In this fourth episode of SEO Mythbusting, Martin Splitt (WebMaster Trends Analyst, Google) and his guest Ada Rose Cannon (Web Developer Advocate, Samsung) discuss the issues of web performance and usability, such as:
The mobile web & the web on low-end devices (1:21)
Performance metrics as a ranking factor for search results (2:17)
How does Google communicate up-to-date SEO metrics to SEOs/SEO companies/web developers? (3:31)
JavaScript sites – ranking, indexing, and performance (5:09)
Is it more SEO-friendly to rely on modern, semantic HTML and CSS rather than JavaScript? (7:20)
Documentation mentioned in this episode:
The new mobile reality – Alex Russell → https://goo.gle/2WFveCB
Using page speed in mobile search ranking → https://goo.gle/2RdLBAE
UX improvements with page speed in mobile search → https://goo.gle/2KFw3nM
User-centric Performance metrics → https://goo.gle/user-perf-metrics
Making Modern Web Content Discoverable for Search (Chrome Dev Summit 2018) → https://goo.gle/2WvzZKg
Implement dynamic rendering → https://goo.gle/dynamic-rendering
Next week, look forward to the fifth episode – Web Frameworks: SEO Mythbusting.
Watch more SEO Mythbusting episodes → https://goo.gle/SEO-Mythbusting
Subscribe to Google Search Central → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral
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The myth: React based websites are bad for SEO and are not recommended.
False. There may be some React web apps that are not good for SEO
since they are not designed for it. SEO Tools could be reporting
incorrectly. Check out gatsbyjs a popular Web framework Myth: HTML and CSS features are better than JS. True.
HTML and CSS will fail gracefully on older browsers. Google is the
only company that will hire people with cool hair like Martin Splitt.
False. Ada Rose Cannon (Web Developer Advocate, Samsung) also has cool
hair. Myth: JS is the devil and will break your website! False.
Javascript can bring your web pages to life, is quite robust, and can
enhance a web page, if done correctly.
Thank you so much Ada for raising the point about making the access to the web more fair.
Interesting video. Part of my discussion in the office today was a type of chicken before the egg situation. Should companies use the most innovative technology to give the best experience and hope that Google catches up, or should they use older technology and try to leverage that for as long as possible.
The sentiment here seems to be that HTML and CSS are still the best, and other innovations are going to be hard for Google to keep up with.
I think that the recent change to update Chromium on Googlebot is a great step forward. I'm particularly interested in page rendering and micro-optimisations. I've too came to the conclusion that Javascript is something that should be used responsibly where it is currently used generously.
4:29 – "What we do want is to open this black box of SEO for everyone…" As someone who has been frustrated at that black box, I applaud this sentiment. And Martin does seem genuine about that desire. I look forward to looking more clearly inside. Thanks!
Here’s an SEO myth we’ve been scratching our heads over… As a web design agency, we add a “Site by…” link to the footer of some of the new websites we build. We’ve recently been told that it could lead to penalties, though in my 15+ years of experience, this is quite normal. Any comments on this? Much appreciated!
Did anyone notice that Mi Band 3?
Why is it Google will do an algo update and your site can lose hundreds of visitors per day, but they can't tell you what your site specifically is doing wrong, but they can send me messages in Search Console to tell me my text elements are too close together when they're not.
Way better questions way better answers in this episode
Don't have a clue what myth they are busting
She was spot on right at the end with the "Wealthy West" Comment. Kudos for saying that.
These are great, but I felt like this one really didn't cover the topic too much. I'd like to see another 10 minutes on performance.
PS': Does anyone else notice that everyone on this show has similar hair dye? I wonder if they is a prereq for getting on the show?
Please invite…
Rand Fishkin
Dharmesh Shah
Brian Dean
Aleyda Solis
Matt Cutts
etc.
It should be fun 🙂
React wont work yet in Google, there is a lot of mis info out there too re JS driven apps as websites, loving this more please!
This is excellent, I have great reports/case studies of this. Moving to a simpler mobile first UI, a proper CDN based web host. Using CDN fed images. But more importantly design for a phone first. Load times of 2 seconds now are slow. One thing I see as a huge issue, is the mis info out there re hosting. Poor hosting is the main issue, lack of PHP etc. Google need to tell more folks about AMP too!
Awesome keep them coming please!
good job sir