I’m a bit feisty this week. I apologize upfront. We’ve been doing tons of website reviews after last month’s sale and it had me quite busy. But there’s good news this week if you’re looking for a job as an SEO: here’s your chance! Google is hiring one. SEO’s all over the web had fun with that this week, but it shouldn’t be much of a surprise. The only thing Google just did is acknowledge that SEO is worth doing. So much that they hire people to be in charge of it. Luckily, there was more!
Twitter blocking robots? Guess not.
There was quite a bit of fuzz on Twitter the last few days about Twitter blocking robots.txt and how bad this was:
Please note that Twitter has blocked ALL ROBOTS ACCESS TO TWITTER. https://t.co/Cv98odmk21 This means wayback will lose it.
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) July 16, 2015
Luckily my buddy Martin MacDonald looked for two more seconds and discovered this wasn’t exactly the case. Why Twitter doesn’t just 301 redirect www.twitter.com to twitter.com is completely beyond me. That would be the only real SEO solution in my (not so) humble opinion.
Penguin is months away
In not so surprising news (as it’s bloody hot here and penguins aren’t known for their love of heat), Google’s Penguin update apparently is months away as they are “working on making it real time”. We’ll see.
Google sends notifications, then wonders why
In another not so surprising move, Google is starting to realize that some messages are not making much sense to each site owner. They send out a ton of hreflang messages this week, only to realize not everyone might be interested. So now they’re asking for your feedback on how you like the messaging coming out of Google Search Console.
Lots of us would probably rather have them fix issues like the current issue with index numbers. And maybe help their colleagues on fixing the referral spam in Google Analytics.
Flash is dead, bye bye!
Firefox is now blocking Flash by default. Flash was always a stupid idea, but in the off chance that you’re still using it on your site, you probably should stop for real now. I mean, we have animated GIFs for annoying content!
XML Sitemaps are hard
Gary Ilyes from Google tweeted about how to properly format the last modified time in XML sitemaps:
How to properly format last modified (lastmod) time for xml sitemaps http://t.co/7wQ3g7799E
— Gary Illyes (@methode) July 13, 2015
His answer also states “in most of the cases it’s ignored by search engines”. We knew that, but it doesn’t hurt repeating it. The same is true for the priority field, which is the reasons our Yoast SEO plugin doesn’t have a ton of interface to change them. They simply don’t matter that much.
That’s it, see you next week!
Tools to improve your online marketing campaign 
Tracking your SEO with Google Analytics: a how-to 
Twitter Analytics: stats for your tweets
I am currently in the process of moving my website from Drupal to WordPress, and am using Yoast SEO now. I am amazed at the support you offer! Just wanted to let you know…
Cheers
Lars
It’s about time Flash died! Nielsen Norman Group said this nearly 15 years ago, “…the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease.” R.I.P. Flash.
That is why recently I saw firefox not displaying flash, now I understand, useful information, thank Joost.
Thanks you for your info!
Very interesting article as always Joost. Google is frequently changing whether it be xml sitemap, search console or updates. All the old SEO tactics are not so fruitful as it used to be before. The above mentioned points are very informative and should be take into consideration. Keep sharing.
Joost, you are a humorous guy. I especially like your animated gif!
On a serious note, does anyone think that Google is for real with their SEO job? Sounds like a PR stunt.
Cheers.
And with the second Firefox I meant Flash of course :-)
Actually Firefox is not blocking Firefox by default. See this tweet by Benjamin Kerensa.