Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You have brought me an interesting technical SEO


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

challenge that you looked into in the past.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Very much true.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So there was this client that happens to when you have agency


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

business, it kind of goes that way, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Where basically we have oftentimes a challenge


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that there are questions that are not really questions,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

if that makes any sense.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh god.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like these are working.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's broken.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Kind of.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Help us.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like, you know, Google is broken.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Do something.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh yeah, Google is broken.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's always a good statement, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's never us.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's always them.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Sure.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

We're kind of really used to that by now.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And I think part of the magic is to translate that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And I suppose you guys are fairly familiar with that


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

problem as well, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You know, specific questions often help.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And it's also a lot of the context.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

If the context is missing, it's like our website


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

isn't showing up in search.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And it's like, it's not working with search.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's like, what do you mean?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Is it not showing up?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Is it showing up incorrectly?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Is it showing up for the wrong things?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Is it showing up less but giving you less clicks as well?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Or like, what are we looking at?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And that's why we always say it depends, because it really


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

does depend on the context.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So how do you deal with that when someone comes to you


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

with a question like, Google is not working for our website?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I think the first thing that you probably need to do


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

is just trying to figure out what's really going on


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

by asking counter questions, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So what kind of questions are you asking then?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Well, I mean, as you said, what countries are we talking about?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

What's the domains, if it's multiple domains?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

What's maybe the business impact that you're seeing?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Does it result in, I don't know, less transactions or anything?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Just trying to figure out the specifics,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

really behind a very broad and generic question.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I love that you say the business impact,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

because I feel like a lot of people are like,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

this thing isn't working in search.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And you're like, and that does what to your business?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, no.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And I think this is also a general issue, oftentimes


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

in SEO.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like, we're looking at kind of vanity metrics,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

but it doesn't really translate to business impact


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

or business goals.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I think this is super important to figure out


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

what impact does it have on the bottom line or not, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

What does it do to your business?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

What's the goal you're going to fix?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK, so then you ask them a lot of follow up questions.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, without trying to be too annoying,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

which is also a challenge, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's true.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You don't want to lose that client, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So OK, you ask them a bunch of follow up questions,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and then eventually, what was your hypothesis?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

What did you find out?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, I mean, so in that specific case,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

what happened was we got this very broad, like, look,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

the website isn't working.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And maybe for context, it was a business


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that's operating in Germany, Austria, Switzerland,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and France, so international business.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And basically, what they said is, look,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

we have a lot of international orders that we can't process.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And that doesn't really help much either.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we kind of start investigating and digging


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

a bit deeper and trying to understand what that really


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was, what the issue was.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Essentially, what it turned out to be was that there were,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

you know, orders happening, let's say,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

on the Austrian website that kind of came from Germany,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

but they couldn't process it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Or, you know, same for Switzerland.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we tried to kind of figure out, you know,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

what's the impact, kind of looked


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

like there was something around geo-targeting maybe


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

or any kind of, you know, that type of stuff.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Now it starts to sound like a problem.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So it sounds like, you know, Google


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

isn't working is not really the proper description for that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Not really the thing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Not at all, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's interesting because when you said, like, oh, we


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

have orders that we can't process,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I'm like, how is that an SEO problem?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But now that you say, like, geo-targeting, I'm like, ah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So you kind of try to puzzle these things together.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's like 180 degrees from Google's not working.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we get orders from customers through the wrong website


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

when they come through Google, I guess.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That was kind of what was happening.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So maybe some, like, further context


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

essentially the business was or is still


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

operating country code top-level domains, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So.ch,.at, et cetera, et cetera,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

each in their own, like, territory.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So, you know, Austrian website for Austria,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

you know, French site for France, et cetera, et cetera.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And the business itself.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh, and you have this problem that, like, the German website,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

the Austrian website, and the Swiss website


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

pretty much have all the same content.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, you could have same descriptions.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I think for those that operate in the dark region, right,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that is a fairly common issue, especially that, you know,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

businesses that kind of come from, let's say, Germany,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

they usually roll it out in the other markets as well.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But there's a fair limited amount of adoption.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, of course, you have different currencies with,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

you know, Germany and Switzerland.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But that's tiny, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's tiny.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And for that specific business, you're completely right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So the product inventory was exactly the same,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

or almost exactly the same.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, fair enough.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Maybe they didn't have this product.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, slight variation, but nothing out of the ordinary,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But the major traffic kind of came from, like,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

short-haired business keywords, very generic, high traffic


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

ones.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

They were kind of the same in those three markets.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So what we did even before that kind of issue appeared


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was, like, you know, look, we need to kind of differentiate


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

in within the market.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So they each had, like, exclusive content pieces


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

targeting the different nuances.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And because, I mean, we both know


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that there's very much cultural differences,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

so that needs to be reflected in the content as well, which


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

we did.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But nevertheless, all of a sudden,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

it seemed to have stopped working, you know,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

very generically speaking.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

For whatever reason, we couldn't figure out why, because you


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

would want the Austrian side, drink in Austria, obviously,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and the German one in Germany, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So that was kind of the way we ended up,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

like, when we started poking around a bit.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's like, OK, that sounds a bit more like maybe an SEO


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

problem at first place, yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK, OK, right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So you identified the actual problem.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That must have been tricky.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Did you get, like, lots of supportive reactions


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

from the business that you were, like, helping?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Or was it more like, oh, make it fixed?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Well, they always wanted to be fixed.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Obviously, I mean, it had business impact.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So, like, their cancellation rates


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

in the kind of in the shopping basket were, like, really high.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Because what happened is, like, when


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

you, as a German customer, you go to the Austrian side,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

they can't process you.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Or they wouldn't process you.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So they wouldn't ship from the Austrian property


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

to Germany.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You go through the entire ordering process.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's like, sorry, we are not shipping to your location.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You're like, what?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh, no.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So that was a horrible experience.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And I think one of the, because we couldn't process as fast as


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

we wanted with, like, trying to figure out what's going on.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

