SEO 2020

[foxdavidj]

Part II Chapter 7: SEO

Content team

Authors	Reviewers	Analysts	Draft	Queries	Results
@aleyda @ipullrank @fellowhuman1101	@clarkeclark @natedame @catalinred @aysunakarsu @ashleyish @dsottimano @dwsmart @en3r0 @Gathea @rachellcostello @ibnesayeed	@max-ostapenko @Tiggerito @antoineeripret	Doc	*.sql	Sheet

Content team lead: @aleyda

Welcome chapter contributors! You'll be using this issue throughout the chapter lifecycle to coordinate on the content planning, analysis, and writing stages.

The content team is made up of the following contributors:

• Authors
• Reviewers
• Analysts

New contributors: If you're interested in joining the content team for this chapter, just leave a comment below and the content team lead will loop you in.

Note: To ensure that you get notifications when tagged, you must be "watching" this repository.

Milestones

0. Form the content team

• Jul 6th: Project owners have selected an author to be the content team lead
• Jul 13th: The content team has at least one author, reviewer, and analyst (minimally viable team formed)

1. Plan content

• Jul 20th: The content team has completed the chapter outline in the draft doc
• Jul 27th: Analysts have triaged the feasibility of all proposed metrics

2. Gather data

• Jul 27th: Analysts have added all necessary custom metrics and drafted a PR to track query progress

• Aug 1 - 31: August crawl

• Sep 7th: Analysts have queried all metrics and saved the output to the results sheet

3. Validate results

• Sep 14th: The content team has reviewed the results sheet

4. Draft content

• Nov 12th: Authors have completed the first draft in the doc
• Nov 26th: The content team has prototyped all data visualizations

5. Publication

• Nov 26th: The content team has reviewed the final draft, converted to markdown, and filed a PR to add it to the 2020 content directory

• Dec 9th: Target launch date

[aleyda]

Sounds great :) Count me in!

[foxdavidj]

I'd like to nominate Nate Dame as well.

Really looking forward to how this chapter turns out with how much enthusiasm there is for it 😄

[max-ostapenko]

I'd like to participate as an analyst in this chapter.

[clarkeclark]

I'm happy to be a reviewer again this year for the SEO chapter.

[natedame]

I'd love to join! Since this would be my first year I'd like to be a reviewer if possible.

[catalinred]

I'd love to help in any way.

[ashleyish]

I'd still like to help - but, there are quite a few participants.

I'd like to gently recommend that folks make room for anyone that is underrepresented or new to putting themselves out there.

Though it'd be good to find at least a balance in gender, I'm good to give my spot up to anyone that is new to the scene. Or act as mentor. <3

[dwsmart]

Still happy to help as I was when @AVGP kindly nominated over on the other thread, but hyper conscious I think the team should be a diverse one, so happy to bow out to help that happen

[rviscomi]

Thank you @ashleyish and @dwsmart! I love to see it.

@OBTo and I will be reaching out to our picks for the content team lead for each chapter, and once that person is confirmed for SEO they can choose their coauthor(s) as needed. SEO is an especially complex topic so I would expect this to have ~3 coauthors like last year. And for anyone else still interested in contributing, there is no limit on the number of technical reviewers so we'd welcome your help!

@catalinred were you interested in contributing as a reviewer or analyst?

[catalinred]

@catalinred were you interested in contributing as a reviewer or analyst?

@rviscomi I don't have the right skills for analyst so I was thinking about contributing as a reviewer maybe.
But I am happy to take a step back and looking forward to seeing the content team lead pick.

[rviscomi]

Ok I've added you as a reviewer for now and you can reevaluate as needed.

[aysunakarsu]

I will be happy to contribute.

[Tiggerito]

I'd be happy to help. I work in technical SEO and I've made a few BigQuery/archive queries to extract data from pages. Then ran out of money! Example.

[dsottimano]

Happy to contribute as per the nomination on the main post but equally happy to act as a mentor as @ashleyish suggested and find a few new faces.

[foxdavidj]

@aleyda thank you for agreeing to be the lead author for the SEO chapter! As the lead, you'll be responsible for driving the content planning and writing phases in collaboration with your content team, which will consist of yourself as lead, any coauthors you choose as needed, peer reviewers, and data analysts.

