Changes in Technical SEO — Kathy Brown // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “Defining technical SEO depends on who you ask. But both sides will agree that technical SEO is all about improving technical aspects of the site so that Google can crawl the site fast and that Google understands the site.” -Kathy

• “It is a high-level way of saying that it is about accessibility, speed, and understanding how much can Google get access to your website, how quickly can they consume the data, and if they understand what you are trying to say.” -Ben

• “Technical SEO is what you focus on to ensure that the site has a great foundation to it. If your wonderful content is buried behind a bunch of thin content and duplicate content, and so Google is having trouble getting to it, it is like running a race and having this huge rock tied to your leg. Youre just not going to win the race if your foundation is just not strong.” -Kathy

• “When it comes to priorities, of course, we all we say that all of it matters but it really depends on the scope of problems you have and I think technical SEO is just one of those discipline where you can always be fixing things, you can always find something wrong with the site but there are certain things that are huge problems and definitely need to be prioritized highly.” -Kathy

• “I think of technical SEO as fixing a house or a car. Its subjective to say when its done if its ever done. You can always change your muffler or redo your floors. There is always something that you could do to change the aesthetics, the performance of a car, the same as a website.” -Ben

• “What happened over the last couple of years is the frequency that sites are now using javascript. With technical SEO, it didnt use to be that Google could understand javascript. Now Google can understand javascript and they can execute it when they figure out what is going on with the site.” -Kathy

• “As technical SEO practitioners, we now need to be very aware of javascript and how it plays a part in how Google is understanding the site. One of the things Id like to say is, view source is dead. If you go to a browser and you just do that view source, what you are looking at is just the raw HTML that was sent over from a server and that is really no longer the big picture.” -Kathy

• “The process that Google uses to understand your webpage is first it gets that raw HTML and crawls it. So as much as possible you want your navigation and your links in that raw HTML because there can be a delay that happens.” -Kathy

• “Its pretty easy to Google to crawl that raw HTML but to actually execute the javascript it has to be sent to a different part of the Google system to actually send us through the parser, execute the javascript, and then see the code as it is actually rendered and that can take some time. Although Google has gotten a lot better and quicker in doing that, its still going to be minutes and maybe a day before it is going to get a full picture of your page by executing that javascript.” -Kathy

• “Websites are becoming more intricate and more dynamic. Google has the ability to comb through and make some sense of your javascript.” -Ben

• “One big thing that is happening right now is when Google announced that is going to change how it measures speed. Actually it is more than just speed and it is wrapped into the users experience of the page.” -Kathy

• “What Google recently announced is that there is going to be this new aggregate ranking factor called page experience.And it is going to be a collection of older ranking factors that we all know and love such as mobile-friendliness, https, not too many intrusive ads above the fold. These older ranking factors are going to be wrapped in with the new core web vitals and these are going to be the new metrics that are going to form the way Google sees the quality or experience of your page.” -Kathy

• “So there is Large Contentful Paint (LCP), theres First Input Delay (FID) which is a measure of how long it takes the page to respond to you when you interact with it like tapping on something. The third is the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and that is a fancy way of saying the page doesnt jump around as it paints before you.” -Kathy

• “LCP is about how quickly the most important part of the page appears either on your screen or on your phone. FIP is interactivity, and then the CLS. So Google announces this but it will not go into force until sometime in 2021.” -Kathy

• “Google, in the end,wants the best experience for site visitors and so that is the step forward they are doing with this experience slash core web vital thing. It is to give us metrics that they are going to use to judge whether the page is a decent experience for the user.”-Kathy