One of the kind of immediate quick fixes that we did


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was, like, this classic kind of overlay,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

telling, like, the Austrian customer, well,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

you're on the wrong side.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You may want to go to the other one so that we can process it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That kind of at least took a bit of pressure away from us


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

but also the system in general because the business impact


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was there.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And we kind of needed to buy a bit of time.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I was about to say, they have to survive long enough


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

for the solution to, yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Because, I mean, you have to understand the business side


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

as well.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And of course, they are essentially


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

losing money, which was there before.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we kind of want something to happen relatively quickly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Well done.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like, you found a quick fix to kind of alleviate.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But not really, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, it's a quick fix.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's a stopgap solution.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You need to replace it with something that is sustainable.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So then how did you figure out what


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was going on in the system?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, so that was kind of the process that kind of went on


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

somewhat in parallel, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Right, because it used to work.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It wasn't been altered at all.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

There were no changes, at least no visible changes


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

when you were speaking to the IT team.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Nah, we didn't change anything.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, they always say that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Well, everything else is in fairness.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's broken.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Did you break it?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No, it was like that when I found it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Let's be honest.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No, that's true.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's true.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But yeah, at least that was also part of this kind of dialogue


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that we had and some ongoing conversations where you said,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

no, not that we can think of.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Let's phrase it that way.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we went through this entire kind of change backlog


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

trying to see if there was anything that stood out


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

with a focus, obviously, on Hreflang, any kind of geo


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

setup, et cetera.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And I think with the ccTODs that I mentioned,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

obviously, search console couldn't also


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

be very much of the reason because the targeting


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

for the ccTODs is set by default anyways, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

True.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You couldn't make the mistake of, let's say,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

wrongly target that one.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly, yeah, because the country levels TLDs like DE,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

AT, CH, FR already are doing that for you.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's true.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So that couldn't have also been a mistake


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that someone made by accident.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Accidentally, not even noticing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Wrong settings, no nothing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But no, that wasn't that either.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we're like, OK, and then the next obvious thing


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that you look at in the process, I mean,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

when you don't find any kind of tickets or changes or whatever.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Nothing obvious enough to catch your eye.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

At least that's what we did.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You start poking around, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, big part of the SEO kind of job, I suppose,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

is trying to investigate and trying to figure out


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

what was going on.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So what you could see is when you're at least kind


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

of interesting, I would say.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I think when you're trying to build this case,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

or the way we usually go about it,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

it's like that you obviously first look into some


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

of the external metrics.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we kind of looked into visibility development,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

where you could see, OK, the German domain


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

spiked in Austria, the Austrian one tanked in Austria.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Where did you find this information?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I think that was taken from Systrix at the time.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But you could also confirm it using GSC, because you know.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I was about to say, Google Search Console


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

gives you this information.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So impression share goes up or goes down respectively.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But what I really liked about that at the time


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

is that you could build overlay charts, which GSC didn't allow


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

you to do.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So you could print the visibility curves


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

next to each other.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You would see, OK, that's on a week's time frame.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

There are some spikes that kind of correlate with a drop,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

respectively.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So you're like, OK, at least at the same time frame,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

there was something happening affecting all the three


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

different kind of domains.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's why I kind of like the external kind of confirmation


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

as well.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But you're completely right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I think one of the mistakes that people sometimes make


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

is just rely on one data source, which is really dangerous.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I think at least a confirmation


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

from another source certainly is a possible.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I think the English term is red herrings.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And as a developer, I know that so well.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You do log file analysis, and then you see weird things.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And you're like, hmm, I think that can never happen.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then you figure out it actually does never happen.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's just a mistake in how we configured logging,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

for instance.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, OK, fair enough.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh, god.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK, so then you had your data sources, you had statistics,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and you had Google Search Console.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You realized something is funky because it's moving,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and it was stable, like literally stable.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Nothing happened on the sides.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So yeah, and then I mean, you go down the rabbit hole, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So essentially, it's the markup that you kind of need


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

to at least have a look at.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And I mean, the hreflang implementation at the time


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was done in HTML.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So obviously, first things first,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

you kind of go and check your implementation.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Even though everyone says, look, it hasn't changed.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like nothing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But maybe you don't want to trust that,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and rather kind of validate yourself.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, and I think the obvious ones are the stuff


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that Search Console is also reporting,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

like the return links are missing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That wasn't the case.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Do the target URLs respond with the proper status code?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So you check for the 200.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You check that they're not canonicalized elsewhere


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

or that they're part of that entire relation group.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, let's be honest, hreflang setup is complex


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

to do, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It is.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's not an easy thing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And it's good that you did a double check on these things.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But you did not find any.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No, and what really confused me was that it worked, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So you're completely right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Implementation of hreflang is really a beast, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

If we're very honest.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I would have not been surprised if it would have been new,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and then it didn't work.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Honestly, it's my working hypothesis until this point.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But I have a feeling that my hypothesis is not


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

going to be true.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But let's go ahead.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

All right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So let's check mark the hreflang for the time being.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That worked.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we kind of also used some external tools,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

like I think there's a Chrome plugin to kind of do


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

all of those testing again.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I didn't know that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, I think it's called Check Hreflang or something


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

like that, where you just have at least it does at scale


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

check if all the responses come back in 200.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So at least it kind of takes away a bit of the legwork.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But anyway, so hreflang, by looking at the HTML,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was entirely fine.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I was, honestly, I was clueless.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I was like, what's going on here?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So the geotargeting is there.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

GSC, fine.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like, all good.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Hreflang is there.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Also good as well.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So then ahead of this, there is sometimes,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

if you work with CDNs, for example,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

there can be funny things happening, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Content distribution networks are fantastic.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yes.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But there can be a beast.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And again, as you said, like fairly complex,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

especially to maintain.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Setup is one thing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But then maintenance, if it's different nodes,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

different data centers.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Caching.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Big fun.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Very, very big topic.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I was like, OK, maybe something


