Jono Alderson
@jonoalderson
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Independent technical SEO consultant. I help brands to compete on technical SEO, performance, and structured data.
York, England
Joined May 2008
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So tired of "is x a ranking factor?". It's been such a long time since SEO was even remotely tactical. Folks need to stop looking for magic bullets & just need to get on with improving their stuff. Provide a better answer to your audience's queries. That's the only ranking factor
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Excited (though a little sad) to announce that I'm leaving
@Yoast
!
As of August, I'll be available as an independent consultant. I'll be specialising in top tier technical SEO, performance optimization and structured data projects.
Looking forward to working with you! 😉
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Sunsetting UA from next year? This will not go well. GA4 isn't ready, users aren't ready, the ecosystem isn't ready.
There's been no incentive for users/developers to change to a more complex, half-finished product. Trying to force it will make a mess...
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Businesses should stop asking "How did you hear about us?", and start asking "What made you choose us?".
End of funnel acquisition channels don't drive preference and decision making. They shouldn't drive focus and strategy.
Dig deeper, and find out what resonates, what matters
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I'm so incredibly proud of the work we've done here. Schema markup is *solved* for everyone.
If you want to dive into the super-nerdy details, there's some great reading here:
#schema
#seo
#wordpress
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Please don't do this. Build a brand. Solve user problems. Craft an awesome website on a rock-solid platform. Differentiate. Spend all of your precious, finite energy on improving product/market fit and creating/fulfilling demand. Don't worry about any of this kind of nonsense.
Ensure you have foundational links (directories, brand profiles, social profiles)
Build 5-10 Blogger Outreach placements per month to pages you'd expect to get links on your site (homepage, blog posts)
Add a handful of niche edits if you have extra budget
Ensure your onsite is
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Google seems increasingly broken, and their strategy for dealing with this seems to be solely to rely on
@lilyraynyc
pointing
@SearchLiason
at specific examples, who then "passes them on".
How many scenarios aren't we seeing? The damage caused by only reacting to this scares me.
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Cannot retweet enough. Any to-do list that I can give you, your competitors can do, too. There's no strategic advantage is coming back from conferences with brainless, undifferentiated task lists. Stop asking for "actionable takeaways", and start asking for "radical perspectives"
Some of the best conference talks I have ever attended didn’t have even one “actionable” “takeaway”, unless you count shifting my perspective or understanding of a problem/challenge/worldview “actionable.”
IMO, not all technical talks/content require “actionable takeaways”
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SEO folks getting excited about using ChatGPT to generate content pages cheaply / at scale are missing the point.
The bigger paradigm shift here is that content no longer needs to be written/published *in advance*. We're becoming unshackled from having to predict content demand.
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SEO is never enough. You have to have the product, brand, proposition, story, price, niche - *something* - which Amazon, Google and your competitors don't. SEO is how you amplify that *thing* to an audience. You'll achieve nothing if you're not unique or doing something uniquely.
Lot's of people in forums like "I have better product descriptions and H1s. why aren't I out-ranking amazon" It doesn't work that way. it doesn't work that way at all.
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SEO
What’s the best term for the phenomenon by which people create additional complexity in order to preserve their role & importance?
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Exciting news - I'm joining Yoast!
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SEOs, please...
Stop writing articles. Stop building links. Stop emailing journalists. Just for a hot minute.
Use that time to fix your platform, your products, your pricing, your photography. Zoom out, and fix your marketing, your messaging, your mission.
Fix your myopia.
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Stop saying that data is the new oil. Data is not oil. It doesn't work like oil. It doesn't trade like oil. It doesn't store like oil. More data is not better data.
We should not be training companies to think about data like they think about oil.
Stop it.
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Welp, the SEO industry abused FAQPage schema to the point that it got taken away. Surprise surprise.
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I'm delighted and honoured to share that I've been elected as a member of the AMP Advisory Committee.
I'll be spending the coming year helping an incredible team to steer and shape AMP's strategic priorities.
Here's to better, faster, web standards!
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Wow. Cloudflare just solved privacy, consent, storage, GDPR, CCPA, etc.
This has been *such* a difficult problem for so long; how does an average business solve for data locality but also scale?
Just run your app on the edge, and handle data 'locally'.
