The SEO industry needs less gatekeepers and more pragmatists. The typical lifecycle of a "community" is that pragmatists often become gatekeepers, or incorrectly equivocate their experiences as superior to others'.

We can all be right. We can all be wrong.

1/N Web rings and blogrolls. Social bookmarking websites. Directory submissions. Article submission/content syndication websites. Authorship. Penguin. Panda. Hummingbird. Mobilegeddon. Interstitials. Locality. Query deserves freshness. PageSpeed. Https.

The opinions don't stop.

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Hello friends following me this Friday on "implicit vs explicit search intent."

When you've been around the SEO industry for a while you start hearing new terms emerge. Search intent, user intent, keyword intent. As usual, I'm going to start with a bit of history.

1/n Informational, navigation, and transactional queries - this categorization has been around since I've been doing SEO, and it takes an internet search to appreciate how old it is - 2002. You can still split up queries this way, but it's not great.

cis.upenn.edu/~nenkova/Cours…

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SEO pet peeve. Changing the url of your content over and over. /top-10-thang-predictions-thingingmabob-for-2021
/best-black-friday-deals-2019
/11/2020/same-words-as-your-post-title-2020-whoops
/common-mistakes-not-to-make-in-2019-says-url-but-title-says-2020

Happy Friday folx - we're ranting about pagination.

We're going to break down the problem pagination was supposed to fix, the problems it ended up creating, and why I want to kill it with fire. Something #passageindexing

What'd you expect? It's a rant.

https://twitter.com/victorpan/status/1318611254085373954?s=20

In the beginning of the internetz, websites were pretty simple.

webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-his…

And fun. And wacky. And evolving. More people started connecting to the internet, own websites, publish content, sell stuff online (who would trust that?!), and much more.

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Today we’re going to rant about “microsites,” a broad term used to describe creating a “new” website experiences. It will cover the why, some pros, some cons, and probably go off topic.

1/n Microsites are defined loosely.

This could be a microsite: nike-react.com
This used to be a microsite: hubspot.com/agencies
This used to be and is a microsite: web.archive.org/web/2015121215… (which at some point was spotifywrapped.com, now spotify.com/us/wrapped/)

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Happy Friday - let's rant about keyword density, LSI keywords, internal/external links per N words, and word count - vernacular you want to get out of your processes sooner rather than later.

1/n Keyword density, usually defined as a percentage of amount of times a keyword shows up divided by the total number of keywords on the page, is product of the keyword-stuffing years of SEO.

e.g. I heard SEO Expert Chad recommends pages should have a Keyword Density of 2% !

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The subdomains vs subfolders/subdirectories debate just won't die. Search engines have evolved their treatment of "what is a website" over time, and yet the debates cling to old case studies.

https://twitter.com/victorpan/status/1304181411629469696

Meme CC: @thetafferboy

1/N Before we start, let's revisit the parts of a URL:
mattcutts.com/blog/seo-gloss…

At some point of this rant, we're going to talk about ccTLD's, sub-subdomains, and subdomain plus subfolder combinations with ccTLD's because #teamsubfolders uses the same argument for everything.

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Happy Friday friends. Today we're going to rant about the trials and tribulations of data accuracy for digital marketers, why data-based goal setting is hard, and how you can't fix both of these things forever, using the fabled "Bounce Rate" as an example.

1/n A common mistake in digital marketing is not understanding, fundamentally, how website data or 3rd party competitor website data is being collected. How is SimilarWeb, SEMRush, and Ahrefs collecting data? How does GA, GSC, Bing, Pikwik, Adobe, HubSpot collect data?

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Today we're going to randomly rant about "brand" as a ranking signal. Why not.

We're going to break down what a brand is, why brands correlate to strong rankings, and how having a strong brand makes everything else in SEO easier...

After these meetings. Is being a brand a ranking signal? I personally don't think so. A brand is a term, logo, and/or concept tied to a person, place, or organization. Usually you need words to convey what a brand is.

Are words a ranking factor in SEO? Of course they are.

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Apple Search may take the following into account when ranking web search results: 1⃣Aggregated user engagement with search results
2⃣Relevancy and matching of search terms to webpage topics and content
3⃣Number and quality of links from other pages on the web
4⃣User location based signals (approximate data)
5⃣Webpage design characteristics

You know what gets on my nerves? Folks that want to redo-everything their way before they understand how an existing system works.

Traffic down? Redo your whole site.

