Digital Things of Interest Overview:
Read these Digital Things of Interest for 05 August 2017, which includes:
- Yet another note for devs about Googlebot and JavaScript;
- The EU is on the hunt for a company to monitor Google;
- 20 years since the USC ruled on the CDA and gave us a (relatively) open internet;
- A silly post about social media posting frequency.
#SEO #JavaScript #Google #SocialMedia #ContentStrategy
Digital Things of Interest 05 August 2017:
- JavaScript & A Good Bot Experience
- Oh come on. You would think that by now, even the most recalcitrant developer would have a clue that Google and other bots still struggle with JavaScript. Yes they can read it most of the time, but usually any error will be fatal, meaning your page won’t be crawled, won’t be indexed, and won’t surface in the search results. It’s really not rocket science building web apps which are accessible to bots. Mind you, I did see a tweet the other day claiming that someone was advising that devs should run a site’s SEO. Nope, not a chance.
- EU Wants Company to Monitor Google Algo
- Hot on the heels of their EU Google Fine, the EU now wants a firm to monitor the Google algorithm and search results for compliance. Apparently the gig pays in the region of 10 million Euros – nice work if you can get it. I doubt the EU will do this, but really they just need a scraper to scrape Google results and churn through the output to highlight if Google is being naughty, or not.
- 7 Words Which Gave Us an Open Internet
- Even though the US court system works in very odd ways sometimes, there are moments where it gets it completely right. (Let’s hope it can strike down attacks on Net Neutrality). This decision to break the internet free from parts of the US Communications Decency Act in 1997 enabled those 7 “indecent” words to be used on the internet, or at least freed the ISPs from being liable for that speech. This gave ISPs common carrier status which gave us YouTube, fake news and funny cats… Actually, I’m not sure it was such a good idea.
- How often should you post on Social Media?
- I really struggle with a lot of the quackery and poverty of advice given out on the web. This is one of those times. As a very general guide it’s as useful as saying “you should post content on social media“. It unfortunately misses out on understanding content, content types, frequency, cadence and all the other variables which you will only discover by testing and analysing the results. You can start with a strategy, or a plan like this, but it needs to evolve as you post.
That’s it for today. If you find anything of interest in the digital space that you think is worth sharing, please get in touch with me.
The State of SEO Mid-2017 Released
TL;DR
- Googlebot eats JavaScript carefully.
- EU wants to monitor the Google algo.
- Thanks to these 7 words, we have an open internet.
- A slightly silly post about social media.
- 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 digital things of interest might mean for your web property, or you have found something of interest and would like to share it, please feel free to contact me.
