Longer commitments
Playlists and videos that are one part of a longer run.
Independent practitioner
Charles Taylor picks over the Daily Mail's move from DailyMail.co.uk to DailyMail.com and what it meant for Google search traffic, as a worked migration case study.
Official source
Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin explain what separates a 301 from a 302 redirect, what 307 and 308 are, and whether any of it affects canonicalisation.
Independent practitioner
Small website migrations can lose half of a site's organic traffic if badly planned, the hosts argue, and they say a clear strategy limits ranking drops, just as for large sites.
Official source
PDF files in search get their own treatment at Google, and Martin Splitt and John Mueller explain how they are indexed, when HTML is the better choice, and traps like rasterised text.
Official source
Do XML sitemaps still matter? Martin Splitt and John Mueller look back at their history, ask whether crawlers can work out site structure alone, and discuss why fetch warnings in Search Console worry owners.
Official source
Should you worry when Search Console lists pages as not indexed? Martin Splitt and John Mueller explain how to read the Page Indexing report and whether a 404 always means a broken site.
Trade press or conference
Does optimising crawl budget improve web traffic? Vanessa Fox joins this podcast episode to talk about how search engines discover, crawl and index content.
Independent practitioner
What goes wrong when an enterprise site migration fails? Charles Taylor analyses the MSNBC move to MS Now and its effect on search visibility, including Google Publisher Center for Top Stories.
Sells in this field
Index bloat is what happens when pages sit in the index and bring no visitors. Tom Capper separates it from crawl budget, explains how to check your site and suggests cleanup steps.
Independent practitioner
Two case studies show SEO problems that only appear on mobile: canonical tags missing across more than 100,000 URLs, and thinner pages on a 40 million URL site, plus tools that spot both.
Independent practitioner
Publishers that hijack the back button push visitors into a feed of more articles and ads, the speaker explains, and links the tactic to Navboost and Google's spam policies.
Trade press or conference
Domain migrations are the focus of a SearchNorwich talk by Emma Russell, who explains the different kinds of migration, recounts a few that went badly, and offers an SEO framework.
Official source
Does crawling more often mean a better site? John Mueller, Lizzi Sassman and Gary Illyes untangle ideas about crawl frequency and site quality, and ask how crawling could be more efficient.
Sells in this field
Which Google ranking factors are real? Will Critchlow offers four testing ideas inspired by the API leaks, so you can check a claim yourself, from what testing is to a worked example.
Official source
JavaScript rendering in Google Search is explained by Zoe Clifford, who joins Martin Splitt and John Mueller to talk about the DOM, whether every page is rendered and how long it takes.
Sells in this field
How do guest posts, PBNs and press releases rank as link building techniques? Matt Diggity sorts 21 of them into a tier list, in part two of a ranking factor series.
Sells in this field
Stevy Liakopoulou walks through six steps to optimise sitemaps for ecommerce sites with over a million pages, as guest host of a Moz whiteboard session.
Older: check current guidanceSells in this field
Hybrid search mixes keyword matching with vector-based retrieval, and this short Elastic guide explains how to judge it, including reciprocal rank fusion scoring and the unified API.
Older: check current guidanceTeaching or conference talk
Basic PageRank gets stuck on spider traps and dead ends. This data mining lecture shows how teleportation gets round both, then builds up to the final algorithm.
Older: check current guidanceOfficial source
Crystal Carter talks with Martin Splitt about a site that no crawling tool could crawl fully, the steps and tools used to fix it, and how monitoring can head it off.
Older: check current guidanceTeaching or conference talk
How does a search engine build its index? This is the first of three parts on index construction from an ETH Zurich information retrieval course, spring 2022.
Older: check current guidanceTeaching or conference talk
The inverted index is the data structure behind search engines, and this eight minute lecture from a University of Amsterdam course explains it.
Older: check current guidanceTeaching or conference talk
PageRank, random walks and matrix factorisation are worked through in a Stanford lecture from Jure Leskovec, which treats graphs as matrices and builds towards node embeddings. Lecture 4.1 of the CS224W course.
Older: check current guidanceSells in this field
Not sure what structured data is? This beginner lesson from the free Yoast SEO academy course shows what it looks like on a page and what it might do for search results.
Older: check current guidanceTeaching or conference talk
Web crawlers are responsible for a large share of internet traffic, according to this lecture, which explains how they work, why crawling is hard and gives a short look at Nutch.
Older: check current guidanceTeaching or conference talk
PageRank and HITS are two classic ways to score how important a web page is, and this lecture works through both, including the random surfer idea and Markov chains.
Older: check current guidanceOfficial source
Is canonicalisation a directive or a signal? Martin Splitt and Rachel Costello work through common myths about it, with timestamps to jump to each question.
Older: check current guidanceOfficial source
Which steps help diagnose common JavaScript SEO problems? Martin Splitt of Google goes through them in a short web.dev LIVE session.
Older: check current guidanceTeaching or conference talk
What makes a web page important to PageRank? This short video explains the random surfer idea and what the damping factor is for.
Older: check current guidanceTeaching or conference talk
An Imperial College London lecturer introduces PageRank through linear algebra, in week 5 of a Mathematics for Machine Learning course on Coursera.
Older: check current guidanceSells in this field
Log file analysis gets a short lesson in Semrush Academy's course, part four of seven, using the Log File Analyzer and its Googlebot activity graph to see how Googlebot crawls a site.
Older: check current guidance
