Digital Rage

Today Jeff Byer (@globaljeff) talks about using Descript to record this episode and its impact on podcast production, he reviews a new agency website built with Nuxt.js, and he discusses more JAMstack options he is considering for his customers.

Descript podcast software https://spatzek.studio/ https://www.getpostman.com/ https://buttercms.com/ https://snipcart.com/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-16/

Transcript

Digital Rage

 [00:00:00]Jeff Byer: [00:00:02] Welcome to digital rage, the podcast about all things internet and the people that make it great. My name is Jeff Byer, and today we have a special episode because I am testing a new tool. So, this will be a podcast about podcasting and, the technology that I'm using to record podcasts.

[00:00:29] So. Today, we're using D script and I am recording directly into D script. I added my intro music and did a little volume editing and envelope editing there, but, now I'm recording directly into the app. So this feels a little strange. What I'm. What I use for all the previous episodes is I have my, my hardware setup, which I described last time.

[00:00:58] Is my microphone plugged in [00:01:00] to a Scarlet to it, to USB interface. And this now is me talking into my microphone directly into the D script app to downloadable app. they have a great tutorial that teaches you how to go through and get started recording a podcast episode. And editing the text.

[00:01:23] We'll edit the audio, which is really cool. So, as I'm recording this, I don't know exactly how this is going to turn out, but we're gonna go through and, see if we can produce a whole episode within the D script app. Okay. So previously here was my production process. I would set up the microphones.

[00:01:44] So there was a digital input, which had been, internet based, mostly Skype, sometimes Hangouts, and sometimes an actual telephone call through FaceTime. Then that would record as two separate tracks [00:02:00] into logic and logic is a pro audio. A nonlinear editing system or software pro level software for Mac.

[00:02:12] And that's what I use to record a lot of music and music production, things like that. So, I'm familiar with all the pro level tools and I do a minimum amount of pro level audio editing within logic. Very little effects, anything like that. It's mostly raw. I didn't want to, I wanted to make the production of the podcast as simple and smooth as possible so that it wasn't a huge production.

[00:02:40] Time-suck which most podcasts, producers all agree is the best, the best, philosophy, which is make it simple, keep it simple and try and automate as much as you can. So the biggest benefit to D script is that it does a [00:03:00] automated transcript as you'd go. Ah, I can't see it as I'm talking, but it does process it on the backend, and then it will, provide it into this project so that I can edit, once it's all done.

[00:03:14] So back to my old process in logic, I would record both tracks. The one track would be me, the other track would be anything from external resources. So that's where my interviews would show up. And what I usually do would do is do record the intro. Break the audio, put a music over the break so that it introduces the next segment, which is the interview.

[00:03:44] And then we go into the interview. So I have music playing in the intro, music playing at the transition to the section, the new, interview section, and then a outro. Outro music with [00:04:00] my voiceover of, where to find podcasts, notes and things like that. And then I would bounce the whole thing to an MP three file and post it in Dropbox.

[00:04:13] From there. I log into WordPress and create a new episode based on, you know, our naming convention. That's now just the episode number guest, and then a highlight topics, which I, I somewhat use as keywords. And then, upload it into WordPress. WordPress automatically sends it to cast dos, which is our, audio hosting provider.

[00:04:46] Casios will then automatically do a transcription, and then I would create the post. I would put in all the, manual show notes that I had, links and mentions and things like that. [00:05:00] And then on the bottom of the page is the transcript. Now the dose transcript is also automated. And it's not very clean at all.

[00:05:12] And so, I do a little bit of editing on the transcript, but I don't go through the whole thing cause episodes are usually 30 to 45 minutes. And, it's just not efficient for me to go through and read all that text. So I basically take, for the most part, what they give me, paste it into WordPress.

[00:05:30] Set the the schedule to post on Monday morning and that's it. On Monday morning, WordPress will, we'll publish the post. The post will get published to the RSS feed and all of the podcatchers, including iTunes or Apple podcasts now would grab the new episode. From the RSS feed and feed it through their channels.

[00:06:00] [00:05:59] So it's pretty efficient, but still a kind of production heavy. So here is the advantage that I'm hoping is going to be, I'm going to make this process easier if I keep using D script. So I'm hoping that the automated transcripts are better. I'm hoping I can keep this platform as a template so that all I need to do is come in and plug in, you know, new recordings and export them.

[00:06:35] Everything gets saved to the cloud automatically. So, I don't need to worry about, you know, using resources on my computer. And don't need to worry about transferring files from my computer bouncing out to another platform. So, all that said, this is totally experimental and I don't know how this is going to go.

[00:07:00] [00:06:59] So that is that for now. That's why this episode is going to sound a little bit different. And I think next week I will give my. Full rundown on how the experience was and if it saved me any time in my podcast production. So on with the show, a today is going to be more, in real life type of, type of data, things that I've been working on this week that are interesting and hopefully the, audience can, can, speak about and comment about.

[00:07:32] So. First thing is on communication arts. they send, you know, inspiration emails and stuff, and they sent this website for a, a, a creative studio. And the, the website address is spat sec.studio. And so anytime a, a studio or an agency posts a a. A portfolio site. I like to go in [00:08:00] and take a look and see what they're doing.

[00:08:02] So they built this site on Nuxe and the first thing I did is like, okay, perfect. I can see what SEO impact that using knucks directly in, in a live environment is going to do for their SEO. And sure enough, I pull it into SEMrush and there is no organic SEO, nothing cause you can't see their content.

[00:08:27] It is all client side rendered and not server-side rendered. So they're not using a, a static site generator. So obviously Nuxe native, you know, that just confirms that that would not be a good solution for any type of Project that requires some sort of SEO or organic traffic, but that said, I believe that that's not one of their requirements because they are getting a ton of backlinks and a ton of attention from the [00:09:00] design community just based on the design and functionality of the website itself.

[00:09:05] So that's something to keep in mind. for me, since I do sell, you know, their, their agency is strictly creative and my agency is a more functional, real world SEO, building, building functional sites that accomplish business objectives. So they don't necessarily need that. So that being said, they're getting a ton of attention in the design world.

[00:09:29] So they've, you know, they're designers for designers and, and you know, their real world clients are, they look like pretty big brands that don't really need the, the big time SEO exposure. So. Just, a little interesting perspective that I had, based on this site. One other thing that I noticed about this site, it may be just because it's getting a ton of attention right now and, and it's getting a lot of simultaneous users, but it is very slow.

[00:09:59] It takes forever [00:10:00] to load. They've got humongous graphics in there, and I can tell that they did do a good bit of optimization on the images, but it's just, it's totally render blocking. Every page is blank with text that says, loading. While each page and each section is loading. It's actually a one page project.

[00:10:22] They changed the URLs and they have the content structured into different pages and sections, but it behaves as a one page site. It doesn't refresh. It loads asynchronously as you click through the project. So, yeah, that was just intro. A little interesting thing. brings up another point that, Google Chrome is going to start putting badges, speed badges on, on websites.

[00:10:50] So if it's a slow loading page, you're gonna get a little speed badge thing that it's, it typically is loading slow on your specific device. [00:11:00] I haven't seen one yet. I'm going to dig it a little bit further and see if it's actually. W you know, when it's coming out officially and, and when we'll start seeing that I do performance audits on every one of my sites.

[00:11:12]I know which specific sites that I have now that, that do need

Today Jeff Byer (@globaljeff) talks about backlinks inspired by the Search Engine Journal Show with Julie Joyce, training your brain to remember inspired by Thomas Oppong, and more tech talk.

