tools

Wikipedia Reliable Sources List

Is Your Site Reliable? Meet Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources List: Another Proxy For Google’s Quality Raters

From “Generally reliable” to “Blacklisted”, you can find scores and discussions for many sites whose reliability is frequently discussed by Wikipedia editors. And as a bonus, I’ll explain how to find when a site is used as a source across Wikipedia. Based on helping many companies over the years that have been impacted by major … Read more

How to find embedded YouTube videos that have been removed using Screaming Frog

How To Find Embedded YouTube Videos That Are Unavailable or Marked Private Using Screaming Frog

There’s nothing more frustrating than coming across articles containing YouTube videos that have been removed for some reason. It’s extremely frustrating for users and can easily elude site owners (especially on large-scale sites). And from an SEO perspective, addressing unavailable videos can avoid UX barriers and unhappy users. So join me as we go hunting … Read more

How to use data-nosnippet

How to use data-nosnippet to block specific content from being used in a Google search snippet [Experiment]

For whatever reason, I’ve seen an uptick in site owners reaching out to me recently about search snippets appearing that they aren’t happy about. For example, Google is selecting text for a search snippet that they simply don’t want to be displayed in the search results. The site owners reaching out didn’t know if they … Read more

Bing's Sitemap Index Coverage Reporting

How To Find Lower-Quality Content Being Excluded From Indexing Using Bing’s XML Sitemap Coverage Report (and Its “Content Quality” Flag)

Bing finally rolled out its XML Sitemap Coverage Report in Bing Webmaster Tools, which is a great addition for site owners. Using the report, you can check indexing levels based on the urls being submitted via XML sitemaps. This is similar to what Google offers in its Coverage reporting, but it’s great to have another … Read more

Syndicated Content SEO Case Study

Why Noindexing Syndicated Content Is The Way – Tracking 3K syndicated news articles to determine the impact on indexing, ranking, and traffic across Google surfaces [Case Study]

Last month John Shehata from NewzDash published a blog post documenting a study covering the impact of syndication on news publishers. For example, when a publisher syndicates articles to syndication partners, which site ranks and what does that look like across Google surfaces (Search, Google News, etc.) The results confirmed what many have seen in … Read more

Disavowing The Disavow Tool [Case Study] – How a site owner finally removed a disavow file with 15K+ domains, stopped continually disavowing links, and then surged back from the dead

There aren’t many topics in SEO as controversial as disavowing links. Ever since Google introduced the ability to disavow links, there has been a ton of confusion about how to use the disavow tool, what types of links should be disavowed, when to ignore the disavow tool altogether, and more. Then add third-party tools that … Read more

Unraveling SERP Features – How to track and analyze urls ranking within Top Stories, People Also Ask, Image Packs, Short Videos, Recipe Packs, and more using Semrush’s New SERP Features reporting

Google’s search engine result pages are filled with an amazing combination of features to present many different types of content. From images to video to news to recipes, there’s no shortage of interesting features at your fingertips. And for site owners and SEOs, we want to track all of them, and at a granular level. … Read more

How to compare hourly sessions in Google Analytics 4 to track the impact from major Google algorithm updates (like broad core updates)

I was just asked on Twitter if there was an easy way to compare Google organic traffic hourly like you can in Universal Analytics. That’s a great question, and that’s a super useful report to have as major algorithm updates roll out. You can typically start to see the separation over time as the update … Read more

Continuous Scroll And The GSC Void: Did The Launch Of Continuous Scroll In Google’s Desktop Search Results Impact Impressions And Clicks? [Study]

Google rolled out continuous scroll in the desktop search results for English queries in the United States on December 5, 2022. Continuous scroll enables users to seamlessly continue to page two and beyond without having to click a “next” button at the bottom of the results. This followed Google rolling out continuous scroll in the … Read more

How to analyze the impact of continuous scroll in Google’s desktop search results using Analytics Edge and the GSC API

Google rolled out continuous scroll in the desktop search results in the U.S. on December 5, 2022, which follows a rollout in the mobile search results in October of 2021. It’s basically like infinite scroll for the search results. When you approach the bottom of page one, the second page of results seamlessly load, enabling … Read more

Percent Human: A list of tools for detecting lower-quality AI content

Updated on 7/29/23: OpenAI shut down its AI content detection tool on July 24, 2023 based on low accuracy. The tool now 404s so I removed links to the tool from this post. Updated on 2/1/23: OpenAI’s AI content detection tool (AI Text Classifier) was added to the list. GPTZeroX was also included (an upgrade … Read more