The last column now shows robots.txt status, lines parsed, How many valid directives that robots.txt file has, and any ones that are not understood, for each URL tested. #seo#robotstxt
For all the long and rambling articles about HCU and EEAT, some of the best advice I have heard is just 5 words long and from the Lyrics of a 1970's musical.
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So I wrote a rambling article about it...
@simoncox it's something I have been thinking about a while (I emailed an early version of this to someone back in March 2020 😀)
Feedback does tend to be "it's complex", but I wonder if that's my poor communication explaining it?
I don't think it's complex for most, simpler use cases personally, only gets complicated when it needs too. But it's a fair criticism and if it's worse than the current status quo...
@simoncox yep, very much of the mind it's always going to be a bit complicated, so you need to embrace that and make it as simple as possible, whilst flexible enough to work.
Excitement at #brightonseo as I walk into the venue this morning and get scanned by the girls they say “oh another Simon Cox”.
This is bad news for me as I can’t get into the serps top 10 with my name anymore as there are more famous me’s out there now. If one of them is easing into my #seo territory there may be a scuffle.
@simoncox fwiw, you're the only Simon Cox that matters in my book. Definitely top 10 Simon material too, and I am sure I probably know more that 10 Simons. (Admittedly one of those Simons got fell into addiction and stole burgled our other friends house and car when they were meant to be house sitting, so that one is an easy win for you.😀)
Migrated my free knowledge graph search tool: https://tamethebots.com/tools/knowledgegraph this morning to the newer cloud enterprise knowledge graph api, so some small changes:
@simoncox be super interesting how this all pans out, I have a general feeling it's going to be a limited success, no matter how clever it ends up being, because it's going to give you what you exactly what asked for.
There's a whole bunch of fables & fairy tales about that. It's like a digital Fae folk.
Humans are good at reading into the issue & giving you what you actually needed, over requested. And perhaps know the pitfalls & can add safety rails & say no when it's a bad plan.
@simoncox and there's then the episode where someone asks for something like "a whole ton of burgers" and the replicator does what it's asked, the shuttle fills up and hijinks ensue.
I often feel a little uncomfortable with some of the glee people display when sites get smashed with updates or manual actions.
Some of the more visible pushers of bad practices probably deserve it more. Some of the should know better but do it anyway for gAinZ™ bro crowd too.
But there's a large section of real people put real effort into something, their 'crime' being listening to the wrong person, without the knowledge to really know they were the wrong person.
For some of these people, they may have invested a significant amount of their savings. For some the sudden drop represents real and serious issues to their day to day financial wellbeing.
This isn't a criticism of updates, a course correction was sorely needed. But I just try to remember that although the output might be bad, the very real humans behind it (even if they were churning it out with ai) may well not be.
@simoncox yeah, for sure. I guess there can never be a clean line that neatly separates the truly deserves it from the truly didn't. The web just isn't that clean, & a ton of sites will have some good, some bad.
Some sites will deserve it, totally, but it's still devastating to possibly naive, or misguided people.
It might be fair, if only to the folks who had taken the time to do it right, so to speak, whose sites were crowded out by them. But must suck to experience what feels like a rug pull.
Glee over justification= appropriate schadenfreude
And I think it's legitimate to feel relieved to see, say a dodgy agency get hit
But I still think their clients perhaps deserve a little kindness, if they truly didn't know better. And many don't, that's why they hire an agency to do that. Especially galling if things seemed to be working for you, so you trusted that agency more.