Show Links

Julie Joyce on Paid Links, Top Tools, Cheap Link Building Ideas & More [PODCAST] How to Train Your Brain to Remember Almost Anything Rode NT-USB Versatile Studio-Quality USB Cardioid Condenser Microphone MENS GV 005 Samsung QN65Q70RAFXZA Flat 65-Inch QLED 4K Q70 Series Ultra HD Smart TV with HDR and Alexa Compatibility (2019 Model) Rode RODECaster Pro Podcast Production Studio NETGEAR Nighthawk AX12 12-Stream Wifi 6 Router (RAX200) - AX11000 Tri-Band Wireless Speed (Up to 10.8 Gbps)

Transcript

Jeff Byer 00:06 Welcome to digital rage the podcast about all things internet and the people that make it great. My name is Jeff Byer and today we do not have a guest. Again reached out to a few people, , lots of, you know, too busy to talk, couple of non responses, you know, so, , I don't have all day to do guest outreach so I apologize. But a, this'll be another, , what's going on and what am I working on type of episode. So, , what , happened this week, we hired a couple more people, a designer and a, a Shopify developer and great contrast. The designer is really slow and turning out terrible work and the Shopify developer is fast and awesome. So, , really happy with that because the Shopify good. Shopify developers are kind of like good web WordPress developers. There are a ton out there, but when you find a good one, you got to keep them. Jeff Byer 01:08 So I mean, I'm paying a premi, but he's very good. So that guy is doing great for me. He is, , is turning out stuff, you know, basically today he did a ton of stuff already, , which would have taken a week with my previous developers. So very happy with that. , the designer, not so much, , going back to my trusted designer that, , is a little slower but much more detailed and a much more on-brand. , so, and this designer, , I got this guy on Upwork and , he's, , he's a premi designer. His, his prices is, , right around $40 an hour. , which you know, is relatively not high at all if you're going to think about hiring somebody or getting a senior level designer. But my, I've, you know, I've got my, my print process designer that's doing it for $16 an hour and, , I have other offers for people that turn out some really good work at $24. Jeff Byer 02:13 So paying this guy $40 for super slow turnaround and not that great at work. , I believe I'm just going to cut them loose and go to the next person on my short list. So that's what's going on at Jeff buyer inc. , so a couple of things. , listen to a podcast this week. , Julie Joyce was the, was the guest and she owns a backlink company. And I loved what she was saying. And, , one of the things that I took away from it was that it's w that was a big truck. Sorry if you heard that. One of the things I took away from it was that she said, even though backlinks paid backlinks are against Google's guidelines, they still work. And I've heard this countless times, they still work, you know, private blogging networks, very forbidden. And if, you know, if they're obvious, they're going to get shut. Jeff Byer 03:16 You know, Google is going to be able to recognize him and penalize him. But the newer ones that are well done, that have quality content, they're working. And there's several use cases out there. I don't, I'm not suggesting that you follow these tactics. I'm not suggesting it for my clients and I'm not doing them for my clients. But it was very interesting and I wanted to talk to her about it cause she, she disclaims to every one of her backlink customers that this is against Google guidelines and they still proceed anyway. , so that's how she got into this specialty and niche of backlinks because her clients, even though she said she doesn't advise it, her clients said we want it anyway. Very interesting business to be in. So I wanted to talk to her about that. She got back to me, said she's super busy and we should reconnect in January. Jeff Byer 04:14 So then I saw a medi article titled, let me just pull it up so I can give you the title, how to train your brain to remember almost anything by Thomas APO. So Thomas, I reached out to him and he hasn't gotten back to me, but , I really found this article interesting and wanting to learn more about the process and how he came about learning all of this. , so one method that he talks about, I'm sorry, I'm having an indigestion problem. , one method he talks about is spaced repetition, which is just repeating what you, what you took in. And so, , in, in also in small chunks. But what I, I've kind of been doing that with audio books that I really love and would love to just have automatic recall for a lot of business process books and, and things like that. Jeff Byer 05:15 So I keep, I re, you know, several times a year I will re reread on audible a book that I, that is on my short list of ones that I really want to remember. So, , he says that's one of the things that you can do, but the other is a 50, 50 rule. The 50, 50 rule. Very interesting. And probably going to be where the, where my , my content process goes from here on out deciding what to write on, what to, what to talk about the time that you have dedicated to learn a new skill. 50% of the time is learning and then the other 50% of the time is teaching somebody else or explaining it to somebody else. And that's what I just did with this article because I was explaining it poorly. And then I went to the article and just said, Oh, the 50, 50 rule, learn it and then teach it. Jeff Byer 06:11 And so that is something, you know, not only is repetition a way to stimulate your memory, but being able, having to recall it and teach it, especially in a podcast or any video or especially on a, on a long form blog post, it's going to be, , going to be detailed and referenced and cited, you know, citing all of your resources and stuff. You're definitely going to take that in to your longterm memory. So explains the, the, the biology that once you listen to a audio book for instance, and you'd take the information in and it's there for a limited time. And if you don't actually do anything with it, it'll just go away. And so I can't tell you how many times I've taken, , a course on a new, on a new programming language or something. And you know, in the while I'm in the course and I'm working with it, I recall the things that I learned in previous chapters and I'm like, okay, now I'm recalling it, now I'm doing it. Jeff Byer 07:21 And by the end of it it's like, all right, got it. If I don't use it, then I go back to square one. It's like, okay, how do we start? What's the, you know, the little stuff, just like the context, like, you know, HTML was easy for me because once I learned it, I just kept hammering on it and hammering on it. And you know, back then there was no, no templates or are bootstrapping or anything like that. You had to actually type in the HTML tag in the beginning of your header or beginning of your docent to build an HTML page. So going from that level of detail, from starting out, you know, that's where I, I got my gain, my skills and in HTML. And then, , one of the first adopters for CSS, I had to learn CSS by scrap, by scratch. Jeff Byer 08:12 , you know, Java script, vanilla Java script was, was the way everybody was doing things back in the day. So, , so the, this, , the ways that he's explained in this article on how to retain information into longterm memory, they're starting to make sense to me because after reading about all of these different ways to do it, I've realized that the things that I've retained from my career in the past have been following these different guidelines and these different roles. So I thought it was a very interesting read. And as soon as I find something like this that's inspirational or, , something that, that I'd like to talk about on the podcast, I reach out to the author to see if they're willing to come on. So that's what I did. I haven't heard back, , Lily Ray just posted something on Twitter. So why don't I bring that up because that was completely relevant to what we're talking about right now. Jeff Byer 09:12 Let me go to my notifications cause she liked the comment. Okay. So she said, , Googl

Today Jeff Byer (@globaljeff) talks about his experiment with workspaces in Chrome Dev Tools, the Shopify universe, upcoming project launches, real-world project issues, and tech talk.

Show Links

Chrome Dev Tools - Workspaces https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/google-chrome-workspace/ CCPA - https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa Fact Sheet, pdf

Transcript

Jeff Byer    00:06    Welcome to digital rage, the podcast about all things internet and the people that make it great. My name is Jeff Byer and I know last episode I have promised you guests but uh, that didn't happen. You know, people are busy, things are happening and uh, you know, just didn't get around to it. I did have an interview scheduled, we had our <inaudible> in our call  

Jeff Byer    00:30    and there was a misunderstanding. This a, I believe a the person involved was expecting some sort of a uh, you know, get to know ya. Uh, cause I sales call and I was expecting it to be an interview. So a little bit of a miscommunication. But um, anyway, I do have a ton of things to talk about. So this will be an episode full of stuff. I like to say stuff because some of it is crap set of, some of it's not. So let's get right into it. First thing is I was playing around and in Chrome and, and the dev tools and just futzing around and came across the workspaces in dev tools and thought, okay, this is interesting. Why would, why would they have a, you know, invite somebody to put their file structure inside of Chrome dev tools if it doesn't actually make any live, live edits as you go.  

Jeff Byer    01:41    Because as most developers know, whenever you get to a live website and you go into dev tools, you can modify all of the code you want and change the display of, of that website. You know, change the content, anything you want, run experiments, even if it's not your site but only you can see it. And as soon as you close dev tools or refresh the page, all those edits are gone. And it goes back to the way it is on the live server. And I do use that sometimes to one. If I'm trying to get a screenshot and I want to modify things for the actual screenshot, I'll go in, remove modules, remove ads and stuff like that. But on my own sites, I use it just to play around and see, you know, if there's something visually or content wise that I want to accomplish, how fast it would be to make that adjustment and just kind of play around in dev tools before I open up, uh, you know, my editor editing environment and go ahead and go through with the change.  

Jeff Byer    02:45    It also helps me to, to create estimates on what it's going to take to accomplish certain things requested by my client. So I get into this and I've read a couple of articles and I go through the Google tutorial on how to use Chrome tools and the whole time, uh, I'm going through these tutorials and obviously it says, okay, you know, it's, you'll be able to save the changes if you use it in, in your local environment and you add your local pho folder for that environment. So I was like, okay, that's fine, but it, uh, it's very limited and uh, I didn't see any way if you are going to use a SAS or any type of, of pre compiler that it just didn't have a way to really integrate those unless you had another third party script going. So the whole time I'm going through this tutorials, like who the hell would use this?  

