– So in a recent Reddit thread, a Google engineer has decided that a little bit of fun with the community is gonna go a long way and he started giving intentionally bad SEO advice. That’s right, banana enthusiast, John Mueller, on a recent SEO thread said that he recommends using the depreciated HTML marquee tag as well as the blink tag as a top SEO recommendation. Oh how we laughed.
– Oh, beautiful.
– For those that still want to actually experience the marquee tag in action, you can actually just Google marquee tag and Google have got little Easter egg that will show you in action. So if you’d like some more hilarious bad advice from Google engineers, they’ve actually made an entire compilation of them. But here are some of my personal favourites. Coming in at number one, add authorship markup to your pages. Number two, share things on Google plus And of course the all time number one terrible piece of SEO advice is just make content and you will rank just fine.
– [Narrator] Ho, ho, ho, that’s a big tumbleweed.
– Now, to be fair to John, he really does have an excellent sense of humour. In particular he had this to say, there’s also which is a great way to add a non-deterministic cloaking, AKA, Schrodinger’s Indexing to pages. It drives the web spam team crazy. I mean that is some seriously intellectual SEO joke telling, Well done. So as an SEO, what is a major sign of the apocalypse?
– The end is near. We all gonna die.
– For me it’s when Google starts giving things away for free or decides that they have enough money. So when Google announced it’s gonna be free for merchants to list products in the Google shopping tab and search results, well I was like,
– Excuse me, a baking powder.
– But yeah they are actually turning Google shopping into an organic play once again. So you can list all of your products free of charge, inside Google shopping. Now I don’t know about you but I think this is something pretty big and I can just imagine the intern that was given control of the Google shopping products, sitting around a boardroom table.
– But what I’d really like to do is something extraordinary, something big, something mega, something copious, something capacious, something cajunga.
– But we would be very naive to think that a national corporate that removed their don’t be evil, tagline, were actually doing it for the good of humanity. The real reason, they’re doing it because of market share or at least the lack of market share. So essentially they’re scared of Amazon taking more market share and eyeballs from them. So they’re making a play to dilute Amazon’s market share by offering up products, free of charge to merchants. Now the Canonical Chronicle managed to get an exclusive comment from Mr. Bezos himself. So we asked if he’s going to let Google take his market share and he had this to say.
– I would love for it to be after I’m dead.
– All this being said, I’m not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. So if you’re a retailer in the U.S you can now take advantage of this right now. Simply go to Google Merchant Center and start uploading your product feed. A really interesting part of this decision from Google is that you can now also integrate your PayPal account with Google Merchant Center to speed up this entire process. Now, if you’re already paying for shopping ads, you might be like, well, what do I do? Well, it’s likely you’re probably gonna need to revamp your campaigns as paid and organic are actually gonna be shown together, albeit the paid stuff will be at top prominent listening. Now I think it’s a really interesting strategy by the search giants, so now is a really great time for merchants and retailers to take advantage of, essentially all that free capital Google can get their hands in, in order to maintain their market dominance. Just do not expect this to be around for very long. Next up, this week, Google launched the first of their lightening talks with videos from Martin Splitt, talking about JavaScript and SEO. Now I watched the entire thing and I have to say it’s pretty impressive. In particular the video covers the do’s and the don’ts of creating links with JavaScript. If you don’t have time to watch it, essentially he said, make sure and always have the AHREF attribute in your link. It’s fine to dress it up with on click events with JavaScript, but make sure that you do not omit the AHRF thing all together. He also gave advice like don’t use buttons.
– Guess you’re supposed to.
– I wouldn’t do that if I was you.
– Why it says, press?
– So you press the thing because it says press?
– But what he means when he says don’t use buttons is, don’t use a button to load content onto a page that isn’t already there. So if you’ve got one of those view more buttons that loads more products onto a site or something like that, that is bad for SEO, but if the button, you click it and takes another page and loads the content, totally fine. He also said do not use click handlers.
♪ Kelly, can you handle this ♪ ♪ Michelle, can you handle this ♪ ♪ Beyonce, can you handle this ♪ ♪ I don’t think they can handle this ♪
A click handler is something that uses other HTML elements to actually simulate the link. This is something you should really try and avoid. He also said use semantic HTML markup. Now, it’s a bit of an obvious one, but you’d be surprised the amount of devs that just use dev tags to structure the JavaScript and they’re pushing up to the browser and don’t use HTML5 Semantic markup. Now, when it comes to links, Martin also said that we should make sure and use proper URL’s. So when we say proper URL’s, well what exactly do you mean? Well it’s four things in particular, a protocol. So HTTP or HTTPS, a host, the domain itself, the path, this specific piece of content and then a fragment identifier if you want. So that’s like the little hash symbol and then somewhere that you want to jump them to inside of your content. One thing to know is that search engines don’t see fragment identifiers, so they’re probably gonna ignore it. Well that’s everything for this week’s Canonical Chronicle lockdown edition. We hope you’ve liked it, regardless of the fact that we don’t actually have a studio and I’m literally shooting it in my one bed, London apartment. Please do like it if you liked it and please subscribe if you loved it. If you would like to get the deck version of this. So we get a slide version of everything that’s happening in Google every single week, and we give that away free on our email newsletter. If you’d like to get access to that, you can go to email.typeamedia.net, but until next time, we will see you later.
