Before I get started, let’s be clear – content and links are still super important ranking factors, but there’s something even more important, that no one seems to talk about! What is it? Response codes! Yes, that’s right. When Google comes to crawl your website, they may get a 5xx response code. If they try […]
One of the biggest ranking factors that no one talks about Read More »
Google are in such a position of power that it is hard to imagine them ever being seriously challenged by a competitor. But being one of the world’s most valuable brands (fourth behind Amazon, Apple and Microsoft at the last count) doesn’t come without its problems. That includes facing up to the prospect of a
Could Apple be Google’s unlikely saviour from the US government? Read More »
Unsurprisingly, as they never do anything by half, there are quite a few different Google user agents. But, just how many there are might surprise you. I have been analysing server logs since around 2013, and, because I like to keep track, I have kept a record of all the different User-Agents I have come
Google Bot User Agents Read More »
When it comes to domain names www, short for world wide web, has been around for some considerable time – as I’m sure you’re aware (who isn’t) However, you might have noticed – if you’ve been paying attention that is – that there are now a considerable number of domain names that do not start
To www or not to www – Which is Best? Read More »
Have you been analysing your Server logs and realised you are unsure about the user agent and what it means. You can try and figure it out, but sometimes it’s not that easy or if you’re doing it on bulk this can be a wasted effort. Here, I have done all the hard work –
While Google didn’t use that exact phrase, that exactly how I imagined them saying it, especially in a British accent. Bet you just tried it, didn’t you? John Muller was recently asked on twitter why they had only indexed 30,000 pages of a site and how long would it take to index the rest of
Sorry, Sir, we’re not going to index all your pages Read More »
Got your file size optimised, your links all present and correct, and in line with Google’s best practices? Great! Now how about your security? When looking into why your rankings aren’t doing what you hoped they would, are you missing out on looking after the security of your site? And did you know foregoing all
Why Website Security is a ranking factor Read More »
Whether you’ve just completed a technical audit on a site, or have spent several hours on a server log audit, one of the least talked about, but most important things to consider, is getting the developer or business owner to buy into the changes you want to make – especially if it’s going to cost
How To Get Developers On Your Side? Read More »
Understanding Googlebot and making it work for you Link building is vital for increasing brand awareness. For those that aren’t in the know, link building consists of actions you take that aim to build and increase the number of inbound links to your webpage to increase your rankings within search engines. So now you’ve got
Why You Need To Stop Link Building Read More »
How Google Changes To Link Attributes Will Affect SEO – And Why You Should Care Last September,Google made a big announcement, 14 years after introducing the nofollow link attribute, they are changing how they treat this instruction as well as adding a few new attributes – cue more stress – and more research by pretty
How Google Changes To Link Attributes Will Affect SEO – And Why You Should Care Read More »
Speed is important, not just from an SEO point of view, but also from a UX and PPC point of view. In fact, PPC is always a great way to get management/client buy-in. By reducing page speed, you increase the quality score and reduce CPC, reduce CPC and a client see an improvement straight away.
Which hosting company is the best for page speed? Read More »
Have you been using Google Pagespeed insights or web.dev to analyse areas of your site which needs improving you will notice in recent months that Google has been recommending to server images in next-gen format? What are NextGen images I will cover later, but let’s cover how to enable this on your WordPress website? Website
HOW TO SERVE IMAGES IN NEXT-GEN FORMATS USING WORDPRESS Read More »
If you need to create a sitemap, then this isn’t for you – this tool allows you to download your existing sitemap and analyse it. A sitemap is an important tool in your arsenal for helping Google find new pages on your site, it shouldn’t be your only tool but it should be used. Having
Best ways to download your sitemap Read More »
Some of the topics I cover on here are about advance server log analysis, but I often get asked what are some of the basic / initial things to look for in the server logs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aphB6TcObgwVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Some of the basic elements you should be looking out for in
Basic elements you should be looking out for in server logs Read More »
Google has been making some big announcements in the recent week about the robots.txt file but this one if one of the biggest announcements. If you weren’t aware robots.txt is 25 years old, Google has finally decided to make it a standard so that everyone knows the rules and follows them. If you are interested
Changes to Robots File Read More »
Before you read on I want to confirm I am political neutral on here, but when something happens that impacts SEO and rankings I like to analyse. Earlier this week Boris Johnson (running to be UK Prime Minster) appeared on a radio show and was chatting to their Political editor. The talk got around what
Boris Johnson: The Clever SEO Strategist Read More »
Back when I spoke at BrightonSEO I said after my talk when a question was asked, can you see if your site was affected by looking in the server logs. My answer at the time was the two sites I had data at that time that I had analysed had seen a spike in Googlebot
Do you see a spike in Google Activity before an update? Read More »
Google did a rare thing last year and pre announced a update and gave specific instructions on what it was targeting. This update was known within the Industry as the PageSpeed update. They gave the industry about 6 months notice to update their sites ready and most did. https://youtu.be/cGsodHYDF34Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is
What are the best tools for measuring page speed? Read More »
Doing technical Audits is important and allows you to find errors on your site which could be holding back its potential. However if your just using Screaming Frog your just doing great audits, if you want to take them to the next level and really find issues you need to connect different data points. In
How to Connect Screaming Frog to Google Search Console Data Read More »
In this video I am going to cover off the basics off how to connect the two data sources together, then a few of the advance changes you can make to get the data which matters to you and then finally I will explain why this is a must and should be something you should
Connecting Screaming Frog with GA data Read More »
At a recent Google IO talk, there were some key topics which came up which I found were useful and wanted to share. The videos are below. The key things is Google bot is using the latest version of Chrome for Rendering it was on Chrome 41 over 3 years old, which is great news
Errors in Search Console Read More »
Ever been like me and wanting to bulk analyse page speeds for websites, but hated the fact its quite a manual task. Well, I’ve got good news – Ive just come across this great tool which will allow you to bulk check up to 500 urls for Google page speed metrics and then export them
BatchSpeed – Review Read More »
Technical Audits – while they can get completed, here are a few quick checks which can be done in less than 5 minutes. https://youtu.be/p80MwDZpFJIVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Cycle Restoration Services Tech Audit (https://youtu.be/p80MwDZpFJI) As you can see from the video. These checks can be done in less 5 minutes. We would
Cycle Restoration Services Tech Audit Read More »
So SEMRush Crawling tool is taking on Screaming Frog Crawling tool to determine which tool is the best for crawling your website to find technical issues. While Screaming Frog is from Britain, a small town in Oxford, SEMRush is a more global operation. There is Head Office is based in Boston in the United States,
SEMRush vs Screaming Frog Crawling Tools Read More »
SEMRush is a tool which you can use to crawl your website to analyse to find technical issues with what’s wrong on the website. SEMRush Crawler Also, SEMRush offers a domain metric called “Authority Score” which analyses a websites backlinks. Its measured using, page score, domain score, trust score as well as some other data
This is something that I have dealt with numerous times and can be hard for certain organisations to set up. Getting log data when using Cloudflare, by default the logs just show the IP etc as Cloudflare meaning it can be difficult to get the data to analyse. Also you need to be on an
Getting Useful logs out of Cloudflare Read More »
Whether you decide to use www as a subdomain or not, whats important is that you add a redirect from other option to your desired preference. I prefer to use the non-www version, but it has no SEO benefit using either. The important thing like with the trailing slash you need to decide which you
Using Htaccess to redirect www to non-www Read More »
I haven’t been able to verify this yet, but some people are reporting a new Google User-Agent in their logs called “Google-speakr”. The IP of the bot is 66.249.81.186 which resolves to Google. People are speculating that the bot is some sort of Home / Google Assistant crawler but there is no news from Google
New Google UserAgent – Google-speakr Read More »
This is a question I get asked a lot, I have spoken at quite a few conferences and wrote quite a lot of articles across the web on how and why you should be doing server log analysis. The most common question I get asked is: How do I convert my log files into Excel?
Convert log file to excel Read More »
Finding Orphan pages are super important and can be very easy to find. In this video, we are going to show you how to quickly and easily find your orphan pages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mDJ59wjR-4 Note: If the site doesn’t have the pages in the sitemaps or any internal links, it will be quite hard to
How to find Orphan Pages Read More »
Today we are looking at the one local website here in the UK and doing a technical audit. This site we picked, due to the fact we had noticed it had lost some of its core rankings and wondered if it could be down to technical issues.
Technical Analysis of 1 Website Read More »
We recently did some technical SEO analysis of the top 100 wedding blogs. In this video we look at some fo the top technical SEO issues and how to fix them.
Analysis of the top Wedding Blog Read More »
Gutenburg is coming soon, it will be the default wordpress editor for writing blog posts and pages.
What is Gutenburg? Read More »
I’m Corey, The Server Log Kid. Today’s question is what is the difference between access and error logs?
What is the difference between access and error logs? Epioside 10 Read More »
The Server Log Kid has no broken up for the summer holidays so we are back filming so of your questions – keep them coming in. But we have had a brainwave, not sure how in this heat – all I wanna do is chill out in some shade somewhere, but one of the
Site Audit – Competition Read More »
This is a guest post by Daniel Cuttridge, he is a fellow On-Page Optimization geek. Daniel is a ex front-end web developer who has spent years working in client SEO, as well as building his own affiliate sites.
Link Sculpting For SEO – Yes It Works, Here’s How To Do It Read More »
This article has been edited on 3rd June 2018. So today is May 25th, 2018 and a new EU law came into effect today. They are designed to give EU citizens more protection over how their data is handled, stored and used.
EU GDPR Rules and Server Log Data Read More »
This is the third video in our new series, with me Andy and Corey Aka The Server Log Kid and the question is How can I quickly spot large images on my website?
How can I quickly spot large images on my website? Episode 3 Read More »
Whether you want to keep the trailing or remove it that’s your decisions, but what is important is that decide upon one and keep to it.
Using Htaccess: add/remove trailing slash from URL Read More »
This is the first video in our new series, with me Andy and Corey Aka The Server Log Kid.
Can you see Google bot activity in the logs on sitemap pages? Episode 1 Read More »
There are many good reasons to move to HTTP2, however, there is only one great reason to move and as an SEO specialist you might be surpirsed to elarn the answer isnt SEO.
The key reason to move to HTTP2 Read More »
Screaming Frog is probably the most used Crawling tool on the market, however, its biggest drawback has been its lack of reporting. Well, we have fixed that and the good news it’s free. In the recent post which looked at one Screaming Frog vs Deepcrawl and one of the area’s which DeepCrawl won was on
Screaming Frog Report Builder Read More »
Over the years I have become quite an expert and analysing websites to find out technically what’s wrong with them. Historically while this has always got good results, SEOs have tended to just get more links or improve the content too boost rankings. This, however, is changing, over the last few years, more and
Top Issues when Auditing Websites Read More »
Crawling your website is one of the most important parts of technical audits, but finding the best tools to complete the job can be difficult, but don’t worry we have analysed the two most popular tools on the market to see which one is the best to use.
Deepcrawl vs Screaming Frog – which one is best Read More »
One of the first steps to Server Log analysis is actually downloading the files and if you’re using cPanel to access your server its a very simple process. https://youtu.be/uyX5gPy8Vz0 Hopefully, you will have watched the previous video on how to keep historical logs, so know you have historical files your going to want to download them
How to get your Server Logs using cPanel Read More »
If you want to analyse your server logs, then unticking this one box in cPanel is the difference between doing great server log analysis and good analysis.
Ticking this one box allows you do great Server Log Analysis Read More »
If you have a development team to handles your servers and website, then you are probably going to need to ask them to get you the data, it’s much simpler than getting the data yourself, however, you need to know what to ask for. Here are the essential items you need to request.
What to ask a developer Read More »
Speed kills your business. A slow loading website is going to increase the bounce rate meaning you’re going to have to get a lower RIO on marketing spend, but also your rankings are going to decrease. In this series of video’s, we are going to take you through a step by step guide on how
Speed kills your business Read More »