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

is going on on that front.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So the two theories that we had at the time was like, OK, A,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

it could be that there's something going on


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

based on a user agent setting.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like one of these content injection things


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that are like spam.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So the e-commerce platform at the time was a magento,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I believe.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And there were.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's a popular target.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It is a popular target, similar to like WordPress and others.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

There were a lot of hacks going on where I think,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

if I recall correctly, there was a lot of injection


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

into HDXs.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then you would.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And depending on which user agent you're coming from,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Google sees one thing, and then the actual user


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

sees another thing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And they see like spam links and stuff.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK, fair enough.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I was like, OK, maybe something not specifically


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

necessarily with the focus on Google,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

but maybe something went south.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, something went wrong.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we're going from a geo-based issue towards more


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

like a server configuration.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Kind of.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That was the idea, at least.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like, what else?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I was like, OK, let's poke around with that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So again, what we used at the time,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

there's a plugin for Chrome called User Agent Spoofer,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

which is, I think, super helpful where you can just set up


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

custom user agent.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It can do that natively now.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

If you go into the developer tools, you can switch that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Which is really a very helpful feature.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I have to admit.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Hide hidden, though.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

True.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But it takes away a lot of this need


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

for external additional plugins, which you all know doesn't make


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then it could get slow, et cetera.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But yeah, so we did that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

User agent-based, I would say, again, sadly, no luck.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Then I had the theory.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

To be honest, it is a good thing,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

but it's annoying that it's not the source of the problem.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

The list of potential things that you can look at


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

got really small.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we did that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then I was like, OK, maybe going back to the CDN,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

but not on the.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Did they use the CDN?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, they did.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Good point to mention that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

They did.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Specifically for imagery and static files,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

but also for DDoS protection.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So they had it up front.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So a lot of the stuff went through the global routing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly, was proxied through the thing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I thought, OK, the other way that it could, what could be,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

is that there's something funky going on with redirects.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Because we had seen cases where people, by accident,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

for example, did something just for US specific IP addresses,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

which is maybe not a good idea.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I think we have seen cases, and I guess you guys as well,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

where all of a sudden US traffic went to a specific holding page


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and all of a sudden only that holding page could be crawled


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and indexed respectively.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And we're like, oh, all the content is now duplication.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I was like, OK, maybe it has something


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

to do with geo-specific redirects on the CDN level.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But again, nothing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I kind of got really frustrated and went back.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I was like, this doesn't work.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So it's not the geo targeting.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's not the server configuration or the CDN.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I was like, OK.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Content?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, I mean, it had to be somewhere.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Because again, the only thing that kept me sane at the point


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was, OK, it worked.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It used to work.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It did work really well.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So the client was literally dominating their market,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and they were ranking insanely strong.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Wild question.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So you say you were seeing fluctuations as we speak?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

As in, was the problem?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK, it sounds stupid to say that,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

but was the problem at least constant?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, and it got worse.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh, oh, oh.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

We discovered it at this one week


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

where the client reached out.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then we had this overlay, I think,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

live after maybe a week-ish or so.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But the second week, you could see it got worse.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So the Austrian side in Austria kind of went down further.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I was like, no.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

This is not going to solve itself.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So going back to my original theory of hate,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

H.R. Flang being a potential problem, I was like,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

let's try something crazy.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And let's take the H.R. Flang and put it into an XML


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

side map.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So part of me thought maybe the processing, for whatever


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

reason, didn't work.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, no real reason, but I was kind of.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

At this point, no shame.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No shame.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like, this is all options.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That was all of options.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And it did?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Admittedly, that was a bit of a waste of resource.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But I mean, again, again.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No, I don't think so.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Because you've got to try the options that you have.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And sometimes it's ridiculous stuff.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And in this case, unfortunately, well,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the viewpoint,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

it wasn't that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, in fairness, it was relatively low effort


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

because we had well-maintained side maps in the first place.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then just kind of putting them together,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

it was OK for where we were at the point.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I like that this happens in this conversation


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

because I feel like we live in a highlight real world where


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

everyone's like, we had this problem


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that we spotted immediately.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then we did this one thing, and it worked.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Hooray.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Which is never, that's never true.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I don't know, but it's rarely the case.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's rarely the case.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like most of the time, I'm sitting in front of a problem,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and I'm like, nah, that's weird.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then you dig and dig and dig,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and you have the hypothesis, and it doesn't work,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and it doesn't work, and it doesn't work.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And eventually you figure it out.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So that didn't work.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Then we decided at some point, we submitted them, obviously,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

in Search Console.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like, we processed all of that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Done.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK, it didn't work.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No avail.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I was like, OK, the only result that I have, again,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

is going back to the source code and just start


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

from the beginning.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then I probably looked at it like 5,000 times or more.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I don't know.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I honestly don't know anymore.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But so there was, at some point, I


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

spotted like, I went like deep line by line through the head,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

right, through the head tag and irrespective of like,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

childs, because it had to be somewhere.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, yeah, yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

There needed to be some reason for it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And the one thing that at some point got my attention


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was actually a no script tag in the head.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

A couple of, I think, weeks or months ago at this point,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I had a conversation with the rendering team


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

because we saw behavior related to no scripts in heads.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And I was honestly thinking they're not allowed in the head.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But turns out I was wrong.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

The standard allows them in the head.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Didn't know.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I didn't know that either.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But there were a couple of things that came together


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

when I looked at it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And so first of all, I thought, that must have been there


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

forever anyway.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I didn't think anything.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Nothing changed.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Nothing was touched.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

The one thing that caught my attention


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was that the SEO directives, if you so will, right,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, including Hreflang, but also some others.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Like all the metadata that is not part of the content.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So if you look at it from an order perspective,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

so there was a title and then some other stuff.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Then there was the no script.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then I had Hreflang and some other stuff.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK, so maybe that has to do something with that.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And so I went back to the client.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It's like, look, there's this no script tag.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I'm fairly sure it has been there forever.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Can you confirm or deny or give me?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No, no, of course.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Talk about it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It has been there forever.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It has been there forever according to the person.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I think there were multiple people involved


