Uncommon SEO Knowledge #5 Hreflang (part 1)

Apparently there's a 25 tweet limit in threads and I have too much to say.

Google is getting rid of the reporting for this in Google Search Console and it has some interesting implications for SEOs who work internationally.🧵

https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1562369672430997504

There are a lot of SEOs who work on this. @rustybrick ran a poll a while back that got over 1600 responses. 55.6% of SEOs said they work with hreflang.

https://twitter.com/rustybrick/status/1290661133431508992

Uncommon SEO Knowledge #5 Hreflang (part 2)

Because I had too much to say, here's part 2 with even more hreflang goodness. Region codes don't work. Lots of people try to use say "eu" or "la" for all countries in Europe and Latin America. This is not a thing and it won't work.

Most SEOs consider GSC their source of truth. Do you trust the data to be accurate?

We ran a study and across 146,741 websites and nearly 9 billion total clicks. Almost half of the clicks go to terms they don't show you.

ahrefs.com/blog/gsc-hidde… As you can see, some sites have no terms with clicks associated and others have all of their data. Every site is different, and the amount of missing data varies across the dataset. Here's a few different ways we looked at it.

It’s my birthday, but I have a present for you. The latest study from @ahrefs is on link rot.

We sampled over 2 million domains and looked at the link profile since 2013. 74.5% of the links are lost with 66.5% of them being considered link rot. (Thread)
ahrefs.com/blog/link-rot-… The web is messy. Websites are in constant flux and often links and pages are lost.

The difference between lost and rotted comes down to some temporary issues where we don’t know yet if they’re truly gone, and some things that would keep the value of the links from passing.

I'm a technical SEO who wrote about creating content.

Why? Well, I create a lot of content and have created many content strategies and unique processes around this and had personal insights to share.

Enjoy this thread with highlights or read it all at ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-wr… Instead of starting with keyword research and what people search, I like to start by looking at the top pages of competitors. I aggregate these and sort them to show successful content in a niche.

The process is in the article if you’re interested. The output looks like this:

People usually come to me with weird issues they or their teams have trouble figuring out. While I try to help, a lot of the knowledge would probably be useful to others as well.

I'll try to be better at sharing, but for now here is a thread with some interesting issues. One interesting one was that http homepages were ranking instead of the https versions they were redirected to. This happened on a few different sites including ahrefs.com. It looked like Google's desktop crawler had simply picked the wrong canonical.

The @HTTPArchive Web Almanac is published. I'm honored to have been part of the SEO chapter this year. Check it out at almanac.httparchive.org/en/2021/seo

Wondering what this is? It's a giant study of a lot of different things about 8.2M homepages. Here's a thread with some of what we found But first, thanks to other authors @IanLurie & @TomekRudzki. Data from @jroakes & @rvtheverett. Reviewers @Jammer_Volts, @filiwiese & @TeitelmanRob. And all the folks from the archive @tunetheweb, @theobto, & @rick_viscomi. Getting this together is a lot of work!

Uncommon SEO Knowledge #4 Search Volume

What sources of data are there and who do you trust? Inspired by @timsoulo's latest article on @ahrefs blog. ahrefs.com/blog/gsc-gkp-s… The most common volume you'll find comes from Google Ads via their Keyword Planner. This data is meant for ads though and not really organic search. It has some weaknesses you should know.

There are certain restricted categories and terms where you'll get no data.

Uncommon SEO Knowledge #3 Paginated Series

This is a hot topic with a differing opinions on what's best for SEO. There are technicalities, mixed messages from search reps that create unknowns, and some additional nuance.

Sounds like fun, so let's dig in! This isn't a new topic for me. I've written about it on the @ahrefs blog ahrefs.com/blog/rel-prev-… but sometimes when targeting a post to help the majority of people, it's hard to include certain nuances that may impact the decisions that they make.

It didn't take long for someone to take me up on my offer at the end of this post to send me an example. I looked into it. Short thread. ahrefs.com/blog/subdomain… If I look at blog. vs /blog alone then yes, traffic increased for the site. It's great case study material right? Subdirectories > subdomains! /s Let's look a little closer.

Uncommon SEO Knowledge #2 Titles and Meta Descriptions + Snippets

Let's see if I can cover something most SEOs don't know about the tags they're most familiar with. (thread) 1. I added snippets because meta descriptions are not always used in search results. According to an @ahrefs study ahrefs.com/blog/meta-desc…:

25.02% of top-ranking pages don’t have a meta description

and

Google uses different text than the meta description 62.78% of the time

Uncommon SEO Knowledge #1 HTTPS

I think most people know HTTPS is a very lightweight ranking signal for Google. Here's what you might not know about HTTPS and things that may be useful to know as an SEO. 1. The certificates required for HTTPS are commonly called "SSL certificates" but the last release of SSL was version 3.0 in 1996. These are more often referred to as "SSL/TSL certificates" or "TLS certificates". Even early versions of TLS, 1.0 and 1.1, were deprecated in 2020.

Thread Warning (1): Here's how the AMA with @methode changed my understanding of search. I'm always happy to learn things and now I have more questions. There's more on Reddit than I will cover, these are just my thoughts before and after. reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comm… (2) On hreflang before I was mixed. John said it didn't impact rankings but it sure felt like it did. Gary made some comments in a video before where it sounded like they shared signals in the cluster.