Jeff Byer    03:47    It's just basic. If you had a basic site with no preprocessing prop, pre-processing, no minification and uh, just static something, I don't even know what, um, that's what you'd use. So I went down a rabbit hole on that and found myself completely disappointed. So moving on. Um, so today I added another team member to my Shopify partner program. Uh, another developer that's going to help me launch these two big projects that we're launching this month. And so the month of November is going to be a huge month here for us. And so we needed to bring on extra help. And the way Shopify partners, the partner system on Shopify works is that if, uh, I'm going to take on a new client that has an existing store, I go find the existing stores, my Shopify address, then I request access to that through my partner portal. And then the owner of that store is able to verify and then, uh, I get, I gain access through the partner portal.  

Jeff Byer    05:05    If the customer just puts in my email address and sends me access, even if it's the exact same address, it does not, uh, it's not available in my portal. So it's, uh, it's just a little quirky thing. I'm sure there's plenty of reasons on the back end or privacy issues or security issues or anything like that that, that takes that into account I guess. Because you know, anybody can put in anybody's email address and then you can accept and, and, but not really have access. I don't really understand the details of why it's separate, but it's separate. So, um, with adding a new team member, um, you know, I take privacy and my accounts very, very seriously, especially when hiring outsourced developers. So I create account specific for them, you know, server accounts, user accounts, things like that. And for this one, um, the developers first request was just to send me the access and what that assumes is that he wanted to log in as me through my account and take a look at everything.  

Jeff Byer    06:20    And that doesn't really sit with me very well, uh, for plenty of different reasons. Obviously security and, and you know, my, my customers who are, the admins can see my logins. And so if something happens while I'm logged in or near anything, it's just, I don't want it on me personally as, as a, you know, possible vulnerability. But the great thing is through the partner program, all of my, all of my accounts are in my partner program and when I log in, it shows that it's my company that's locked in, a representative of my company that's in there doing changes. And that's much better as far as, uh, my clients are concerned and I'm concerned. So the, the great thing was it the easy way to, there's an easy way to add people. You just add staff members to your partner portal, then each of those staff members, you can define their access but then they have access to all of your partners sites.  

Jeff Byer    07:24    And this hire today was not for for one specific type but for three of them that are in my partner portal. And so it was very convenient that I just had to get his Shopify email address, the email address that he uses for Shopify and he now has access to uh, to make changes to all of my customer accounts, which is, which is very convenient for me because it's one single point of access. He can access all of them. Now if something happens or if I don't like the worker or if I'm just moving on to a different developer, remove him and he wrote it, he doesn't have any access to them anymore and if he's going to ask them, access them currently he has to go through my partner portal. So a very cool thing. Uh, just thought that was really interesting cause it's, it's kind of backwards from how you access how you grant access to a customer's store rather than through a partner in, through my company.  

Jeff Byer    08:27    So that was fun. Um, another piece of information, uh, was regarding the, the California consumer consumer privacy act CC P a. So this is coming on January 1st and uh, I'm making sure that all of my, all of my accounts are aware of this and so that they're prepared and know that it's coming. And so digging into the fact sheet of the CCPA, the here's the requirements. So, uh, E not a lot of my customers actually require this, but for the ones that do, I'm just confirming cause I don't know the ins and outs of everything that they do. Uh, I have web stats and that's it. I don't know how the business is run specifically. I don't know revenue numbers cause they're mostly private businesses. But here are the, here's the, the requirements. So businesses are subject to the CCP. A, if one or more of the following, our true has gross Avenue S sorry, I'm having trouble speaking today.  

Jeff Byer    09:47    Let's try this again. If the following are true, has gross annual revenues in excess of $25 million, um, buys, receives or sells the personal information of 50,000 or more customers, households or devices. So that one's interesting because when I first skimmed through it and I said, Oh, buy and sells information, that's, you know, none of my customers do that. But then receives and absolutely all of my customers receive information and checking databases on that information. Is, is only part of what the law entails. This is pretty much everything. So I need to verify that with all my customers because 50,000 consumers on, you know, a site that's been 10 years old, that's a pretty easy number to hit. So, uh, even for a small business, so I'm confirming that, uh, all the information that they have

Today Jeff Byer (@globaljeff) talks about the abundance of posts and information regarding Natural Language Processing and the BERT update.

About Natural Language Processing & the BERT Update

Bill Slawski @bill_slawski retweeted this article from Ibrahim Sharaf ElDen as an introduction to Natural Language Processing https://t.co/Xct8wP3BIX?amp=1

I just reread this article by @ajkohn from 1 year ago and it's quite possibly the most relevant article about BERT and #SEO on the internet right now.https://t.co/PCbCAOdQ1D

— Jon Henshaw (@henshaw) October 27, 2019

Justin Briggs@justinrbriggs article about how to write for natural language processing On-page SEO for NLP post

Kevin Indig quoting a Fortune article. I am embedding the tweet to show the comments and expose that this is not "new" as the article title might be misleading.

👀 “Language understanding is key to everything we’re doing on search,” said Pandu Nayak, Google fellow and vice president of search. “This is the single, biggest, most positive change we’ve had in last five years.”https://t.co/3LVXGjFu0e pic.twitter.com/jRzeTb7OC3

— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) October 25, 2019 Transcript

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Jeff Byer    00:08    Welcome to Digital Rage, the podcast about all things internet and the people that make it great. My name is Jeff Byer. Today's episode, I do not have a guest and I wasn't planning on recording an episode. This was going to be the first episode that I skipped since, , end of January, 2019. But, , I'm gonna call this the accidental episode because I came across so much, , tweets and posts about natural language processing and the so-called Bert update that, , I had to, , throw in my 2 cents and provide you the audience with everything that I've, I've been following and watching and learning and, and how all of this affects search moving forward. So let's get started with how this, you know, so when it comes to natural language processing and, , language itself, I look to bill Slawsky and his study on how Google has, , published their patents on language processing and Bill's breakdown of those patents and how they relate from patent to real life search results.  

Jeff Byer    01:26    So he, so bill retweeted an article from Ibraham Sharif El den as an introduction to natural language processing. And so I started digging in there and started realizing that different variations of natural language processing are taking a a sentence basically and breaking it down into its primary parts with the nouns, the adjectives and verbs and taking a, a word, a word that that is meant to be. I don't want to use the word keyword here because it's completely in different contexts. The contents here is, it's basically the root word of the sentence and how many jps from the root word backwards. Can you put the word into context and choose its actual meaning based on that. So in natural language processing and previous iterations of that, those, those jps from that, that main word in the sentence, we're, we're toward the beginning of the sentence and not many hops from the, from that word to the end of the sentence.  

Jeff Byer    02:45    And now what I understand this Bert update or Bert is supposed to do is it is supposed to take the, the words that are not on it's bi-directional means not only the w taking the context words before the main word, but after the main word and going further after the main word. So that all the, everything, all the possible data can be taken into account. So that the understanding of the context of the root word and all of the contextual words found in short jps from that root word will provide an actual context. And based on that context, you will, a search engine would then provide the appropriate response in context. So what that means for SEOs and content writers is, , a system that, , that you w a system of writing or a style of writing that if you're writing for SEO, you want those words to be relatively close to each other and provide as much context as possible for what the sentence that you are building is trying to convey.  

Jeff Byer    04:09    And if there is any, , ambiguous is there, if it's an ambiguous term, , the term can mean many different things. There's so many different ways that it can be interpreted. So your answer needs to be as clear and sustained as possible and put in all of the relevant information possible to give Google or any, , natural language processing algorithm with algorithm. The best opportunity to understand in full the context of what you're writing and what you're saying. And you know, in turn what you're basically doing is providing the, the searcher with the most informative and complete answer to a query that you could possibly offer. So, , what I've been finding in a lot of these writing guides for, , natural language processing and what the style of, of writing would be is that, , you'd need to, you know, it's, it's not as creative writing and it's not super technical.  