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

at that point in the conversation.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And everyone was like, fairly sure, no,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that must have been there.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That must have been there forever.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And so I wasn't really convinced.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

For whatever reason, I wasn't convinced.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And I was out of options as well.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You brought me the wrong way.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

The thought that I had at the time


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was to kill everything from the hat tag


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

and just have the atrial lung and the tilde and maybe


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

the description.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You don't have to throw everything out.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You can just move it up.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That would have been the other way.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But I was really desperate.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I was like, OK, I just want to get rid of everything.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I want to just make sure.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You want to establish a baseline, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You want to be like, OK, so now we have a solid foundation


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

to work from.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Because to be honest, it can't get worse, can it?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No, no.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It clearly didn't work anymore.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we had to re-establish some kind of mechanism.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So yeah, that's kind of what happened.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we kind of went and took away a lot of the bloat,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

including this no script tag.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Getting buy-in for that must have been tricky.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

They were desperate.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It was a massive impact on the bottom line.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So they're like, whatever.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You're going to nuke this website.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, sure, sure.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Do it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Just make it work.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I think the cool thing is if you work with clients that


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

kind of understand the contribution of SEO


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

to the overall business.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And again, saying that it was a short-hand.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It is a short-hand business.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

PPC is extremely expensive.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So you need a positive contribution


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

from other channels.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So SEO is crucial to their business model.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So they, I think, as unexperienced


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

as they were in some areas when phrasing the questions.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

They at least understood the value


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

of what you were bringing to the table.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Which is great.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Because I think one of the big issues


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that we're also facing oftentimes,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

like the lack of buy-in, generally speaking.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And that was there.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So they kind of trusted us, even though there


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was this problem still present, to kind of just go


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

for it, which is great.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

This is a great relation between the teams.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So yeah, we essentially kind of trimmed this entirely down.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And we submitted it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And for whatever funny reason, without understanding


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

why at the point.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It was fine.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, things started to move.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, you have the GSC impression share coming back


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

relatively quickly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So that establishes that it is something happening in the head.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But it didn't, at that point in time,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I had no understanding why that script was triggered.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So how did you then figure out what was going on with it?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean, I guess you looked at view source, kind of.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

What is this no script doing?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then everyone's like, no, it hasn't always been here.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You removed it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And surprise, surprise, it came all back to life.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, completely crazy at that point.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But I think that the crucial difference between the view


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

source situation, which is just the regular markup,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

versus if you look at something as the render DOM, which


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

is a fairly big difference, apparently.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

We do have a lightning talk on that,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

because the render DOM and the actual DOM


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that the service sends, sorry, the HTML


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that the service sends and the render DOM


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

are not the same thing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But all right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And that is exactly, I think, the biggest


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

conceptual thing, because it's been a while ago, what


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

wasn't really on people's radar.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And also at the time, when you looked into a lot of the tools,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Fetch as Google.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, that also didn't really help so much at that point.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But also, third party tools didn't have any kind


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

of dedicated report.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Now, I think it's a big shout out to the likes of Siteball,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

but also Screaming Frog, et cetera.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

They now have dedicated reports saying, look,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

there's something funky in your head


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that according to specification or shouldn't be there.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So at least have a look.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Because we did crawl the entire thing, right?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And nothing.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That doesn't give you the render DOM,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

because it doesn't run JavaScript.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So what did you do to find the problem?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Well, essentially, we went back to comparing


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

rendered versus unrendered.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

How did you find the rendered thing using?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Well, I think at the time, there was the old Google tool, which


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I can't recall the name for now.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

What was it?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

The old Google tool.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Inspect, not inspect the?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Fetch as Google.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No, the.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Fetch and render.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No, the external one.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

The external one.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Not the mobile friendly one.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

The rich result one.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

The structured data validator.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That one.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Structured data testing tool.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

The structured data.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Blast from the past, though.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, but I mean, this issue is a, you know,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I think seeing this happened years and years ago,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

kind of getting on people's radar.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And at the time, we had the structured data testing tool,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

which reproduced the rendered DOM for Google.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

For Googlebot, in a way.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And that was extremely helpful.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then there's also a cool plugin in Chrome, again,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

where you could see side by side.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh, yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

A new rendered source.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

New rendered source.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then raw and rendered and different.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then the diff, yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And I think the other one that we used a lot in the past


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

is just diff checker.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So you could copy those two together.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then you would spot, basically,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

what kind of is happening behind the scenes.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And what's happening, or what's happening behind the scenes,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was essentially like the iframe, which


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was part in the no script.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So it's no script, and there was an iframe in the no script.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Essentially closes the head tag.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Because an iframe shall not be in the head.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So the no script, per se, was not really my biggest problem.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

The problem was the content in the no script.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh, god.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So I think that's probably like a side effect of a workaround


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that we do for images that might be in no script tags.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And I think iframes are included as well, where they drag the.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

OK.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Ouch.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, essentially what happened was if you look at the rendered output, and this is probably in retro, should have been happening earlier, but OK.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It didn't used to be that much of a problem.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh, it did.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It did.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So essentially, it was a mis-implementation.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

They did this no script slash iframe situation and put it in the head.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It was, as it turned out, it was new.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So someone did.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Oh, no.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It hasn't been there.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I mean.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

We didn't change anything.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

No, no.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That was what they said.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But apparently.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It just fell from the sky.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah, you know.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Somewhere it came from, at least.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's for sure.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But yeah, no.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I'm kidding aside.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That clearly was what was happening.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So this new line got introduced.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Unfortunately for us, you would say, also above the SEO directors.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So that closed the head.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Before they'd be even kind of processing the kind of hreflang


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

situation at the time.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And none of the testing tools caught it because they didn't render.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And didn't see the same out.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Correct.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

They only checked the validity of the syntax.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Ouch.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

But not the real output.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Wow.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That is a harrowing fairy tale you brought me.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So that was an interesting one.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Whew.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Gee.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So customer came to you with a very unhelpful question of why


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

is Google not working for us anymore?