The immediate next steps for this chapter are:

1. Establish the rest of your content team. Several other people were interested or nominated (see below), so that's a great place to start. The larger the scope of the chapter, the more people you'll want to have on board.
2. Start sketching out ideas in your draft doc.
3. Catch up on last year's chapter and the project methodology to get a sense for what's possible.

There's a ton of info in the top comment, so check that out and feel free to ping myself or @rviscomi with any questions!

@en3r0 @ipullrank we'd still love to have you contribute as a peer reviewer or coauthor as needed. Let us know if you're still interested!

@aysunakarsu @ashleyish @dsottimano @dwsmart @natedame I've put you down as reviewers for now, and will leave it to @aleyda to reassign at their discretion

[foxdavidj]

@Tiggerito would you like to contribute as an analyst for the chapter?

[Tiggerito]

@Tiggerito would you like to contribute as an analyst for the chapter?

Happy to do that.

[aysunakarsu]

I can contribute as an analyst too if there is still need at that part. Thanks.

[antoineeripret]

I'd be happy to help as an analyst. If there is enough analysts for this chapter, happy to help with another one as well :)

[aleyda]

Thanks @en3r0, really appreciate your feedback! I just applied your changes requests to the doc already. If you want I can give you access too, just let me know your email :)

[dsottimano]

I'm all done, left a few comments and sorry for being late. Great work folks!

[aleyda]

Thanks @dsottimano! Great input :) I've applied all your edits/requested. Regarding the Web Vitals metrics/explanations: please keep in mind the existence of the performance chapter, that will be the "main" source of information about this topic (so we should try to avoid overlaying too much) and to which we will refer/link to point out major concepts/metrics.

[antoineeripret]

@aleyda, @bazzadp:

• Files added to a fork of the repository. Should I create a pull request to the main one?
• I added the markup code as a suggestion on the main Google Docs. You can review the content whenever you want. I mainly used extracts of the chapter - which was very descriptive - even though I sometimes rephrase it a little bit.

[tunetheweb]

@antoineeripret spotted a few issues with the markup (my fault mostly for not telling you there are some differences from last year - sorry!). Made a comment against the first one but it applies to them all.

Could we create a branch in the main repo (called seo-chapter-2020 maybe?) and add these images and open a Draft PR? That way @aleyda could also add the markup to the same branch and then we can merge both together when all ready. If you use the main repo, rather than your fork, then you all will have edit rights to that branch so might be easier than trying to change permissions on your fork.

[antoineeripret]

@bazzadp: seen and understood! I'll apply the modifications later today and create the branch you just mentionned :)

[antoineeripret]

@bazzadp:

• Draft PR created with the files (with better names as suggested)
• Markup code updated in the Google Docs following your instructions

@Tiggerito: I have not helped you at all on the Lighthouse metrics and I'm not sure that metrics displayed in our bar charts come from the lighthouse.sql query. Can you confirm that?

[tunetheweb]

Good stuff @antoineeripret !

@aleyda is the chapter ready to move to Markdown yet or still want to change it in Google Docs? I can do a quick conversion tomorrow, add it to @antoineeripret ’s branch and pull request, then do a test release so you can get a feel for what it looks like. Then you can make any further edits in GitHub from then on until we’re happy to merge it.

[aleyda]

Thanks @antoineeripret :)

@bazzadp There are just a couple of comments/conversations pending at the moment: from @borisschapira that have been answered by @fellowhuman1101 - Could you please take a look Boris so we can move forward? Thanks a lot :)

[Tiggerito]

@Tiggerito: I have not helped you at all on the Lighthouse metrics and I'm not sure that metrics displayed in our bar charts come from the lighthouse.sql query. Can you confirm that?

Those charts and associated data came from extra tabs added to the sheet. I think Jamie (@fellowhuman1101) added them.

[tunetheweb]

@bazzadp There are just a couple of comments/conversations pending at the moment: from @borisschapira that have been answered by @fellowhuman1101 - Could you please take a look Boris so we can move forward? Thanks a lot :)

I think if that's the only thing we're waiting on we can move to Markdown. I've done that in #1589 and will pick up the conversation there.

