8/10/2020: SEO Rewind

I’ve compiled a list of the most important news and opportunities in SEO from last week. Ready for you on Monday morning so you can have a head start for the workweek ahead.

Sitebulb 4.0 has been released! It’s packed with new powerful features while making it more accessible and easy to use.

The most significant additions are:

• structured data extraction and validation
• point and click content extraction (no need to fiddle with XPath and such)
• subdomains crawling
• ability to mark hints as fixed or ignored
• plenty of bug fixes

For a quick visual overview, you can watch this recap:

For a more comprehensive overview, here are the full release notes:

Sitebulb Latest Updates and Release Notes

Download the latest Sitebulb update, and catch up on all the updates in the funniest Release Notes in the world (of all UK based SEO tools whose name sounds like lightbulb).

Sitebulb

Improved internal linking thanks to Yoast SEO 14.7 Yoast recently improved internal linking suggestions in the premium version of their WordPress plugin. When adding internal links, it’s now supposed to give you more relevant suggestions. Most importantly, it’ll suggest adding links to relevant taxanomy pages (categories and tags) and work across all languages.

Demo of new features:

Release notes:

Yoast SEO 14.7: Smarter and faster internal linking suggestions in Premium • Yoast

Smart and fast internal linking in premium, meta data for web stories and well-prepared for WordPress 5.5: this is Yoast SEO 14.7!

YoastWillemien Hallebeek

In the future, we’ll be able to improve page loading times by skipping the rendering of off-screen content. Content-visibility is a new CSS property that lets you defer rendering of off-screen content.

Content-visibility is now available only in Chromium 85, but we can expect it to be adopted by other modern browsers. This is something to keep an eye on since it brings promising performance boosts, expecially to long-form pages.

content-visibility: the new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance

The CSS content-visibility property enables web content rendering performance benefits by skipping rendering of off-screen content. This article shows you how to leverage this new CSS property for faster initial load times, using the auto keyword. You will also learn about the CSS Containment Spec a…

web.devUna Kravets

Dan Petrovic released a Chrome extension that labels paywalled content in Google’s search results. This started an interesting discussion on whether paywalled content in search results should be labeled or not.

Historically, there were a couple of approaches to handling (and limit access to) paywalled content, but it will be a growing pain since more and more websites have their content behind paywalls.

From the user perspective, clicking on an unmarked search result to hit a paywall is far from a great user experience. However, what’s the right approach here? That’s something we’ll need to figure out in the forthcoming years.

More about the extension:

Paywall Label for Google Search - Dejan Chrome Extension

Unlabelled paywall content in search provides bad user experience.I’ve been trying to do something about this by raising awareness and received significant public support. I’m sorry Google but to me this is simply not OK. I searched for cyclone QLD news and keep clicking on pages with paywall a

DEJAN MarketingDan Petrovic

As SEOs, we need to make sure that the recommendations we give are grounded in reality. JR Oakes pointed out that many technical and page speed audits recommend implementing security headers such as Content Security Policy. Still, even large websites rarely use it because it’s tough to implement.

I have that in my technical checklist (probably out of habit), and it seems like a good time to revisit.

Check out the full thread here (spans across multiple tweets):

See you on Monday with the next Rewind!