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#BrightonSEO
teaching a wave of SEOs to fear and/or hate JavaScript makes me sad. Such a shallow, narrow understanding of the present and future of the web, being peddled by old timer SEOs. JS is the future. Understand, learn and embrace it.
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Every time an SEO asks a Google employee a question about how some particular part of their system works, a kitten dies.
SEO isn't about building a folio of anecdotes about how specific elements/scenarios behave. If you're trying to "learn the algorithm", you're doing it wrong.
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If this concerns or worries you in any way, you've been Doing It Wrong. If you've been solving the problems of your audience, building a loved and respected brand, and maintaining a technically perfect platform, then you can just ignore this update and keep up the good work.
Later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the May 2020 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this blog post for more about that:
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It's a mistake to think that Core Web Vitals measure performance. They don't.
They measure technical debt.
They measure user-centricity.
They measure strategy.
They measure quality.
They measure if your brand deserves to be featured in a consideration set.
Be more concerned.
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New section on about using canonical URLs for syndicated content (typically in the context of news articles).
Paraphrasing, "don't use cross-site canonicals for syndication; noindex it instead".
That seems like a step backwards. Not gonna work for many.
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Congratulation to everybody at
#SMXL19
who survived my talk on site speed yesterday! If you'd like to go through the slides a bit more slowly, here's a link to the deck...
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ICYMI, Cloudflare's new automatic SXG feature makes your pages eligible for caching & prefetching in/from Google's SERPs (like AMP results).
You should literally drop everything you're doing and check this out.
And no, this doesn't mean AMP is dead 😂😂
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Super proud of Yoast's new Crawl Optimization settings, which we just moved to the free version of the plugin.
This will save so many trees. 🌳🌲
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This is the future of web development, today. Async modifications on the edge. Mind-blowing.
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So many websites are garbage because devs preference their needs over those of end users (audiences, marketing teams, writers, etc).
Imagine if builders constructed houses in a way which benefitted only them, at the expense of future residents.
Many websites are uninhabitable.
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This guide to site speed and performance by
@DeepCrawl
is pretty epic. Everything you need to get started in one place!
Shame the PDF is 14mb :p
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I'm absolutely blown away by many of the reactions to the Google leak. It's proving incredibly useful as a way of identifying people I wouldn't ever trust with an SEO strategy or budget.
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"Does anyone actually care about responsive images", asks
@photomatt
. Yes. Uses on mobile. Users on data connections. Search engines. Users on large screens. Users who don't want to download 10mb of images. Embarrassing for 5.0 to have shipped with broken image support.
#wcus
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VERY excited to share that WordPress now has an official 'Performance Lab' plugin. Get early access to (and beta test!) all the new and cutting edge features that the performance team are working on.
VERY cool stuff.
Great work to
@felixarntz
and co!
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Well folks, there we have it. We have an official WordPress Performance team.
Can't wait to do some heavy lifting!
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I wrote a blog post! Here's everything you ever wanted to know about how messy and inconsistent og:image tags are...
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Honoured (and baffled) to have won the "Digital superstar" award for the inaugural
#inorbit24
awards. Humbled, blessed, confused, delighted.
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You know you're a technical SEO when... You can no longer write the name 'Jason' without having to go back and add the 'a' every single time.
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Clicks were never your objective. Visits were never your objective. Convincing a consumer that you're a good fit was your objective. You can do that on a web page. You can do that in a rich snippet. You can do that in image. You can do that in environments other than a Goog SERP.
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Let's make WordPress faster!
Here are some thoughts on better approach for how themes and plugins should author, manage and enqueue CSS.
I'm SUPER excited to trial-run this on the Yoast sites!
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It's time for the industry to stop talking about "ranking factors".
It encourages the wrong kind of thinking about how Google etc work.
It focuses us on isolated tactics, rather than holistic strategy.
It confuses cause with correlation, and with effect.
It's time to move on.
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redirects to
The thing loads 21mb of JavaScript over 190+ requests, and that's before I even accept cookies/consent.
Delightfully, the Facebook logo loads initially, then gets replaced with the Meta logo via JavaScript.
Messy.
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This has been said by many, but I'll happily echo it. Google's title tags update is nonsense.
Look how it changes the tense (and the case) from 'Create' to 'created' here.
