As SEO tools get outpaced by Google's constantly evolving signals, what SEO data is worth making bets on?

1. THE SEO CIRCLE OF TRUST
Matthew Brown
MJBLabs
@MatthewJBrown MatthewBrownPDX

2. Where we went wrong

3. SEOs and ou
r
“data”

4. Google

5. We aren’t ‘proving’ ranking fac
tors.
Solving algorithm updates end
ed
with Caffeine.

6. Server Logs Search Co
sole

7. Server Logs

8. Google’s Pipeline
Optimizing this
means less crap hits the
parser/index

9. Googlebot needs a diet
“Crawl budget” isn’t the issue here
GSC won’t tell you
Server logs don’t lie!

10. Buy this product! (not an ad)

11. Log Timeframes/Splits
Small timeslices are easier to work w
ith
Compare different months, 7d, 14d
Google’s crawl cycles aren’t static

12. What I’m NOT looking for
Don’t freak out about a few
UTMs.
Everyone will be mad at you.

13. Match up links with crawl
Crawled pages and
pages with links
should close to 1:1

14. Find and break Googlebot’s h
abits
4xx/5xx/Soft 404
s:
catnip for
Googlebot
Do not get me
started on Bingb

15. Here’s the good stuff

16. More good stuff

17. What we did:
No more API endpoints for Go
ogle
Optimized IA for a smaller # of
hubs

18. robots
First noindex THEN robots.txt bl
ock

19. Parameters
Browse/Searc
h
entry points
have link valu
e.
*Block carefull
y*

20. What we did:
Left main Browse q= URL alon
e
Blocked all ?q=
Unblocked ?q= that had links

21. The Results:
noindex and robots.txt block

22. Important note: Patience
noindex and robots.txt block
changes implemented here
The Yikes Zo
ne

23. My takeaways:
Shoot for the fewest # of pages
per keyword target
Ruthlessly eliminate everything el
se
from Google’s crawl – Quarterly

24. Search
Console

25. about
Rankings
Crawl Stats
Links
Reliability

26. Good!

28. Oh No! (times 6000)

29. URLs
Do they receive traffic?
Links? (this can get tricky)
Internal searches?
Social shares?
Cited/referenced by other pages?

31. The results:

32. Takeaways:
Segment XML sitemaps into as many in
dex
files as you can for granular data
Qualify your sitemap URLs based on m
etrics

33. Thoughts

34. My best recent tech SEO
successes were based
on server log data
(with a little GSC).

35. data is going to get
worse.
GSC isn’t getting better.
Your own data is the key