:
Recent Tech SEO Stuff We Love
Our favourite things from the world of tech SEO, in the last 30 days (or so):
Crawling & Indexing: Technical SEO Basics That Drive Revenue (Case Study)
via @RobinRozhon
I love a good technical SEO case study, and this one is a blog post after my own heart, putting crawling and indexing to the forefront. And if you can't get excited about a company deciding to deindex 80% of their pages and being rewarded by a 50%+ revenue increase, then you're reading the wrong newsletter (scroll to the bottom, smash the 'unsubscribe' link).
Experts On The Wire Podcast with Paul Shapiro
via @dan_shure
This isn't ground breaking news, but Paul Shapiro is one smart mofo. When he talks, it's generally worth just shutting up and listening, which is what you should do with this excellent podcast interview from Dan Shure. There's over an hour of technical and non-technical goodness, and you'll almost definitely come out the other end feeling (if not actually being) a little bit smarter yourself.
What Counts as Crawl for Search Console?
via @ohgm
Oli's obscure tests have featured before in this fledgling newsletter, and he's made the cut again with an investigation into the 'Last crawled' datapoint in the new Google Search Console. Upon reading this post, you'll come away with a better understanding of the process Google take when they see a 'Fetch and Render' request in Search Console, and a better appreciation of the crawl data they are showing you.
Aside: Oli hosts a characteristically unusual SEO conference, which legitimately is a real event, even if the conference landing page may lead you to believe otherwise. Pitch him via Twitter DM to get your name up in lights (sort of).
Other Stuff You Should Check Out
- It’s Not About Ranking #1 - The Monopoly Strategy
Nick Eubanks takes a more holistic view of search results, and explains how you can monopolise a SERP by owning 'the opinions and awareness of every bit of that SERP'. Very clever stuff. - Tracking Offline Events Using Google Analytics & the Measurement Protocol
A rare post from Dean Cruddace, as he conducts a fun and interesting experiment, pushing offline 'smart home' events into Google Analytics. - Update to hreflang Generator Tool
Aleyda Solis updated her hreflang generator tool, so it will now also generate XML sitemaps with hreflang annotations.