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You clarified that question through a series


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

of more detailed questions to give you a better idea.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You looked at the geo setup in Search Console.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You did a crawl.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You suspected hreflang because it was a geolocation issue.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

At least it looked like one.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Couldn't figure out what was happening there.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It all looked good implementation-wise.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You then finally looked at the source code,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

compared the render DOM to the service and HTML,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

realized there's a difference.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then that difference impacted the way


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

that the metadata was not in the head anymore.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Correct.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And that solved the problem.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So essentially, the quick fix was just taking it off.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Obviously, it wasn't the long term solution.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You couldn't move the.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Exactly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So we just kind of got rid of everything.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then once we established that that apparently


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was causing a problem, we let it,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I think, sit for a week, just seeing if it gets back to level.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

You could see the recovery relatively quickly, again,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

going back to the impression share in GSC.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Everything was moving back to this old baseline,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

if you see, for all domains.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And then we went back and just moved the script


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

to where it actually belongs, which is not in head,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

obviously.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Not in the head.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Surprise, surprise.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So that's interesting.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

So on that very high level, I think


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

this is a fantastic approach, clarifying the problem,


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

then making a hypothesis, working to falsify or verify


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

the hypothesis, and going through your tools


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

until you find the culprit, and then actually fixing that


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

based on what you find.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That makes a lot of sense.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's really cool.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Wow.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Holy moly.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Congratulations for figuring that one out.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That is an amazing fairy tale.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

It was a funny one.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Yeah.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

All right.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That's true.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Bastian, wow.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Thank you so, so much for telling me this story.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

That was really, really cool.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I do hope that these stories won't repeat themselves.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

I'm really grateful to have you here as a guest today.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Thanks for joining me.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Thanks for having me.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Much appreciated.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

And to all of you out there, I do


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

hope that this was interesting and you


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

learned a bit about an approach to actually fix


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

these kind of problems.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

If you liked the episode, press Like.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Let us know in the comments if you ever saw a problem that


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

was described very differently from the person coming to you


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

than what it was actually causing it.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Stay safe, stay healthy, and bye-bye.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache

Bye.


Hunting a heinous hreflang headache


Mobile-First Indexing | WMConf Lightning Talks

Hello and welcome to the Webmaster Conference Lightning Talk series.


This time, we will talk about mobile-first indexing.


How does mobile-first indexing work?


As many of you may already know, mobile-first indexing is an ongoing effort by Google for several years.


So, what is mobile-first indexing exactly?


Let's look at how Google indexing works.


First, Googlebot will crawl URLs from your site with the desktop and mobile user agent.


With the original desktop-first indexing, the indexing system will get the page information from the desktop page content.


Finally, the page will be shown in the search results if the information has enough relevance for user queries.


With mobile-first indexing, the indexing system will look at the mobile page instead of the desktop page for information.


Well, now that we know the difference between desktop and mobile-first indexing,


what challenges can occur with this mobile-first indexing on your site?


One possibility is that something is going wrong when we crawl with a mobile Googlebot.


The request might be treated differently by your server based on the user agent,


or something else might be going wrong when making a request to the mobile pages.


Then, if that happens, there will be little to no information that we can get from your pages,


and if that happens, we can't get the necessary signals to show your page in the search results.


Another possibility is that your mobile page is having content issues.


We might get less or maybe even incorrect information from your page,


which results in us getting less information about the page's relevance.


Both situations will prevent Google from serving your site well when your site is enabled for mobile-first indexing.


Now, that is something that you probably want to avoid.


So, how can you avoid issues like that?


For example, you may have put the following rule in robots.txt under your mobile site.


It tells Googlebot not to crawl pages under your mobile version.


Or, if you add any of these meta tags on your mobile pages, they tell Googlebot not to index these pages.


Those settings will prevent Googlebot from either crawling or indexing these pages.


So, please don't set any of the mobile pages you expect to appear in Google Search up like that.


For another example, if you put the following rule in robots.txt under your resources host,


it tells Google not to crawl any files under mobile-css.


If you add any of these meta tags on the mobile pages, they would tell Googlebot not to follow any of the links on these pages.


Those settings will prevent Googlebot from crawling the resources.


If you let Googlebot crawl resources for your desktop page, you should probably also let it crawl them for your mobile page.


Otherwise, it cannot understand your mobile page as well as your desktop page.


To conclude for mobile crawl issues, you need to check your robots.txt files,


and you also want to be careful with noindex and nofollow tags for indexing issues.


Please also check if your hosts have enough crawl capacity to handle as many mobile crawls as they handle desktop crawls.


Setting mobile page content correctly is as important as setting the mobile crawl correctly.


Our general suggestion is to make sure your primary content is the same on desktop and mobile versions.


Let's look at some cases where it might not be the same.


Let's say you have a desktop page that looks like this, with several images and some text.


But then you make your mobile version look like this, with only two images and very few text.


Users need to click the plus button to let the rest of the page load.


However, Googlebot won't click the button to load them, so all of the unloaded information is invisible to Googlebot.


A special note, if it's your intention to have less content on the mobile page,


please be aware that Google might not be able to serve your site as well as before mobile-first indexing.


That is because we cannot get the full information from your site as we did before.


Headings are also important for Googlebot to understand your page.


This is a good example of a heading. It uses the good old H1 tag.


Well, this is not a good example. Regardless of its class, Googlebot will treat it as if it is normal text rather than a heading.


It will then affect how Googlebot understands the page, so don't forget to use semantic heading tags on your mobile pages.


If you also care about image and video traffic of your site, you need to do some extra checks for them.


For example, this is a good example on how to define an image, while this is not.


Because the alt text is empty, it will be a bad experience for some users.


Neither is this one, because the alt text is not meaningful.


People don't know what the image is about just looking at the alt text.


So, please don't do that. Also, don't do it this way either. That's not even a semantic image tag.


Googlebot cannot index CSS images like that.


