One of the main benefits of combining programming and SEO skills is that you can find clever solutions that would be difficult to see if you only know SEO or programming separately.For instance, tracking the indexing of your most important pages is a crucial SEO task.If they are not being indexed, you need to know the reason and take action. The best part is that we can learn all this for free directly from Google Search Console.In the screenshot above, the XML sitemaps are grouped by page type, but the four sitemaps listed here are specifically used to track the progress of some SEO A/B tests we ran for this client.In the Index Coverage reports, we can check each sitemap, learn which specific pages are not indexed, why they are not indexed, and get a sense of how to fix them (if they can be fixed).The remainder of this post will cover how to reorganize your XML sitemaps using any criteria that can help you isolate indexing problems on pages you care about.Table of … [Read more...] about Reorganizing XML Sitemaps with Python for Fun & Profit
Where is xml sitemap in yoast
The Best XML Sitemap Tools, Tips, and Tricks
In my first weeks at Atlassian, I was seeking for a quick-win to get a stronger foothold within the company and evangelize SEO. So, I audited our main site and noticed it didn’t have an XML sitemap. What an easy win! I went to the devs and asked them to activate it in the CMS. To my surprise, they told me that it wasn’t possible; I was baffled. After some thinking, I remembered that Screaming Frog had an XML sitemap function, so I scraped the site and uploaded the crawl as an XML sitemap. Google ate it within a few seconds, and we saw a noticeable impact on our traffic in the following days. The moral of the story is that XML sitemaps are important and sometimes underrated. What XML Sitemaps Are and Why You Need to Have One XML sitemaps are digital maps that help Google discover important pages on your site and how often they are being updated. Google states on its help center page: A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site, and also … [Read more...] about The Best XML Sitemap Tools, Tips, and Tricks
The Yoast Plugin To Blame For Google Large Scale Ranking Drop? Probably Not.
Remember the Google update I reported in early March? One thing I left out of that story, intentionally, was some chatter that the those noticing a ranking decline around then may have had a bug with the popular Yoast plugin. I left it out because after reviewing the Black Hat World thread in detail, it appeared the general consensus from that community that the bug with the Yoast plugin was NOT related to this Google update because (a) many who were hit didn't have the Yoast plugin and (b) those that did have the plugin didn't strongly believe it was related. There were some that felt their hit was solely related to the plugin but based on A and B, I really felt it was unrelated.What was the bug? Well, Joost de Valk documented it on May 30th. From what I understand, the bug in the plugin did not automatically forward attachments to their original source, which may result in confusing Google but at the same time, from how I understand Google works, Google wouldn't just drop tons of … [Read more...] about The Yoast Plugin To Blame For Google Large Scale Ranking Drop? Probably Not.
Ask Yoast: Creating landing pages for affiliate marketing • Yoast
Affiliate marketing is a means to monetize your blog or website. You can recommend products on your site with a trackable link from your affiliate partner, or put that link in an ad. If someone clicks on the link and buys a product through your blog, you’ll get a commission. Especially if your site has many visitors and high credibility, you’ll have a good chance that your audience is willing to follow your recommendations. Still, it’s definitely a good idea to give some thought to how you implement affiliate marketing on your site. For instance, do you write blog posts to promote affiliate products, or create seperate pages? And if you choose the latter option, what’s the best way to do that? Let’s discuss in today’s Ask Yoast! Davide Roccato emailed his question on the subject: I want to create a number of landing pages on my news blog, targeted for affiliate marketing. What’s the best way to do this from an SEO point of view? Should I create … [Read more...] about Ask Yoast: Creating landing pages for affiliate marketing • Yoast
Google: Sitemap Files Don’t Need To Be Indexed To Work
This is a bit heartwarming - to see John Mueller back up Joost de Valk and Yoost when someone incorrectly claimed their was a bug with the Yoast SEO plugin causing major Google issues. John from Google came in and backed up Joost, confirming Joost and telling the plugin creator his plugin is not needed.John explained that XML sitemaps do not need to be indexed to work. Noindexing a Sitemap file is irrelevant because they are not really web pages. Here is Joost's post: The plugin wrote "Our latest release fixes Yoast SEO which has been tied to site visibility being affected in Google rankings." But there was no specific issue that needed fixing here.John confirmed it by saying: The plugin creator then closed the plugin, as the plugin now says "This plugin was closed on January 28, 2019 and is no longer available for download."Forum discussion at Twitter. … [Read more...] about Google: Sitemap Files Don’t Need To Be Indexed To Work