Jeff Byer    05:27    Writing is writing for understanding. , and so natural language processing is trying to take the natural progression of speech into account. But for people like me who find it difficult to explain technical concepts, simply, I just find it difficult to speak in general, which is why I do a podcast to become better at it. But when I've start explaining something technical and I get into details, my, my sentences tend to get longer and longer and longer, and it becomes harder for the listener to connect those dots. As an example. That sentence that I just said, the, the explanation took way too many words. And so if I was to rewrite that sentence over, I would get more to the point and say, this is, this is the problem, this is the solution. And that's it. So, , as I've been researching and digging more into it, , a tweet by Jon Henshaw, he re posted an article from AGA cone from a year ago.  

Jeff Byer    06:40    And what he tweeted was, I just re-read this article by J cone from one year ago, and it's quite possibly the most relevant article about Bert and SCO on the internet right now. And so what I did is, , I went to that original tweet and, , I'll have it in the show notes so that you can reference it and see the context of how my learning on this subject progressed. So the Bert update, , is basically, it's been used for a long time and there, and I've, we get into this later in the, in in my learnings, but it just seems like this wasn't much of an update because it's been happening for a while. And so this article came out a year ago right after the medic update and we've talked about the medic update, , in several of our past episodes. So, , if you need to catch up on that, I can put links to where we talked about it and specifically how it affected, , one of my client's sites and, and how it corrected and all linked also to a recent tweet from Kevin indig, which I'll get into in a second.  

Jeff Byer    07:56    But basically the, , here is the original tweet. , here's the quote reading article reading the article by aJ  cone one year ago about natural language processing. Burt its relation to the medic update, what went wrong with the update and how it was corrected. So this, after reading through the article in detail and it said that the medic update was actually not medic at all, but it was a, a attempt, an initial attempt at a improving the natural language processing, , for, for search and , mainly for content so that, , for search results. So this started the whole discussion, you know, as in the quality greater guidelines about, , experience authoritativeness and which is eat and SEOs now have to consider all of this because Google is now considering all of this information. And in this article he explains that the, the , medic update initially got it wrong and was, was not understanding the context of a lot of, of medical, , information and how it would relate to searchers. So a lot of medical information sites, which is how this update got the, the term medic.  

Jeff Byer    09:33    , it was basically nay natural language processing error in the update itself. And it only affected, you know, the medical, your money, your life categories. This is based on this article. So I know that the update had a lot more going on, but specifically to natural language processing, this is how the medic update was, was seen, applied and reversed. So this, the, , example in the article uses it uses a SERP analysis. I'm just looking at back up again so I can, I can tell you exactly. , so the OG in the article, it States the audit August 1st error, , that, that the new content ranking didn't match the intent of the queries. And so by October of 2018, rankings came back because there was a reversal in how the syntax was calculated in, , on pay for a natural language posts,

Today Jeff Byer (@globaljeff) talks with Rachelle Golden about the Supreme Court's decision to not hear Domino's petition on whether its website is accessible to the disabled, and what it means for website accessibility litigation moving forward.

About Rachelle Golden

Rachelle handles labor and employment law and litigation. She defends employers before state, federal, and administrative agencies and provides counsel regarding all aspects of human resource issues and compliance to help clients avoid penalties and litigation.

• Hatmaker Law Group
• Rachelle T. Golden LinkedIn

Robles v. Dominos

Bloomberg Law Article by Alexis Kramer CNBC Article by Tucker Higgins Mashable Article by Siobhan Neela-Stock

Transcript

Jeff Byer   00:07    Welcome to to digital rage, the podcast about all things internet and the people that make it great. My name is Jeff Byer. Today I had a good discussion with Rachelle Golden choosing an attorney at ha maker law group and she specializes in accessibility and equal access for people with disabilities. She's, , got firsthand information about the,  

Jeff Byer    00:33    , domino Roblis vs Domino's case, which, , two weeks as you, two weeks ago as you listen to this was, , the Supreme court denied an appeal to, , they, okay. So what happened is we explained the case in the interview and how the case came about and where the case stands today. But, , what happened recently, which triggered me contacting Rochelle is the U S Supreme court's decision to not hear Domino's petition on whether its website is accessible to the disabled. So a very interesting discussion and, , it was awesome to get the details and understand the impact and how this is, this case has the, the opportunity to define website access moving forward. We also discussed that a worst case scenario is that Domino's settles the case and we don't get any resolution in the courts to decide what is an acceptable level of accessibility for websites.  

Jeff Byer    01:41    One of the main takeaways that we got from our conversation, or I get from my conversations with Rachelle, is that if you have offline access, , ADA compliance, accessibility, , guidelines to follow, then that should also be duplicated on your website. So if you sell Rochelle's example is that if you sell gift cards within your store, then you should be able to buy gift cards on your online store. And if anybody with disabilities has special access that they, they have to buy those gift cards in the store, that same access needs to be provided online. , she also said that in this wikag 2.0 AA and you know, basically WCAG 2.1 moving forward is not going to cover everybody. , disabilities have such wide ranging, , you know, symptoms and how people use assistive technologies to, , get information with their disabilities that it's never gonna cover everybody.  

Jeff Byer    02:58    And it's not gonna be possible that every single individual is going to have equal access and a digital property. All we're looking for is what is going to avoid litigation and complaints in the courts. You know, keep this, keep this not illegal issue and give us standards that we need to meet. And , and so that's what this court case could possibly do. But for now it's back to the lower courts and it's at a standstill. So that's all I got for now. I'm going on vacation. That's why I'm posting this short episode early. But this is a very important episode and lots of very quality content in here. You can reach me. I am on Twitter at global. Jeff please, if you have the opportunity and the time please rate and review us on any of your pod catchers. It really helps and I'd love to hear any feedback that you have about the show.  

Jeff Byer    03:57    And we are , there was a request online the to go into more static website hosting and and a static website rendering. We are going to get into that in the future. , right now I am working on a WordPress plugin that's going to be able to give you the fastest possible load times using WordPress as a backend. , and we're cause all of my tests using the API are taking way too long to render. So we're moving forward with the static version. So I am going to give you my recipe for static versions most likely in the next episode. So stay tuned. Thank you for listening. And here is Rochelle golden  

Jeff Byer   04:52    All right. Today we have for shell golden for shell is an attorney, a court with hatmaker law group. , Rachelle, will you briefly just explain, , you what you do and what your specialty is?  

Rachelle Golden    05:05    Yeah, sure. So, , I'm an ADA defense attorney. I represent businesses all grow up the state and state and federal courts and, , I am a proactive consultant with various businesses as well to make sure that they become compliant with the, not only construction-related access laws, but as well as the website guidelines that are produced by the worldwide web consorti. , and so I do, like I said, defense, litigation and then proactive consultant as well as employment litigation as well for various businesses.  

Jeff Byer    05:39    Excellent. So, , the topic that we're going to just discuss today, which I sent you, was the, , Supreme court's decision to not hear Domino's petition on, , the <inaudible> case. So a little bit of background. , what, how did this all start?  

Rachelle Golden    05:58    So I'm mr O bliss is a blind individual and or a sight impaired individual and he sued dominoes because he said that he was unable to access the online services to order a pizza. And at the time, , there was no banner on the website, so there was no, you know, if you're having difficulty call us or call our 24 hour hotline at such and such nber, , that, that wasn't in existence. And so he sued dominoes for at website accessibility and said that because there was no, , coding on the back end that met the out worldwide web consorti guidelines, which is the, , website content accessibility guidelines, WCA G, , he said that because it wasn't coded that way, that it was a barrier to accessibility and a violation under the Americans with disabilities act. And so that's how it started. , last year. Correct.  

Rachelle Golden    07:02    , I believe it was in 2017. Okay. I believe it was in June. I think the, I think the complaint was filed in 2017 and so that originally the district court, which was the first court to hear it, the first federal court to hear it, , dismiss the case because the, , because dominoes then after the complaint was filed, put up this banner that said, call us 24 hours for assistance. And the court said, that's sufficient. You've effectively remediated the issue because there's a 24 hour, one, 800 hotline that people could call an accident, access the same services, , for ordering pizza if you have a site in permits. Well of course Mr. Robles didn't like that decision. And so he appealed it to the ninth circuit court of appeal and the ninth circuit court of appeals said, , not only did you not comply with a website content accessibility guidelines, , that banner didn't exist at the time.  