For images and videos, another important thing is to check their position on the page.


Let's say you have a desktop page like this, with the video as an easy-to-see position.


While on the mobile page, you put an ad on the top of the page like this.


Users need to scroll down a lot to finally see the video here.


Imagine what they will feel like if they were only searching for the video.


So, please don't let your mobile pages have such a bad user experience.


Finally, it is better to do some extra checks for invisible parts of your page.


They won't affect user experience, but they will affect how Googlebot understands them.


One such example of an invisible part of the page is structured data.


We suggest you keep structured data the same on desktop and mobile pages.


The other ones are meta descriptions. Please don't forget to add them to your mobile pages.


They matter a lot for Googlebot as well.


If you want to learn more about mobile-first indexing, check out the video description for more information.


And follow us on Twitter, at GoogleWMC, to stay tuned with more on the journey to mobile-first indexing.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Search Off the Record, a podcast coming to you from


The Story of Aleyda Solis

the Google Search team discussing all things search and having some fun along the way.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

My name is Gary, and I'm joined today by John Mueller from the Search Relations team, of


The Story of Aleyda Solis

which I'm also part of.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Hi, I'm John.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I love cheese.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Yeah, you do.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

For a while now, we've been thinking about bringing in more guests whose work inspires


The Story of Aleyda Solis

us.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

The list is very long, so it's highly unlikely that we'll be able to cover everyone, I guess,


The Story of Aleyda Solis

but I thought most will agree that we should absolutely start with Aleyda Solis.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Hi, Aleyda.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Hello, Gary.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Hello, John.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It's a pleasure to be here today.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Thank you very much for having me.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It's super nice to have you.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

We've known each other for a very long time, and it's always exciting to chat with you


The Story of Aleyda Solis

about random things, but especially about internet and search things.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Yes, indeed.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I'm very looking forward for our conversation today.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Are you nervous about our conversation?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

A little bit, I have to say.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I do a lot of podcasts, webinars, et cetera, but yes, in this case, it's going to be a


The Story of Aleyda Solis

little bit of a different experience for me.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And of course, you and John always make me nervous.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Don't ask me why, right?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

No, but I'm only trying a little to make people nervous.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Oh, well.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I don't know, Gary.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I don't know.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Maybe it's a bright light that she has in her face.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

That could be, yes.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It's very bright in your studio, and I don't know how I feel about it, so I just project


The Story of Aleyda Solis

this darkness from my corner of the world.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

That sounds very Sauron-like, Gary.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Thanks.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

That's very nice of you to say.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So as I said, we've known each other for a very long time, and when I first encountered


The Story of Aleyda Solis

you on the internet, you were already relatively well known.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

This was like, I don't know, like two centuries ago even.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So I was very curious about your background and how you came to be the Alayda Solis that


The Story of Aleyda Solis

everyone knows today.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So this whole podcast is, I was thinking to focus it around you and how you became the


The Story of Aleyda Solis

person you are today, the internet persona that you are today, and how can others become


The Story of Aleyda Solis

basically the new Alayda, for example, or a new Alayda.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And without further ado, let's start with a few questions.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Cool.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Okay.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So I have a question.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

When did you first encounter a computer?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So I remember, and it's likely, I believe at least the first time that I remember to


The Story of Aleyda Solis

have interacted or have seen a computer.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

In fact, it was a laptop.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It was my dad when I was around potentially eight years old or nine years old.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And he brought a laptop from work and it was a huge laptop, but for me it was a mind blowing


The Story of Aleyda Solis

machine.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And he had a blue screen and he was working on it and I had no idea what he was doing


The Story of Aleyda Solis

in it, but I was like, yeah, very impressed.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I actually asked my neighbor over just to take a look at it because we were like typical


The Story of Aleyda Solis

friends, right?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And shockingly or not, because this, we need to remember it was in Nicaragua in the eighties,


The Story of Aleyda Solis

he came over and because he was literally my dad's room at the time, like watching him


The Story of Aleyda Solis

type in the laptop, he left his bike a little bit too in the outdoor of my home and it got


The Story of Aleyda Solis

stolen.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So yes, it's not a nice story, but it's probably the reason of why I remember it indeed.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Was it one of those really old computers where you had only two colors on the screen?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Yes.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I remember playing very, very old games on those monitors and it was still exciting.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Those games back then were very entertaining in a very different way than today.


The Story of Aleyda Solis


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I have to say that later afterwards, potentially years after, right?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

But you know, like in children's time that you never know, but I remember then my dad


The Story of Aleyda Solis

taking me to his work and then me getting bored.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So he pretty much put me in an empty computer, not latte at the time and me playing Prince


The Story of Aleyda Solis

of Persia already.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So that was a little bit more advanced and I enjoyed so much and found it super, yes,


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I could spend there like four hours and me not wanting to go back home because I wanted


The Story of Aleyda Solis

to keep playing Prince of Persia.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Yeah, that was a very exciting game.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And then I remember a little later, maybe a few years later after Prince of Persia was


The Story of Aleyda Solis

big, we started seeing more of the internet around.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

When was the first time you encountered the internet?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Because for me it was relatively soon after my first encounter with Prince of Persia.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Interesting.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Yes.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So in my case, maybe it's because I didn't have a computer at home yet at that point,


The Story of Aleyda Solis

but it was from my neighbors.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I actually watched a lot of serious words and we were very engaged with the X-Files


The Story of Aleyda Solis

at that point.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So I remember them getting an internet connection and then they telling me, oh, you know that


The Story of Aleyda Solis

in the internet, we can try to look more about the X-Files and what happens in the series


The Story of Aleyda Solis

and what is true.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Because we thought that it was sort of a documentary, I guess, at that point rather than fiction.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So we actually made use of AltaVista.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I remember it to look for X-Files related information at that point in it.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Wait, so AltaVista was your favorite search engine?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Well, not favorite, it was what was available, I guess at the time.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And of course it was the one that was pretty fine in their computer.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And of course I had zero idea and zero knowledge pretty much at that point on how to look for