That undoubtedly makes that snippet confusing; it changes my expectations of the page.
le sigh.
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Lol at RankMath's marketing still calling Yoast bloated.
I could talk for HOURS about how stupid and pointless all of this output is. How it does nothing, how it costs carbon, how it's not supported by consumers, how it costs editors cognitive load, etc.
What a garbage product.
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Exciting times!
@jdevalk
is taking a step back from the day-to-day, and I'm taking on more responsibility for the 'SEO stuff' at Yoast.
Some thoughts here:
The end of this month sees a change for Yoast. Our CPO
@jdevalk
will be transitioning into an advisory role here at
#Yoast
. Also, our own
@jonoalderson
will become Head of SEO. Want to know more?
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Hey, Twitter! I'm planning a new content series for
@yoast
where I audit everyday websites for technical, strategic and content issues. I'll explore, discover opportunities, and document my process and findings! Do you have a popular website you'd like to see me start with?
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This is a great article by
@LoukilAymen
on doing some clever custom auditing with Lighthouse. Very cool!
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Thrilled to announce that I have joined
@distilled
. All the juicy details here: . Let's grab a drink and celebrate!
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Stop talking about "ranking factors".
Stop asking questions about what may, or may not, be a "ranking factor".
These words don't mean what you think they mean.
Our friends at Google don't use these words the way that you do.
Everything, and nothing, is a 'ranking factor'.
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Ooh, Adobe are buying Magento. That'll kill it off nicely.
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Great SEO agency:
Realise that all of your competitors have access to the same keyword data, make the same decisions, and produce the same garbage category pages. Stop churning out content that adds no value to the corpus; invest in creating real value and solving user problems.
Bad SEO Agency:
Our client sells lamps, so let's target the keyword "lamps" — it has 48,000 searches per month, so ranking for that keyword will drive a ton of sales.
Good SEO Agency:
Our client sells lamps, but we're not going to be able to rank them for the keyword "lamps" —
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The last thing SEOs need is to become poor/pretend data scientists. Python has been sold to us as sexy magic which will solve all of our problems. The secret is, it doesn't matter how cleverly you slice the data if you don't understand how websites work, and how businesses work.
Wishful thinking.
I’d love that SEOs put the same effort they’re putting into learning python, JS and any other new shining tech, into learning marketing and business.
The risk of having wonderful nerds with knowledge about the real marketing value of SEO in ramping.
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I see a lot of posts and interviews about "How to do SEO in 2018".
I thought I'd take a stab at an answer, but go a bit further, and solve for 2019 and the longer-term future, too.
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I've been at inbox zero for as long as I can remember. Baffles me how people have 30k unread emails 😂
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If I see another conference deck where an SEO is talking about schema, but hasn't understood any of the core principles about how graphs and cross-referencing entities work, I may implode. So much bad advice. So many errors. So much noise. Schema SEOs are worse than link builders
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Google is not our enemy. SEO testing is (mostly) cargo cult nonsense. Link building is the same thing as link buying. Technical SEO is a 100% solved problem. There's no such thing as 'digital PR'. AMP is the best thing to happen to web standards, ever. WordPress is the only CMS.
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This is how you schema.
(Thanks to
@TonyMcCreath
for the
@ClassySchema
update that now coalesces JSON-LD and microdata with shared IDs).
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That has huge implications. People with questions won't need to seek out already-published content for it; they'll get answers on demand.
For SEO, that means we need to focus more on:
- Original, opinionated thought
- Making the destination more appealing
- Influencing training
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I wrote a thing about agencies, and about impossible compromises.
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Gratuitous, tedious, contextless GSC screenshot to prove how good of an SEO I am.
I've cheated a little, and actually included the scale in this one. What a rebel.
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Oooh, Google's docs *finally* acknowledging/suggesting that you can "co-type" schema. That's progress!
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"My rankings dropped, but I haven't done anything!"
Quite.
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I love schema markup, but my human users don't need to waste bytes and energy downloading it.
I already have a
@cloudflare
worker running on all 'pages' on
@daysoftheyear
, so I can remove it (and some other bits that humans don't need) whenever the 'visitor' isn't a known bot.
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I often cringe at SEO advice to noindex non-performing pages / pages without many views. It feels like that should usually be a last resort. Maybe some of those pages get few views because they're a bit rubbish. Maybe they *could* perform, if they were less rubbish / improved.