Rachelle Golden    08:02    And so there was a right case for, , for the case to continue. And ultimately the ninth circuit court of appeals said, , setting aside the ban or issue or you know, we're not going to really focus on that. We're going to focus on whether this website needs to be coated with the would gag, the website content accessibility guidelines 2.0 AA or higher in order for it to be, , provide effective access. And the ninth circuit said yes, in order for there to be the remedy for the injunctive remedy for website accessibility is to have, , the website coated to comply with those guidelines. , and it needs to comply in order for there to be equivalent access for persons with disabilities. But the catch was, it said in order for  

Speaker 4    08:56    a website to need to be in compliance with those webs, with those website guidelines, the website must have a nexus. There must be a direct correlation between the product and services that are offered on the website to the brick and mortar of the business. And since Domino's has brick and mortar locations that somebody could walk into and go order pizza, and they also have one site prevalence, they need to ensure that they are coded properly to meet those guide

Today Jeff Byer (@globaljeff) talks with Geoff Atkinson (@geoffatkinson), Founder and CEO of Huckabuy. We talk dynamic rendering, automated schema markup, cloud serving dynamic renderers, and Google's perfect world when it comes to websites and their content.

About Geoff Atkinson

Geoff Atkinson @geoffatkinson CEO of http://Huckabuy.com, former http://Overstock.com SVP, online marketing, search, SEO, skiing, biking, golfing https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoff-atkinson-7311872/ https://huckabuy.com/seo-company/geoff-atkinson/

Episode Links and Mentions

New article: "Identifying site structure weaknesses" "Site structure" is one of the most loosely used terms in SEO. That's why I attempt to clarify how Internal linking, Taxonomy, Click depth, and URL structure play together and how to optimize them.https://t.co/31h2YXJ55g

— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) October 9, 2019 Transcript

Jeff Byer     00:07   Welcome to digital rage, the podcast about all things internet and the people that make it great. My name is Jeff Byer and today we are featuring an interview I did with Jeff Atkinson. He's the founder and CEO at HUC buy and we talk about dynamic rendered sites, static sites, search for Google, Google's perfect world and what they really like to see and respect  

Jeff Byer    00:33    when it comes to , crawling websites and website content. So dynamic rendering, cloud rendering of a of a large website is the key to what his company does and they take large, , constantly changing sites and serve them through a cloud system as far as what I understand. They serve it through a cloud based system that does cloud-based rendering of their site and gives Google a perfectly static rendered version of the site that is quickly crawlable and indexable so that there are no barriers to Google being able to get the structure, the content and list in search results. So very fun. We also talk about dynamic, , schema markup. So there's a few tools out there. I found one called in links that , that kinda does the same thing. It'll go through your content and it'll find all the opportunities that your, your HTML has to add schema markup to it.  

Jeff Byer    01:50    I don't, I looked at the results and what it, what it picked out as being, , able to have a, have structured data connected to it and it wasn't completely accurate. It uses keywords and tries to, , tries to automatically select a topic based on your HTML content and it's not completely accurate. It had a few, a few things that were out of the scope of what the content was. And we're off topic as far as what the website as a whole is about. So the, at least this tool in links takes a lot of customization and hand holding to make sure that it, that you get it right. But Jeff's tool at Huckaby is much more, much more one on one and does, , you know, it does a better job of identifying schema, , in HTML and served as static version with the scheme so that Google is very happy and can index easily.  

Jeff Byer    03:02    So that no content is missed specifically. It's, it's good for very large sites that change very often. So the Google can keep up with it. And the faster that you can deliver that information to Google, the faster that it gets indexed and added to the knowledge graph. So, so that's that. , other news is there was a Supreme court ruling for a ruling. Basically Domino's appealed the decision, the judgment that they had against them last year where a blind person sued them for ADA compliance because they couldn't order a pizza from the website. So the Supreme court decided not to hear Domino's appeal. And we talk about, we're going to talk about what this means for the future of, , ADA compliance and accessibility laws regarding digital properties for large corporations. And you know, basically everybody is that this is, this is something that's going to become more common and it's time now for everybody to assess their websites and make sure that they are up to speed on accessibility and that they meet the requirements for accessibility.  

Jeff Byer    04:24    I'm S I'm in the process of getting certified right now, , as WebEx, web accessibility expert at IAP. So, , once I have that, I'll, I'll keep you updated on everything that you need to know as far as being certified, getting certified training courses, things like that. But next week we are talking to Rachelle golden who is an accessibility attorney. She's been on the show before and she is going to talk us through the details of what this decision means and what it could mean moving forward for , corporations and accessibility in general. So keep on the lookout for that. My specific portion of this accessibility topic is going to stick to what my audience mostly wants to know is all of the technical requirements and technical aspects that go into being WCAG 2.1 compliant. So, , look forward to that and we will, , you know, lead by example and reach out to all the sites that we've worked on for the past 10 years and let them know what's involved, how their site fares as far as ADA compliance and what will be required to make it compliant and give them the opportunity to opt out.  

Jeff Byer    05:54    So the opt out is important because if any judgment comes or any complaints are filed against a website for ADA compliance, that it can't be assed that it was part of the original project that it had to be opted into and you need to opt out of it if you don't want it done. So just something that we are moving forward with and hopefully by the end of the year, most of our large sites that do have a ADA compliance in their brick and mortar are going to also be accessible through their website. So that is that. Let's get into the interview with Jeff Atkinson and if you have any questions or suggestions for topics or interviewees, please let us know. You can hit me up on Twitter. I'm at global. Jeff, you can go to the website, digital rage.fm and leave comments on the show notes. , anywhere where, , you can email me, , [email protected] and I think that's all I have to tell you about. So let's get into the interview with Jeff Atkinson.  

Jeff Byer     07:21    Hey Jeff. Hey Jeff with a G. Hey, doing good. How are you? I'm good, thanks. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. , so I usually just start recording and, you know, edit in whatever at any time. , perfect. So, , the way that I described my show is it's a  

Jeff Byer    07:42    digital marketing for digital marketers, so feel free to, to get in the weeds, use acronyms, you know, talk, that type of stuff. So cool. Yeah, for sure. , so to start out, let's, , I'll, why don't you introduce yourself and introduce your company? Okay. Right now, just go for it. Yeah.  

Geoff Atkinson    08:04    Cool. , so yeah, I'm Jeff Atkinson. I'm the founder and CEO of HUC by , formally the SVP of [email protected]. And Huckabee is a SEO software company, performance driven SEO software that does automated structured data markup as well as we have a product called SEO cloud that takes advantage of dynamic rendering on Google. So that's, that's me.  

Jeff Byer    08:29    Very cool. , I was reading through the, the white paper that, , that got sent that did a little bit of the, , the overview of what your company does. I'm really intrigued, so I completely agree with, you know, the Google perfect world, the way that I build my websites is, is exactly like that. Lots of , static rendered HTML, , for speed and for ease of crawling. So yup,  

Geoff Atkinson    08:54    I heard that on your last podcast  

Jeff Byer    08:56    and was super impressed. I pretty rarely hear about people building this way. So, , yeah, I was like, boy, this guy gets it. , let's build in static HTML. Let's give the bots what they want. , so yeah, I think we are going to, we speak the same language. Yeah, definitely. And so, , one of the new sites that I was building just related to this was a, we were going to build it using a react, but get react to, , export through Gatsby so that Gatsby creates everything, takes all the dynamic content and creates, , , just one big static site with all the resources compressed and an image, , manipulation and everything. So yeah,  

Geoff Atkinson    09:39    that's great. So, you know, we find a lot of, a lot of companies just simply can't do that necessarily because of business requirements, you know, put onto the website that they wanted to interact with users in a certain way. And so that's really what our SEO cloud product is around, is allowing them to sort of do whatever they want on the front end and still have this perfect crawl experience for, for bots.  

Jeff Byer    10:04&

Today Jeff Byer (@globaljeff) talks with Scott Desmond Dahlgren about the past, present, and future of advertising as well as the transition from digital to traditional to omnichannel media sales.