The Story of Aleyda Solis

more, install more.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It was not even my computer, right?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I wouldn't have there to do anything on it.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It's interesting that you mentioned AltaVista because that was also the first search engine


The Story of Aleyda Solis

that I used.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Oh, interesting.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I remember like my early days of the internet, I would go to Yahoo, like not AltaVista, but


The Story of Aleyda Solis

on Yahoo they had this page with new websites.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And you could spend like an hour or two and look at all the new websites that came out.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And thinking back now, it's like, well, let me look at all the new websites that happened


The Story of Aleyda Solis

since last week.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It's like, you have no chance.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So much stuff happening all the time.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

But back then it was like 10 new websites that came out and you can look at them.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Amazing.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And I still remember though also when I realized that there was something better than AltaVista.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And I remember that it was Metacroller or something like that.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And someone mentioned me, okay, yeah, AltaVista is nice, but have you seen this other search


The Story of Aleyda Solis

engine that, yeah, it's much better, better results, et cetera.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And I went and took a look at it and much cleaner too than AltaVista, Metacroller.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

But then after, I think it was a few years after, it was of course Google that was literally


The Story of Aleyda Solis

game changing.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I believe that I was already in the university first year or so, second year or so.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Yes.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And finding Google and that was actually mind blowing indeed.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I don't actually remember when I ran into Google.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It's so weird.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Thinking back now, it's like, you should have remembered when you first encountered Google


The Story of Aleyda Solis

kind of thing where he's like, oh, everything was better.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

But to me, in my mind, it just kind of subtly happened over time.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It was never like, oh, this is so much better than everything else before.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

For me, it's actually very memorable because I was extremely against Google in 98, 99 because


The Story of Aleyda Solis

it was way too simple.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It was way too different from the other search engines.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Actually, if you think of AltaVista, for example, they had very weird adverts sort of things


The Story of Aleyda Solis

on the search results page that were very often very annoying.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And I thought that that's how the internet should be.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Even if you went to Yahoo, for example, to the directory, you saw these banners and whatnots


The Story of Aleyda Solis

that were super annoying.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

But for me, that was the internet.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And then you went to Google, and it was this very simple interface with just four blue


The Story of Aleyda Solis

links and some snippets and whatever.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And that was very strange to me, very alien to go back to the X-file reference.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So how did you make your first website?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

When did you decide you need to be on the internet now?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So this is interesting.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And let's say a little bit of a serendipity type of thing.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I was already in my first year of university, so that was in 1999.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And they were given this free HTML course to all those students in the first year.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And then somehow at this time that they were given this course, I had another class.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So I was one of those few people who had this other extra class and I couldn't attend and


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I felt bad and I felt actually a little bit mad.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And I was like, no, I cannot get behind.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So I literally went and looked for the person who was teaching it and asked for the manual,


The Story of Aleyda Solis

HTML.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And then my teacher, by the way, was a second year student.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So pretty much I was like, oh, really want to learn this whatever.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And he was like, oh, can you at this time come around?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It's very simple, whatever.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I will try to give you tips of what I'm telling the others, whatever.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And I went and pretty much was blog notes and learning HTML tags.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And it was so very logical for me at that point.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And I did it.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And then this is a funny thing, right?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

The first website that I did was a website about marine turtles.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

They are quite a big thing in Nicaragua.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

There's a lot of efforts protecting them because people kill them and people eat their eggs,


The Story of Aleyda Solis

which is crazy.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Yeah.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And they say, okay, you need as a final project for the cruise, you need to do a website about


The Story of Aleyda Solis

something.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And I literally had no idea about what to do.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So I decided, oh, about marine turtles and why we need to protect them, resources, whatever,


The Story of Aleyda Solis

about them, facts about them.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And I ended up doing my first website about marine turtles and very likely not because


The Story of Aleyda Solis

of the quality of my code or how beautiful the website was, it ended up winning the first


The Story of Aleyda Solis

prize because there was a competition, but very likely because of the topic, right, that


The Story of Aleyda Solis

a lot of people really liked.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And yes, so I don't even remember what they gave it to me.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So I just remember that I won.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And because I won, I actually got, thanks to that, my first job proposal ever because


The Story of Aleyda Solis

it was Nicaragua, remember?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

This was like a small country.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It was like a family of another student who saw my website about marine turtles and he


The Story of Aleyda Solis

was the owner of a small ISP provider in Nicaragua.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And they had a web design department and they were needing new people.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And he thought my website was good enough to try to hire me for their web design department.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So I started to work part time in my second year of university as a web designer there


The Story of Aleyda Solis

because of that.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So yeah, it was like all very serendipity and that is how I started.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It started all pretty much.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So basically your first website was number one ranking from the start.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It's like you'd never started anywhere else, like number one ranking.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And thanks for the content, not even the quality of the code.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So yeah, that says a lot indeed.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Content quality.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It's also interesting because it feels like you're one of the few SEOs I know who actually


The Story of Aleyda Solis

has formal training in publishing on the internet.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Most of the SEOs I know, they are self-taught from the very beginning.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

They self-teach their HTML skills and whatnot.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

But you actually learned that in university.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Yes, they taught it to me.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I'm unfortunately not a self learner.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So smart to do that, I'm afraid.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I needed to be taught to start.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

So then you were working in an office at that point?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Yes, I was shockingly working in an office for quite a while.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

In fact, all my work life until at an agency and then also in-house.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And then it was until 2012 that I got my first job offer as an in-house SEO.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And actually one of the things that really took my attention at the time is like, oh,


The Story of Aleyda Solis

and you're going to be based in Madrid, but you are going to be able to work remotely


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from home because all the team members were spread across Europe.


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And for me, that was exciting, but also at the same time, I was scared.


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I was very scary because I was very used to the office at that point and having a boss


The Story of Aleyda Solis

so they could see that I was working and doing my work with it.


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Then I realized that all what I believed and this cultural facture or context, which I


The Story of Aleyda Solis

had been developing myself so far, was broken.