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There's no such thing as "digital PR". There's PR, and there's link building.
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Excellent deck from
@dawnieando
. If you're still talking about rankings, links and content strategy, you're going to get left in the dust. The game has changed.
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Absolutely honoured and delighted to have been responsible for shipping the Structured Data chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac.
Looking forward to seeing the rest of the chapters land in the coming days and weeks!
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What if we stopped talking about crawl budget, and started to talk about carbon budget?
Each one of your requests/responses uses server resources (often over multiple layers/systems/locations), and costs both the requestee & requester electricity+carbon.
Make each request count
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@kristaseiden
Absolutely non-designed garbage. Fundamentally unfit for purpose, for either "normal" or power users. Completely fails to anticipate or support the most simple of use cases. Even when working externally in BQ/Looker it's still prohibitively limited and inoperable. Burn it down.
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Google are late to the CDN game, but, here they come...
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I've said this a bunch; AMP is where all (of Google's) bleeding edge innovation on the web will now happen. AMP is where tomorrow's challenges are discovered, explored, solved, and open source'd. Even if you don't like / approve of AMP, you can't afford to ignore it.
Even if you’re not interested in
@AMPhtml
, the link in this document ⤵️ by
@kenjibaheux
are well worth exploring. It’s mostly standards that were at least partly inspired by AMP. 👍
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If your site is slow, your business sucks. 100% correlation.
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Sheesh.
@bookingcom
launched their new business account portal recently. Here's what happens when now when I try and visit .
362 requests from 20+ hosts. 27.2mb. 14 secs. 8 distinct pages/URLs/steps.
This is everything that's wrong with React & JS dev.
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Can't help but wonder if everything that
@verge
publishes is misrepresentative, click bait garbage. Maybe, ironically, that's their SEO strategy? Either way, I'll be avoiding reading anything they publish in the future.
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Bye bye, technical SEO. Bye bye, competing on platform. Bye bye, crappy websites.
Hello, open, performant web.
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Whilst it's purely a technical distinction, developers who refer to websites as 'apps' have a 100% overlap with developers who build unindexable, slow, inaccessible, un-optimized JavaScript messes.
Maybe we should enforce the word 'website' to enforce an awareness of context.
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*deep breath*
I HAVE JUST FINISHED MY
#MozCon
DECK.
See you all in Seattle. It's gonna be emotional.
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SEO is building a brand that solves Google's audience's problems, manages the experience of searchers in your space, and facilitates systems (like, but also beyond, Google) discovering and ingesting your content. Links are a side-effect of getting that right.
SEO is content and links.
The quicker you realise that the sooner you can ignore 80% of the industry's bullshit.
The 20% that's worth listening to will be stuff you have to pay for.
My genuine advice?
Test everything and invest in a mentor.
Quickest way to learn.
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If you're a business of any scale, and your website isn't yet on HTTPS, then your business is dead. 100% dead. Completely dead. Bankrupt. Insolvent. It's too late. And it's not even necessarily that you didn't adopt HTTPS; it's that you're the kind of org who's *that* decrepit.
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Hey Twitter, can you help me out? I'm chatting with a chap from a disadvantaged background, who's looking for opportunities in the digital marketing space. He's a good writer, with some basic SEO knowledge. Is anyone in a position to consider giving him some (even trial?) work?
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It turns out that some of the best digital marketers and SEOs in the world are gamer geeks.
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Any SEO folks want to beta test an AWESOME upcoming Yoast SEO content analysis feature? DM me!
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Thank you so much to
@LocalMirador
for sponsoring the bar at our silly little viking-themed SEO meetup. What an absolute delight to have all of these wonderful people together. ❤️
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This week I rebuilt , line by line, from scratch, in WP, using AMP. 20 hours, ish. Including markup, the likes of which you have never seen. Only ~95 on Lighthouse scores temporarily; waiting on AMP plugin feature updates (local js).
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Oh, the irony of the number of thin, repetitive, amateur, and unoriginal takes on the "helpful content update". This tweet included, I know.
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There are about 100 people on the flight, and about 500 of them are WordPress nerds heading to Turin. This is delightful.
Hey friends!
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Subfolders > subdomains.
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