About Scott Desmond Dahlgren

West Coast Digital Sales & Programmatic Lead Xandr (Formerly DIRECTV) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdahlgren/

Transcript

Jeff Byer   00:07    Welcome to digital rage, the podcast about all things internet and the people that make it great. My name is Jeff Byer. Today we have our first in studio guests. My cousins, Scott Desmond Dahlgren. He does media sales, at Xandr. Xandr is a division of AT&T and he, uh, explains the combination of data from each one of 18 <inaudible> sources so that they can not only target  

Jeff Byer    00:33    they're advertising audiences, but they can, uh, try and keep track of them as well. And, uh, he talks about the differences between online and offline targeting and reporting. So very fun conversation, especially for a this audience, which is strictly online digital marketing and how traditional TV and, uh, and the media that he sells is, it differs from what we do, uh, for PPC on a day to day basis. Uh, and we talk about my history with, with him creating digital and uh, and all the following him with all the companies that he's worked with and done sales for. And he uses me as a creative resource, which I always very much appreciate. Um, so, uh, beyond that, uh, not much else is going on in the, uh, in the, in the Jeff buyer inc realm. Uh, lots of, lots of proposals out, lots of, uh, work going on.  

Jeff Byer    01:37    Um, the, you know, PPC specifically it, we're doing a bunch of rebuilding and I'm trying to clear off a lot of, uh, lower, lower level stuff off my plate. Get mostly outsourced and get, uh, the bigger projects started. Uh, we got a huge project build a, a relaunch of a, uh, a celebrity brand name that's coming at the end of the year. So once it's done, I will announce it on the podcast. You guys can check out my work. But for now, the site that's up is somebody else's work and it, uh, quite frankly is not very good. So, uh, we're gonna have that fixed by the end of the year and we're launching probably mid November and then a brand new, uh, celebrity and indoors product brand is also going to launch at that same time too. So we're going to have two pretty large launches, uh, within the next month, month and a half. So, uh, be look beyond the lookout for that. And I will definitely, if you follow me on any social media, best way, best place to follow me is on Twitter. I am at global. Jeff and I will announce all of our product launches there and, uh, you can ask me any questions. Uh, go to byard.co for, uh, anything related to business and contact information as far as website design and SEO. So let's talk with my first cousin Scott Desmond.  

Jeff Byer     03:05    Doug. So today we have Scott doll Graham who goes by guy. He's my cousin. She works for Zander and uh, he does a lot of advertising, but Dez, why don't you tell us what you actually do? Scott Dahlgren   Hi, Jeff. Jeff, my first cousin. Uh, my name is Scott Desmond Dahlgren and I work for Zander, which is a part of that  

Scott Dahlgren    03:31    at T and, T, which also owns direct TV and AppNexus and Warner media. So it's a large media conglomerate. Uh, and I have 15 years of digital advertising experience where I worked at AOL, Disney interactive and a startup called GumGum. So I've been working in the digital advertising industry for quite some time now. Yes. And, uh, thank you for bringing me along and all these ventures. It's fun doing work for you with all these companies. Yes, Jeff's been, uh, very helpful, uh, with creative and other things that I've needed over the course of the last 10 or 15 years. So it works great. You, you're the creative genius behind the ads that I sell.  

Jeff Byer    04:12    I didn't, you know, I don't think of the creative teams, but I liked being, uh, being included. So, um, today I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the, uh, some of the, uh, the terms that you use on a daily basis and, and what you, what, um, acronyms that, cause I remember talking to you one night at a, at your place and you've used a bunch of acronyms and I'm like, do you just speak in complete acronyms at work?  

Scott Dahlgren    04:41    Yeah, the digital video and just digital advertising ecosystem has really changed a lot in the last 15 years. Um, when I first started at AOL, um, about, like I said, 15 years ago, we were primarily selling digital, uh, banner inventory, you know, banners that are referred to by their sizes and pixels. So four 68 by sixty's or seven 28 by nineties. Uh, and it was really the emphasis infancy of the digital advertising sort of revolution. Um, you know, and over the past 15 years it's gotten a lot more complex. So now instead of just selling banner or display mentory, we're selling things like native ads also, banner still exist. Um, but more rich media, uh, video in the form of pre-roll and mid-roll. Um, and that sort of refers to where the video actually takes place in the content, either before the content, during the content or after the content.  

Scott Dahlgren    05:39    Um, and then of course we have things like, you know, linear television, uh, advertising, which are kind of the spots that you've seen, you know, for the last 30 years on television sets. Um, and now those are also getting more digital. So they're turning into things like addressable advertising. So the really changed over the last 15 to 20 years and it, and it's poised to change even more over the next 10 years. Um, so I can kind of talk a little bit about how it's going to change and then, you know, share some of the acronyms as well. Um, but it's probably better to lay a little bit of foundation in terms of how it's all coming together and how people are using it.  

Jeff Byer    06:17    Yeah. Cause this, this, uh, audience for digital rage is digital marketer marketers. So it's people doing mostly online, uh, PPC or anything using digital properties. So, um, one thing that's come up is how much, how much is programmatic and how much is, is, uh, manual placement. How much programmatic do you do?  

Scott Dahlgren    06:41    Uh, well when I joined, uh, direct TV about five years ago, we did very little to no programmatics. So primarily we were selling at that point, addressable television, uh, against direct TV's, addressable television audience. So to put it in context, direct TV is the largest pay TV service in the United States. Uh, at T and T is the second largest wireless service in the United States. And then <inaudible> and then, uh, the third largest broadband service in the United States with at and T broadband. So we have a lot of different platforms to sell off of. Um, and the programmatic part of that is really consists of the digital video area. So within digital video, indirect TV, you're talking about things like TV everywhere, which is direct TVs, uh, kind of lap top based service that allows you to watch your direct TV, not on your conventional living room television, but maybe on your mobile device or your, uh, iPhone.  

Scott Dahlgren    07:40    Um, so we sell programmatic inventory against that product and also against our other OTT products. Things like watch TV, which is yet another OTT service that we offer with at and T wireless subscriptions. And then yet a third service called DirecTV now, which is sort of a, uh, you know, basically a direct TV light. It's for people who don't want the satellite dish on their roof, don't want the set top box, but still want access to the direct TV programming. Uh, people who maybe have a sling or a Hulu account, but are typically cord cutters and cord nevers, they would sign up for that service. So on all three of those services, watch TV, direct TV, now TV everywhere we sell pre-roll and mid-roll advertising. So these are 15 or 30 seconds video spots, um, that you can buy across the 75 networks that we insert those spots on 'em.  

Scott Dahlgren    08:29    And you can buy that in either a direct IO fashion, which is kind of your old contract based transaction or programmatically, which is a more auction based environment. So we started selling in, this is sort of a long winded answer to your question, but it gets to kind of how it all kinda came into place in the first place. Uh, we sell against those, uh, those video properties in those two ways on a direct IO basis or a programmatic basis in each one of those ways. Different kind of benefits to them, um, depending on pricing and how you want your inventory to fill, um, you know, and targeting. But, uh, essentially those are the two modalities that we sell. Digital video again,  

Jeff Byer    09:09    that's true. And are the big brands doing any type of live testing or do their videos already go through focus groups? And what you get is final, final across all media.  

Scott Dahlgren    09:20    Typically we'll, you know, being one of the largest advertising companies in the world where we're working with fortune 500 companies who generally have their creative figured out, they understand who they want to reach from a targeting perspective and they're coming to us to, um, you know, see how we can reach that

Today Jeff Byer (@globaljeff) talks about this week in digital marketing and recaps the findings from his projects after the Google Core Algorithm update.

About Jeff Byer

Jeff Byer has been designing identities and building websites since 1995. He is the CEO and co-founder of Print Fellas LLC, and CEO at Jeff Byer Inc, a web design company in Redondo Beach, California specializing in Web Design and SEO. Twitter @globaljeff Bio https://www.byer.co/about-jeff-byer

Show Links and Mentions

Starting to see some clients have nice jumps in traffic with this core update. This one is a medical site. pic.twitter.com/uCGrKc653I

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) September 27, 2019 Transcript

Jeff Byer:00:07Welcome to digital rage, the podcast about all things internet and the people that make it great. My name is Jeff buyer and today I am exhausted probably as most people are. The big thing that happened this week is the core algorithm update and a lot of controversy, not controversy, that's not an appropriate word to use. A lot of speculation about what it is and what it's about. And mostly it's been about medical sites and and mostly a

Jeff Byer:00:38Already and trust on anything related to medical issues. So the site that I've been mentioning in the past few episodes regarding SEO and EA T actually a was fine. There was a very little volatility it stayed even and even gained a couple of, a couple of spots on, on words that were related specifically to medical. So that was good news in the bad news department. I got a local business site that got a little bit hammered. And so I figured out that in one of my breadcrumb links, as I was updating the breadcrumb schema, I got one of the links wrong and got errored on that. So just fixed it today. I will report back next week and see if we get those spots back. But but overall they're still way ahead of any of their competitors.