1/n Website performance generally doesn’t get worse over time. People add or delete to websites. Websites can get compromised.

Getting a handle on people processes keeps a website from building tech debt. Ask good questions.

Watch out for the people who blame Google.

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It’s Friday and I’m OOO. Going to the beach really emptied my mind.

What was I angry and about to rant on?

Probably something about either direct traffic or faking signals.

Honestly I’m not even upset. It just is. Maybe we’ll just be chill this Friday. Inspired by @darth_na we’re going to talk about doing right with wrong, along with the messy middle.

I’m going to share what it was like Ranking #2 for Google AdWords, and how slowly that result fell to page 2.

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There's a lot of hype around GTP-3, some fear about more displaced jobs, so let's rant about automation.

xkcd.com/1205/

More often than not we assume automation is going to save us a lot of time. The reality is automations break. Is it worth the time? Yes.

1/n To build out automations or processes, you're required to break down a complex step into smaller steps. That's an analysis skill. Mindful repetition creates mastery. Being good at analyzing processes is great for solving problems. The world has plenty of problems.

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Right I was supposed to rant about multi-variate regressions... well let's see where this goes. Ultimately I think there was some value in doing it in the earlier days of search, and now that search has evolved folks are using regression models wrong.

1/n A multi-variate regression takes likely variables that influences an outcome, and tries to make projections. Zillow's Zestimates may not be a multi-variate regression model, but the factors they list would be good variables to predict house prices. zillow.com/zestimate/

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Covid has made SEO a business critical system for many businesses that have had to move their business online. Business critical systems will impact livelihoods.

Please don't forget that with this opportunity comes great responsibility. Give advice thoughtfully. Listen first. The world is filled with systems - for example, with nature you have the circle of life, with governments there are tax systems, and with the web the domain name system. Many systems were originally discrete, but converging as a trend. Covid is accelerating convergence.

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Ever feel a bit of impostor syndrome doing SEO? I do all the time.

Last week's private rant was about easy it is to "SEO" with known algorithm.

This week we're going to rant on how easy it is to feel impostor syndrome with an evolving algorithm, and why that's OK.

1/n Will X hurt SEO? Will X improve SEO?

"It depends" has become the filler word for SEO's to buy time as they gather their thoughts.

It's also a way of saying "I don't know without more information," or "I'd have to search what you're trying to ask me - because jargon."

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This Friday, I'm going to share WordPress Plugin Directory's ranking factors. The format's going to change.

Instructions: Follow me on Twitter, retweet and @ me in the replies. In return I'll share the algorithm and rant about it in a DM.

You have till Friday. Tic. Toc. Usually a $999 self-directed course but because I have a quirky sense of humor it's free for a limited time with a 30 day money-back guarantee.

Pricing hack: I upped the opportunity cost the way you'd up the value of cryptocurrency.

At some point... let's rant about titles for SEO's!

Says the guy who once said "sure you can culturally appropriate me and introduce me as an SEO samurai."

If titles don't matter to you then you've already made it as an SEO. SEO’s come from all wakes of life.

Sometimes you see SEO in a job tile, sometimes it is listed as a required skillset, and now increasingly you have SEO’s that don’t have SEO listed in their titles or skillsets. What’s the deal?

I have some thoughts and ramblings.

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So I've been getting really frustrated with teaching math/arithmetic to my children because it's all about the different ways you can get the same answer now.

But today I realized just what we're really training our kids to one day do... Humans: An anagram is when you switch letters around the same word like brainy and binary.

Maths: Let's assign each word/phrase a number. That number is the product of unique prime numbers assigned to each letter of the alphabet. If the numbers match, you have an anagram.

I've come across a lot of folks who wonder what is the deal with Chinese knock-offs of things. From my limited experience, let's just say it's a cultural thing that's systemic.

A mini-thread on why plagiarism is much greyer than black and white.

1/n There's a phrase in Mandarin - 抄功課 - copying someone else's homework. Much of the traditional way of teaching was that there's material that's presented by the teacher, then there's answers that have to be memorized. You don't ask "why." It just is.

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Hello friends, today we are just going to do something simple, we are just going to rant about image SEO. 1/n Let’s start with the basics that you can Google and skip some nuances:

Keywords in file name, dashes as separators, lowercase, keywords in alt the tags, lossless compression for your files, keywords around the image, blank alts for design images ( backgrounds, images).... 2/n