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And I could very well work from anywhere I wanted, I liked, and I started and never went


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back.


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Even when I changed jobs, et cetera, I became independent.


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My one criteria was like, I want to continue to be able to work remotely.


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So when you became independent, did you have an office for yourself or did you also work


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kind of from home and remotely?


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You know what, at some point I also went to a co-working place, but it was pretty much


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to socialize and interact with other people.


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Those days when I needed a little bit more socialization, but actually when I actually


The Story of Aleyda Solis

wanted to make things happen and do in-depth work and audit analysis, et cetera, I needed


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to stay at home because I needed to be in a quiet space.


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I find it very humorous that you were working in an office because you are one of the, you


The Story of Aleyda Solis

know, biggest proponents for remote working.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And you also have this site remoters.net where you can search for remote jobs.


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It's actually a beautiful site.


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If you don't know the site, you should check it out even just for the looks of the site,


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if nothing else.


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So yeah, I find it very humorous that you were working in an office in some really weird


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way.


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Yeah.


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I think I'm saying it myself right now about that, but I work in very big offices.


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So for example, Nicaragua, before coming to Spain to study here, I used to be a web designer


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slash front end web developer, the biggest newspaper there.


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So it was like a huge office full of journalists, et cetera.


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And yes, I was in a very small room with the other web team, et cetera.


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But yes, it was like surrounded by people like that.


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And I have to say that sometimes I miss that interaction and be able to be surrounded by


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people, especially now with our situation.


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But I have to say that it also allowed me to understand when I started to work remotely,


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it blew my mind that how gate changing that was for me already at that point, even like


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I was based in Madrid, but that opened up the opportunity for me to start working for


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many brands from all over the world, from the US, from all over Europe, from UK, Germany,


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et cetera.


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And then it also made me realize how game changing it could have been for me 10 years


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before.


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And maybe I wouldn't have needed to leave Nicaragua to develop myself professionally


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if I had had the opportunity.


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So we started Remotors with Elisa Martinez, who's an SEO here from Spain, by the way,


The Story of Aleyda Solis

a friend of mine in 2015 because of that, because a lot of people were asking us about,


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oh, how do you work remotely for even for Spanish people at the point was mind blowing


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already.


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And so I realized, OK, we really need to make this happen to allow other people to do it


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in case they want or in case they need.


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I as someone from a development country myself, I understand that there are people who are


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very skilled, very knowledgeable, who unfortunately are not able to have access to jobs that they


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could otherwise very easily have access to if they were born in another country.


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So with Remotors, that is one of my goals, to facilitate the access from people all over


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the world to this type of jobs.


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And SEO in particular, I believe that is one of those areas where is that very and web


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development too and copywriters.


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So there are certain areas that can, you know, you don't need formal training, for example,


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they don't, shouldn't ask you for a certificate or something like that.


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So anybody and anywhere in the world with the right type of knowledge and experience


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should be able to have access to amazing jobs and have a fulfilling career independently


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of their location.


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I imagine that being remote also allows the person to develop themselves into a more visible


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person on Twitter or social or the internet in general.


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Do you think that being remote help you in any sense to become so visible?


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Because I can't think of a single SEO who doesn't know your name or who you are.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

You are insanely visible.


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I do think so, Gary, because actually that one of the reasons why I went so much to conferences


The Story of Aleyda Solis

before an event, etc, it was to fulfill that socialization need that I didn't have because


The Story of Aleyda Solis

I would have been otherwise stuck at home working all the time.


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And since I had flexibility to working while traveling, which can be tricky, by the way,


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you need a lot of self-discipline, but once that you master it, it is amazing.


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It can be an amazing mix.


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I decided to go all in.


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And that definitely allowed me the opportunity to start meeting people from all over the


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world and network with people.


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Sometimes it was people that I first met online over Twitter, for example, that is a platform


The Story of Aleyda Solis

that I use a lot.


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But in other cases, it was the other way around, right?


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People that I initially had met at a conference somewhere and then I started following and


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saw that they had an amazing community around them, etc, etc.


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So yes, I do believe that this has a big, let's say, it's one of the big reasons for


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it, for sure.


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What kind of things would you recommend for other people who are looking to becoming a


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little bit more active in the area of SEO?


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Amazing.


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So that is a really good question, John.


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And literally I don't know, I received like dozens of emails every month asking me about


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this.


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And that is why I decided to create learningseo.io.


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That is a free website featuring a roadmap of the different areas of SEOs where you can


The Story of Aleyda Solis

go and if you're starting an SEO or just want to, let's say, like advance or see the options


The Story of Aleyda Solis

for you to continue developing yourself as an SEO, go and take a look at the different


The Story of Aleyda Solis

areas and then resources that are reliable, that are free also to access and tools that


The Story of Aleyda Solis

are free and start using them to focus your knowledge much more or decide to, let's say,


The Story of Aleyda Solis

expand your knowledge in all the areas too.


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This is the thing, right?


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I mean, when I started in SEO, there wasn't many resources at that time.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

It was difficult, right?


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I remember going to SEO most, webmaster, Word, et cetera, et cetera.


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Now it's a little bit the other way around.


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There's so much content and it's difficult to know where to start.


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It's also difficult to know what is reliable and what is not and where you should focus,


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right?


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And there's the beauty of SEO.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Like if you want to focus only on content, you can.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

If you're more technical and want to be a technical SEO, you can.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

If you like the promotional marketing side of things, you can become a link builder.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Why not?


The Story of Aleyda Solis

And if you want to do it all and you want to be a strategist, you can.


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The industry is already mature enough in order to do that.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

There's a wealth of information.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Hopefully with that resource, I help at least partially to solve that need of new people


The Story of Aleyda Solis

trying to get access to information.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

In many cases also, we see a lot of courses, et cetera, that are paid.


The Story of Aleyda Solis

They also have a non-trivial price for many people, especially those that don't live in


The Story of Aleyda Solis

Europe or the US, for example, more developed countries.