Jeff Byer:01:34So what, how it affected their business is probably minimal. It was just search and usually that's a, you know, and, and is specific to a very highly competitive keywords that they really didn't get a lot of conversions on any way since they're small, local. So, so that's it on the core algorithm update, I'm sure there's more to follow. Marie Haines posted stats from one of her customers that seen good gains. So who knows if that was the algorithm update or just Marie Haynes doing a very thorough job on cleaning things up. I did submit a few disavow files this week just to clean up past mistakes from either me or who I inherited the websites from and disavow some toxic links that were obviously toxic. So we're going through those and still seeing him pop up. But we're using SEMrush to identify those backlinks and get them all straightened out.

Jeff Byer:02:42So my friend Matt, he texted me last week talking about what do you do when you're in the middle of a project and you start getting more and more features added on from your customers. And what I like to call this feature creep, it's kind of an industry term and feature creep is, is you know, the, there's many drawbacks to it and one is that you keep pushing the launch date further and further out. The second is it costs more money to develop and you keep changing things around. And so I experienced this on a small scale with one of my new projects that we started out, we've, we threw out the statement of work and we bid the project and we got all the way through the design and got, you know, got an approval that included a bunch of changes.

Jeff Byer:03:44So it wasn't really an approval. And the, one of the biggest changes was they've got a whole new line of products that wasn't included. So we had to backtrack in our designs, go back through all the navigation and all of the content structure, restructure it, redesign it, relay it out and get it going. And this also had to come without any they, they expected the changes to come without any change of the deadline. So that's the stress that I've been dealing with. I think we're gonna still end up pulling it off. I did, I had to end up taking a lot of the work on myself because the designer on the project was kind of a, not too happy about having to go back and redo everything and basically just did kind of a half ass job. I'd hate to say it. So I had to spend most of my day, most of my week actually refining and rebuilding.

Jeff Byer:04:51And what I ended up doing in the end is that it, you know, this could have stayed in design for another whole week, which we didn't have. So what I did is kept it clean and simple on the new pages. Cause one with the new products we don't have any information on yet. So we mock them up with, with you know, placeholder images and placeholder text and to the products that we do have that are their flagship products already have a, a look and a feel and an aesthetic. So the new products are going to look very tame compared to the flagship products. But that's also kind of kind of okay, since we still want to push people to the main products and the other products will gain in popularity as, as we see fit and we can add on once the website is done.

Jeff Byer:05:38So this website deadline is real and the popularity of the products or the hype on the products can come later at it's, can come later. We do have a retainer to stay on and do a maintenance SCO, SCM. So during all that process we will be doing improvements. Another topic that came up with one of my clients is they hire writers that are specialists in their field. And so they sent me a writer and said, what do you think about this writer and what, how will they work as far as SEO? And now that we have to take in, you know, the reputation of the author, especially in health related industries. I went and looked and they're well published throughout the internet, but the, the places that they are published are not authorities in the industry. So the sites that they're plump published on have less authority than, than most other sites.

Jeff Byer:06:47The other thing is they don't have any credentials or any authorship that would lead them to be experts in the fields that they're talking about. So I had to unfortunately send the feedback to, to the client saying they, I know that they can write and the product and the, the, their writing is great. The problem is it's going to do nothing for SEO if they make any type of medical claims because they don't have any verifiable authority to speak on these aspects of the industry. So client understood they respected it and they're going to keep looking for writers. So that was, that was on that project. Let's see what else we got going on. Oh, so project changes the way that I address it this on this project, I, I knew that I could do, I could pull it off without having to do anything drastic.

Jeff Byer:07:49So I just made the changes and moved on. And e-commerce, it's funny about e-commerce is it is very forgiving that way when you're just adding products and not changing brand and not changing real structure. An E commerce site already comes with a pretty set structure. You've got categories and you've got products. So it's, it was, I knew it was going to be easy just to add those in and, and move on. But if you're in a project and features keep getting added on, that's when it needs to be addressed. So most of my clients, our agency clients so the agency is the one that's actually bringing the changes and there's an in between so I can speak more frankly and just mention if it's something structural that's going to change either the site map or the navigation or require a unique individual pages, then it will require a change order.

Jeff Byer:08:46And that's the standing rule that I have with my agency clients that that is, is pretty much understood. So when a feature creep situation comes up and a client is asking, so now I'll switch from agency, from working for agencies to working one on one. When a client comes to me, direct client comes to me with several changes. I say, great, those are great ideas. Sounds good. Let me get you a quote for those. And we can go from there. And sometimes they expect it and sometimes they say, wait a second, why, why couldn't we just make these changes? And then I get into the technical aspects of what it's going to take to change. So right now with another client, a direct client, we are, we were down the path of a complete redesign design approved and static homepage built. And now we have a decision makers coming in and asking questions and making, they're not really making demands, they're making suggestions.

Jeff Byer:09:57And so when you're this far down the line on a project and those suggestions require going back to design, that's when a change order is required. So we're still in talks on that and we're still negotiating as far as what can be done and what can't. Budgets are definitely a concern. Timeline is also definitely a concern. And the, the decision makers are wanting me to go back and verify all of my data. So we're kind of taking where we're paused, where we are now, which is actual, you know, HTML before we go into as full site build. So basically I've got a prototype of what the homepage navigation, everything is going to look like, pausing that, going back to square one into pre production, running all of our preproduction data

Today Jeff Byer (@globaljeff) talks about the news and updates for this week in SEO and Digital Marketing.

About Jeff Byer

Jeff Byer has been designing identities and building websites since 1995. He is the CEO and co-founder of Print Fellas LLC, and CEO at Jeff Byer Inc, a web design company in Redondo Beach, California specializing in Web Design and SEO. Twitter @globaljeff Bio https://www.byer.co/about-jeff-byer

Show Links and Mentions

Google Chrome on Android Will Provide Answers to Queries Right in the Address Bar via @MattGSouthern Organic search responsible for 53% of all site traffic, paid 15% [Study]   Barry Schwartz @rustybrick Matt Southern @mattgsouthern

Transcript

Jeff Byer:00:08Welcome to Digital Rage, the podcast about all things Internet and the people who make it great. My name is Jeff Byer and Today is episode 30. I can't believe its been 30th. Already met some great people, had some great conversations and we'll have more in the future. Just, it has been hectic lately, not only for me, but the digital marketing community in general.

Jeff Byer:00:33Those were the things we're gonna discuss quickly today, but could not get a guest lined up but also didn't have the time to really hound anybody down because of everything that's been going on with the with the algorithm updates and the search console report updates and you know, having an ads campaign that completely spun itself completely out of Control and having to reel that back in all sorts of fun stuff. So I apologize, but we will get somebody more interesting than myself on the show next week. So as I stated, we've have a couple of, you know, we've had algorithm updates going on and there's no real, there's no real consensus on what is causing it and any type of issues that are surrounding it. It's just that the algorithm update and may be directly related to the s structured data and search console reports.

Jeff Byer:01:45So let's get straight into that because that was what woke me up this morning was all of my search console alerts about my breadcrumbs. So the way that I do my breadcrumb Schema is just on pages that need breadcrumbs. So the home page obviously isn't going to have one. And when I have categories and deeper categories that I link to the, the homepage, then the next breadcrumb link is the category and then the next breadcrumb link is the landing page. And I always thought it was weird to link the page to itself in the, in the breadcrumb. So I never put the link in, I just put a span around the name of it so that I could have the item prop name in the structured data. Turns out that with this new update, Google wants the page linking to itself because it uses that link as an ID.

Jeff Byer:02:43So a, I'm going to have to go and fix my, my breadcrumb structure in all of my templates. And it's kind of pushing me towards this unified SEO template that I've been thinking about for a while. But having a, a standard custom modular way to make updates like a schema and, and structure, it has nothing to do with layout or design or content. It is basically just an overall structure for pages, especially with categories and, and you know, any type of Schema or, or metadata that I can automate and be able to syndicate a template so that changes like this can be immediate across every one of my clients. But for now we're going through one by one and changing them. So the first thing that I didn't even think of adding when I first built the breadcrumb screen is position.