[fellowhuman1101]

@bazzadp based on @borisschapira original feedback, I reworked the performance section to avoid duplication and focus relevancy to the SEO chapter audience.
cc: @rviscomi changes don't impact the markup

[fellowhuman1101]

@Tiggerito: I have not helped you at all on the Lighthouse metrics and I'm not sure that metrics displayed in our bar charts come from the lighthouse.sql query. Can you confirm that?

Those charts and associated data came from extra tabs added to the sheet. I think Jamie (@fellowhuman1101) added them.

@Tiggerito they've been removed to avoid duplication of the performance chapter. (Were originally pulled from their workbook before the charts were revised to bar charts)

[tunetheweb]

Have these changes been done in Google Docs or in the Markdown? If in Google docs could you copy your changes across to the Markdown version as that's the golden copy now?

[aleyda]

the Markdown version

Hi @bazzadp ! @fellowhuman1101 has just done these changes in the doc so I was going now to implement them in the markdown version... I'll do them now :)

[tunetheweb]

Good stuff! I've just pushed a fix for some of the headings to that branch too so once you're done I'll generate another test version so we can see what it looks like now. Let me know when done.

[aleyda]

I just updated @fellowhuman1101 :) Can you please take a look at the markdown version? Thanks :D

cc @bazzadp it's done from my side - feel free to do additional updates :)

[Tiggerito]

A background on the Structured Data data. I'll post it here because it's quite a bit of info. @ipullrank

In 2019:

Full data...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uARtBWwz9nJOKqKPFinAMbtoDgu5aBtOhsBNmsCoTaA/edit#gid=1844385215

Microdata itemtype values were checked for.

JSON-LD @type values and an attempt to check @context to a max depth of 5

So no detection of untyped entities. For the results they just stripped out the context (I think most would have been missing) so the types could be for any vocabulary.

In 2020:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ram47FshAjzvbQVJbAQPgxZN7PPOPCKIK67VJZCo92c/edit#gid=337739550
Contains basic comparison of raw and rendered

pct_has_raw_jsonld_or_microdata
pct_has_rendered_jsonld_or_microdata
pct_has_only_rendered_jsonld_or_microdata
pct_rendering_changes_structured_data

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ram47FshAjzvbQVJbAQPgxZN7PPOPCKIK67VJZCo92c/edit#gid=361660017
Formats used based on the rendered results. I also checked for rdfa and microformats2. Next time I think it would be worth checking of og/Facebook/Pinterest and twitter tags.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ram47FshAjzvbQVJbAQPgxZN7PPOPCKIK67VJZCo92c/edit#gid=475182211
My version of the top entities based on the rendered results.

I implemented a more complex context builder so could reasonably accurately report on the vocabulary used. If my code could not work it out it would use http://complex-context.com/ or http://invalid-context.com/

I checked all entities and then looked for their type. Hence the -UnknownType- showing up. You may also see -ComplexType- (probably an array) or -InvalidType- (not a valid URI)

And a few other things which we may use in the future: id references and sameAs values

Notes
-UnknownType- is not bad. It gets treated as Thing in schema.org. A common scenario I see for this is for say an author where they only marked up the name. It can alos be legitimate if the site is using @id to merge information.

40% have JSON-LD or Mircodata. Between 1% and 2% are purely adding it via JavaScript. About 4.5% are altering it via JavaScript. JSON-LD is used more than Microdata.

WebSite and SearchAction should be at the top. They are used for the sitelink search box enhancement, I think the only rich snippet Google offers specifically for the home page, and few get it.

Most rich snippet features will not show on the home page. It looks like few are trying it on now (AggregateRating, Review).

Organization or any subtype makes sense on the home page. Google does check the logo, business hours, address etc.

data-vocabulary.org is going to be dropped in January. 0.37% Breadcrumbs were detected but who has a breadcrumb on the home page? Saying that almost 4% of home pages have schema.org breadcrumbs!

There's the odd typo, like incorrect case. I think Google lets you off.

I've the day off. I'll be around for a few hours before I have to go to the beach :-(