I used to get requests from clients to redirect all non-existent/broken pages to the home page. This was especially common for redesigns of websites where garbage pages created by other agencies were unwanted. The rationale is that if someone comes across one of these abandoned pages via search results, the home page would be a better welcome/entrance than a 404 page.
Using 301 redirects, you can easily send visitors from the old domain/page to your new domain and appropriate pages. MOZ estimates that some 90 to 99% of link power is transferred from these redirects. The whole process should be a gradual transition. A simple banner message for a few months explaining the transition will help eliminate confusion to visitors.
Lazy loading is one way to speed up loading by only rendering assets within view. There are several plugins available for free on WordPress to accomplish this. It’s not just images that can be targeted. Other assets such as iframes can be delayed in rendering which could have quite an impact if you have many youtube embeds. It’s also not uncommon to see premium themes these days incorporate lazy loading directly.
The crew at Yoast really don’t want you to use stop words in your URLs. Stop words, like “the”, offer no benefit and are unnecessary. If you look at some of the posts on this blog, they differ in length and do contain various stop words. While I agree, that they aren’t going to help increase your rankings for a particular keyword, I don’t believe that they can have a negative impact all that much.
I would hope the very first thing that a web design company would do after finishing a site for a client is to run a speed test. It’s one thing to have an amazing looking site. It’s quite another to have that website load quickly and without any hiccups. As a designer, there has to be a balance between aesthetics, speed, and the needs of your client. Having a widget that affects loading time, for instance, should be taken into consideration. Is it necessary? Will it have value to your visitors?
I really don’t understand the obsession with discrediting links with nofollow. I don’t think I’ve ever placed a nofollow link on this site and any of its blog posts. Perhaps, it’s ignorant on my part. However, I take the definition of nofollow at face value. It tells Google and other search engines that you don’t vouch for that link. So what is the point really?
AMP has certainly gained in popularity over the last couple of years. It used to be something you’d see mostly on news posts. Now a lot of prominent websites have an AMP version of their web pages for every standard page. Google’s goal with AMP is to have those pages served as quickly as possible. The strict guidelines for pages to be accepted can cause headaches for developers. However, if done properly it can lead to an indirect benefit when it comes to SEO.
Google PageSpeed still provides very valuable data when it comes to optimization. However, as I’ve learned, it might not suit your visitors best to make sacrifices in order to achieve the best score. Render-blocking scripts and CSS minification might be better left alone. For me, FOUT (flash of unstyled text) and FOUC (flash of unstyled content) should absolutely be avoided. I’d rather have a few marks deducted on a score than compromise user experience. Google font swapping and content moving around during page load is both unsightly and distracting. In most cases, you may shave a little bit of time off but is it really worth it?
As an avid user of yoast on all of the WordPress sites I’ve built, I’ve been pretty impressed with just how efficient and organized the plugin is. When I read the news about this bug, it was shocking on a few different levels. For one, the Yoast team has always been thorough with the features they offer and introduce. Having an option inadvertently reset to a potentially harmful setting just didn’t seem possible. Alas, accidents happen.
While I’m not a fan of voice assistants, I can’t deny their ever-growing popularity. It makes sense for Google to intertwine their assistant with search features. What’s more, is that I can see the value of a person in their kitchen searching for recipes and having the ingredients and/or steps read back to them. Since schema makes that possible, not only do you get the visual benefit in the search results but now also the advantage of being communicated verbally to searchers.
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