Lighthouse takes a much more practical approach and puts user experience front and center. It visits your site over a throttled 3G connection so it can emulate what a real visitor in the real world would experience

PageSpeed Insights is a fairly static tool that gives you a high-level overview of the performance of your site. Lighthouse, however, is more fine-grained and gives you immediate feedback based on real-world usage. You should definitely use it along with your other page speed test tools, like WebPageTest and GTmetrix

when you click a PASF topic that appears under a domain, 78.87 percent of the time that domain doesn’t rank anywhere in the top 20 of the new SERP. We take this to mean that either: Google knows better than to show you the same site you just left; or even though the site is topically-related, it’s not relevant enough for the new SERP.

how’s an SEO to take advantage of all this oddity? Well, if you’re struggling to rank higher, or rank at all, against your current query’s competitors, it may be worth investigating the SERPs of PASF topics as alternate avenues

Google wants clear signals that are consistent and straightforward. When you start to confuse Google by communicating that one URL is more important than the other, but another signal says the opposite or you use the noindex to hide pages that you think are less important but want to pass that weight to other pages - it can ultimately confuse Google and come back to bite you

We'll generally pick the rel=canonical and use that over the noindex

If your image has related text of the search query, it may appear in the featured snippet.

The featured snippet image can come from YouTube videos, too.

If your site is not mobile friendly, it will be hard for you to get a place in the featured snippet.

One way to combat duplicate meta descriptions is to implement a dynamic and programmatic way to create unique meta descriptions for automated pages. If possible, though, there's no substitute for an original description that you write for each page.

If a page is targeting between one and three heavily searched terms or phrases, write your own meta description that targets those users performing search queries including those terms.If the page is targeting long-tail traffic (three or more keywords), it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines populate a meta description themselves. The reason is simple: When search engines pull together a meta description, they always display the keywords and surrounding phrases that the user has searched for.

One caveat to intentionally omitting meta description tags:  Keep in mind that social sharing sites like Facebook commonly use a page's meta description tag as the description that appears when the page is shared on their sites. Without the meta description tag, social sharing sites may just use the first text they can find.

consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse. Page-specific data is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.

out of all the A/B tests I’ve run, I’ve never seen my traffic drop. I continually A/B test it and do so with all of my other businesses as well. I can tell you with 100% confidence that I have never seen a dip in rankings due to testing. If you are worried, you can always noindex the variation to prevent duplicate content.

Do not include your website name in all of your title tags as this makes them seem duplicate. Just include your website name in the title tags for your homepage, about page, contact page, and other generic pages.

Target question-based keywords. Check if there is a featured snippet on the SERP and what type it is (paragraph, list, table etc) using a tool like Ahrefs. Keep your paragraph and sentences fairly short. Answer the query as directly as possible. Structure your content with logical subheadings (H2, H3, H4 etc). Use tables to display any data. Include the question within the answer if possible. Include a summary at the start or end of the content.

In the SERPs, Google isn’t providing all of the steps from the How-to, but the SERP feature does take up significant real-estate (with visuals when they are provided).

but on Google Assistant smart displays, you can walk through all of the steps in the How-to without visiting the site in question

you can land both featured snippets and How-to snippets in the same SERP. That’s at least for now… And when you do, you can take over massive SERP coverage. You’ll have the initial featured snippet in position 0 and then a How-to snippet that can rank in the top 10.

if you are going to keep them on your pages, make sure they are implemented correctly. You do have to take the time to learn how to follow the specs carefully and get it right. Putting aside the prev/next tags for a moment, let’s think about how you should implement pagination otherwise on your page. Our first preference is to implement that pagination in clean HTML tags that are visible in the source code for the pages on your site

The second choice would be to implement it in a way that isn’t clinging to the source code, but you can actually see it in the DOM or the Document Object Model. That means that your links are going to be anchor tags with a valid href attribute, not span or button elements with attached JavaScript click events.

if you need to crawl millions of URLs using a desktop crawler, you really can. You don’t need to keep increasing RAM to do it either, switch to database storage instead.

f you’re auditing an HTTP to HTTPS migration which has HSTS enabled, you’ll want to check the underlying ‘real’ sitewide redirect status code in place (and find out whether it’s a 301 redirect). Therefore, you can choose to disable HSTS policy by unticking the ‘Respect HSTS Policy’

For macOS, to open additional instances of the SEO Spider open a Terminal and type the following: open -n /Applications/Screaming\ Frog\ SEO\ Spider.app/ You can now perform multiple crawls, or compare multiple crawls at the same time.

The survey of 500 consumers asked about sources used to find a local business phone number or address. Google My Business listings was the top answer, but websites came in at number two:

Dominant preference for calls vs. email, messaging. After identifying the target business, 60% of consumers said they overwhelmingly would prefer to contact that business over the phone compared to other methods:60% Call on phone.16% Send email.15% Visit the physical location.4% Message through online form.

Item Property – This comes from the Schema.org vocabulary and should always be in double straight quotation marks (it may sound pedantic here, but for real the curly and single quotation marks are different and will interfere with validation), and must belong to the properties allowed within the item type (as specified within Schema.org).

In many cases, canonical tags will work much like 301-redirects, and do seem to pass link-juice. I've even seen experiments where people used canonical tags to move an entire domain. I wouldn't recommend it (except in rare cases), but it seemed to work

You want to use paid social to target people like journalists, bloggers, other media figures, and influencers who when they see your content might see it as the kind of thing they want to share with their audiences, again increasing the opportunities for links.

Keep a constantly updated list of your evergreen content and share it different times and days on different networks to maximize the exposur

unless you are an authoritative website such as Wikipedia, your information probably won’t appear in the answer box.

having an image from your website in an image pack is not very beneficial.

Besides the common video thumbnail and video knowledge panel, videos may also appear in a carousel, both on the mobile and the desktop devices.

For publishers, this could of course mean a drop in organic traffic from Google if it is no longer showing your in-depth or evergreen content as often or as prominently as it once did for certain queries.For others, such as big brands like Amazon that attract press coverage, it could mean more traffic to their own properties and their social networks.And, depending on the coverage that ranked, it could help some in the brand reputation department.

What Google said. “When relevant, we do and will continue to surface high-quality evergreen content as part of the overall search results,

Businesses with photos on their listings receive 42 percent more requests for driving directions on Google Maps and 35 percent more click-throughs to their websites than businesses that without photos, according to Google

The photo should be in focus and well-lit, and have no alterations or excessive use of filters. The image should represent reality.

First step to getting your Google My Business listing up and running is to actually conduct a Google search to ensure your business doesn’t already have a GMB listing.

just because a site isn't doing well with one specific area - it doesn't mean that site cannot rank well in Google. In this case, speed is one of hundreds of factors Google uses