Group items tagged

Don’t include a page in an XML sitemap and then set meta robots "noindex,follow."

Schema.org markup can be used on web pages written in any language. The site is currently available in English only, but we plan to translate to other languages soon. The markup, like HTML, is in English.

As a general rule, you should mark up only the content that is visible to people who visit the web page and not content in hidden div's or other hidden page elements.

You should not create blank or empty pages just to hold structured data; nor should you add structured data about information that is not visible to the user, even if the information is accurate.

JavaScript notation embedded in a <script> tag in the page head or body.

Work on JSON-LD coincided with the development of schema.org, a centralized collection of simple schemas for describing things that might exist on the web. schema.org was started by Google, Bing, and Yahoo with the express purpose of delivering better search results by agreeing to a common set of vocabularies. schema.org vocabularies, together with JSON-LD, are now used to drive features like Google’s Knowledge Graph

This featured snippet became very prominent in July, 2018, when PAA started appearing in more than 40 percent of SERPs. When I last checked, according to MOZ, related questions/PAA are now appearing in 79 percent of SERPs.

While Google has never explicitly said that structured data affects things like featured snippets, it has been heavily implied. With the recent addition of Question, HowTo and QAPage markups, combined with the recent expansion of PAA, the line can be drawn between question-based schema markups and PAA snippets.

Small changes make a big impact. Google’s first point is that often with large sites, making small changes can make a big impact and return when it comes to search rankings. Google plotted the growth of one of the 7,000 websites, the Google My Business marketing site, showing how adding canonicals, hreflang to their XML sitemaps, and improving their metadata all resulted in gains in their organic traffic in search.Here is that chart:

Here is the chart showing the improvement after making the AMP error fixes:

Consolidation. For the past several years, many SEOs have been saying “less is more.” Meaning, having fewer sites and fewer pages with higher quality content often leads to better SEO results. Google says that works for them and they have been working on consolidating their sites. Google said they found a “large number” of near duplicate sites across their properties.“Duplicate content is not only confusing for users, it’s also confusing for search engines,” Google said. Google added, “Creating one great site instead of multiple microsites is the best way to encourage organic growth over time.”In one case study Google provided with the Google Retail site, they took six old websites and consolidated the content. They made “one great website” and it lead to them doubling the site’s call-to-action click-through rate and increased organic traffic by 64%.