Jeff Byer:03:51So the, they want to know it's not, you know, since they can show up in any position or not show up at all visually Google would like to know what position each link is in your breadcrumb. So I get that easy enough, you know, one, two, three homepage is one, category two and landing page three. Then I got penalized for missing field item. And so I was, I had an item prop, so it's item list and then item for the breadcrumbs. That's the Schema that it uses. And I had the item, I had assumed that the item would have been in the w by defining the Schema, but apparently I was wrong. And you have to actually define the item Schema in it and and the item is what I'm referring to as it uses the link as the item Id. So very interesting to, to get those corrections and I'm glad that I'm getting them corrected because, you know, this has been several years that my breadcrumb Schema has been just fine.

Jeff Byer:05:06So that is my rundown of the breadcrumb Schema. And since I was just getting it rolled out yesterday, according to Barry Schwartz and it's still continuing to roll out, but I got this, I got two console alerts on two of my sites and that, and then they started to roll in and there keep rolling in. So this is going to be something that is going to consume a lot of my time for this weekend and next week, but I want to get it fixed because anything that shows up in in search console as an error is what we considered a high priority and we fix it as soon as possible. So related to that is the reviews rich results. So this has been kind of kind of controversial because it basically, John Mueller basically said that if you have res, if you have re star reviews and ratings on your site for your site or your products that are on your site, Google's not going to count them because they're self-serving.

Jeff Byer:06:15So it sounds confusing and everybody is trivial. You know, it's always been worrisome that, you know, for one of my pages I just put this, the, the rating scheme Schema as static in there just to just to be in there. And sure enough, I got whatever rate star rating that I wanted out of that Schema because you know, I put it in there and it's simple. But now Google is saying, all right, if we're actually gonna put this in our search results, we have to verify this and verify it through a, a trusted third party, not just anybody. So that even if you get them from a trusted third party and you embed them onto your site, it's still no good. And they're not going to use them in that way. They'll use them directly from the third party. But if you can manipulate it in any way possible by just displaying them on your site, that's what Google is trying to avoid.

Jeff Byer:07:09So trusted third parties, which I'm figuring Google reviews are probably going to be one of the, the priority partners for reviews. And then there's the yelps and the bbbs and you know, going on from there. But now it's more important than ever to push your audience to review your site on any of the third parties where you are allowing reviews. So in, in local small businesses we point people in a number of places and it gets really confusing for the user, cause they don't know where to go. And we're, and we used to point them in several different directions. And now my unified point is the Google my business page. And I can, I have a deep link directly into the review, pop up for each one of my Google my business pages so that it's much easier just to go in, write a quick, quick review through Google, having somebody signed in through their Google account who's verifiable, knowing that they are a customer but not affiliated with the company in any way.

Jeff Byer:08:21Google likes that history, likes that verification. So that is the reviews, snippets algorithm updates. We touched on it earlier and they are, they are wreaking a little havoc. I'm gonna, I'm going to just take a quick look at semrush right now and just look at the graphs across all the projects that I haven't semrush and see, see if I can see a a trend in how it, how these are being reported. So let's go to, so what does the site I'm choosing right now is a they get most of their traffic through organic because they rank well for most of their pay, most of their key terms and they have a very low to modest paid campaign. So this'll be something that I'll be able to tell. The best, it'll be a more clear and sure enough, yeah, there's a market drop in, in traffic.

Jeff Byer:09:47Their overall position for their main keywords is, is the average dropped by a quarter of a percent, a quarter of a position. So not that big of a deal. But average, you know, estimated traffic dropped by quite a bit. So that's a little concerning, but it may be just, you know, featured snippets are, are showing up and and solving people's questions within the syrup, which that's something that we all have to be okay with. Now. let's go to the organic organic traffic insights and see if there's any, anything fun in there that we can decipher. But not, I mean, not a ton of fluctuation now. And not a lot of tennis punctuation through the Algorithm update period. Users are up, sessions are up, pages per session are slightly down, but not, you know, that's more of a content issue and an interface issue that we're currently solving. Right now we're in a complete overhaul redesign and a new, a new VP of, of 

Jeff Byer:11:18Of digital, not digital of, what am I trying to say? Oh, business development. A new VP of business development came in after we've already had our, our designs approved and page developed. He came in and he just wants to go through everyth

Today Jeff Byer (@globaljeff) talks with Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) about the Google link attribution announcement and its Twitter backlash, EAT, PubCon, Music, and green fish wallpaper.

About Lily Ray

Twitter @lilyraynyc Director of SEO at Path Interactive  Personal Site lilyray.nyc

Show Links & Mentions

Quality Rater Guidelines - Updates https://moz.com/blog/new-google-survey-results https://moz.com/blog/nofollow-sponsored-ugc searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://www.pubcon.com/las-vegas-2019

I think this is the main reason for the nofollow changes. Many authoritative sites will use a blanket nofollow which, in the old system, made it so that Google would ignore those authoritative mentions other than for entity recognition. Now Google can use those links. https://t.co/oj9qHAeN0N

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) September 12, 2019 Tools

https://sitebulb.com/ https://www.botify.com/ https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ https://www.searchmetrics.com/ https://www.conductor.com/ https://getstat.com/ https://moz.com/ https://www.semrush.com/ https://ahrefs.com/ https://www.sistrix.com/

Transcript

Jeff Byer:00:08Welcome to Digital Rage. The podcast about all things internet and the people who make it great. My Name Is Jeff Byer. Today we talk to Lily Ray, she is the director of SEO at Path Interactive and we talk about link attribution, FAQ schema, quality rater guideline updates, Google survey results, PUBCON, and my prediction for what the Google search engine result pages are going to look like in the future.

Jeff Byer:00:33And one surprise topic that nobody ever thought was going to come out of this podcast. Green Fish wallpaper. And to find out what's what's up with green fish wallpaper. You will have to listen to the podcast. So here is our interview with Lily Ray

Jeff Byer:00:53I'm based in Los Angeles. You're in your office?

Lily Ray:01:02Yeah, New York. I'm from the bay area though. Good friends in la.

Jeff Byer:01:14Well if you ever need a place, nice to hang out or just want to stop by and say hi right now.

Lily Ray:01:20You play guitars? I take it.

Jeff Byer:01:21Yeah, I've been in and out of bands since I was 12 years old and uh,

Lily Ray:01:27yeah, me to actually, but drums, drums.

Jeff Byer:01:32Drummers are very hard to find.

Lily Ray:01:34I know. It's so weird? It's just an ex such a big instrument. I think that's the issue. Yeah.

Jeff Byer:01:39Well I mean when we were trying out drummers, our original drummer left and we are trying out drummers. Um, they're just so loud and most of them couldn't keep tying, you know, because you have a drum set doesn't mean you're a drummer. You know, just, we always had a hard time finding one with the right fit, cause we're kind of a mellow like acoustic band and, right. Yeah.

Lily Ray:02:03Right. it's tricky. Drum drummers always want to be allowed.

Jeff Byer:02:08Yeah. We had one that, that uh, in rehearsal he was fine. Everything went great. And then when we got live it just took over the whole thing. We stopped playing and he kept playing. He didn't even realize we stopped playing.

Lily Ray:02:20Wow. That's kind of embarrassing.

Jeff Byer:02:25Are you ready to get started?

Lily Ray:02:27Yeah, let's do it.

Jeff Byer:02:28Okay. So, uh, today we're talking to lily ray. She says on Twitter, she's an SEO by day and DJ by night. How are you today?

Lily Ray:02:39Doing well, thanks for having me.

Jeff Byer:02:41So, um, I wanted to start with, uh, how your trip was. I saw you were in Berlin.

Lily Ray:02:48Yes, I went to London, Berlin and Barcelona. Um, so my husband and I go to Europe pretty much once a year, Berlin pretty much once a year for the past four years. Um, but this time we brought my step son who's 10. That was really awesome cause you kinda got to see everything through the lens of a 10 year old, which is a different experience, but super fun.

Jeff Byer:03:08Yeah. Very cool. That's always fun. We've got a two year old at home and uh, excited to start taking him around the world right now. Yeah. With the diapers. Yeah, still a little, little sketchy.

Lily Ray:03:19Yeah, it takes awhile.

Jeff Byer: