SEO Bits and Pieces w/e 11 August 2017

This is an extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 11 August 2017.

Read the SEO Bits and Pieces for w/e 11th August 2017. Chock full of smaller changes from the world or search.

If you would like to discuss ways these SEO updates could impact your web business, please feel free to contact me.

#SEO #Snapchat #LinkSpam #Redirects #Googlebot

• Google, in the latest example of Big Digital copying slightly smaller digital, is rumoured to be bringing a feature similar to Snapchat Discover to search. Apparently it will be called Stamp & be based on AMP.  Poor old Snap, it’s not having a lot of luck keeping its ideas to itself. Still, good testing ground for Google and Facebook.
  • H/T WSJ
• Few tears were cried when a insurance link spammer generator slid out of business as colleges stopped responding to their “scholarship program” outreach. Having worked with insurance companies, they really struggle to keep things clean.
  • H/T PointBlankSEO
• In unsurprising news of the week, John Mueller confirmed that the size of your CSS file didn’t really stop Google from crawling and indexing your content. “<10’s of MBs” was his phrase. I sure hope a file (or files) of that size are cached around the web, as that would be monstrous, and slow, to load every time.
  • CSS Size Twitter Thread
• In further unsurprising news, there is no such thing as an expired redirect. Remove the redirect and any value which passes through it goes back to the originating URL, or lost if it 404s, which is more likely. Which idiot SEOs recommend removing 301 redirects?
  • Expiring Redirects -John Mu
• John Mu reminded webmasters that Googlebot doesn’t pass a referer. Although it may do when fetching embedded (src) files like CSS, scripts etc. Have these webmasters never looked at a log file?
  • Googlebiot No Referer – John Mu

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We recently released the super-exciting The State of SEO in mid-2017. Read it now.

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• Google appears to be copying Facebook copying Snapchat.
• A link spammer disappeared off the web.
• CSS size doesn’t really matter.
• No such thing as an expired redirect.
• Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
• Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.

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