Whenever a sitemap changes it's important to notify Google and Bing of the change by pinging <searchengine_URL>ping?sitemap=sitemap_url . Whilst these URLs are meant for bots, they do return an actual html page. When you look at Google's responses though, you'll notice four interesting... More

Last year Google launched the beta of the new Google Search Console, but when it first launched it was pretty empty. By June they had added one of the features I now use most often in it, the URL Inspection tool. It allows you to quickly see details as to how Google's crawling, indexing and... More

HTTP2 is a major revision to the HTTP protocol, agreed in 2015. At this stage it has pretty much universal support across web browsers. As HTTP2 supports multiplexing, server push, binary protocols, stream prioritisation and stateful header compression it is, in almost all instances, faster than... More

Speed has been always one of the most important metrics when measuring a website’s performance, as well as one of the confirmed desktop ranking factors since 2010.   Nowadays we are in a mobile era and speed is even more important after Google rolled out the Mobile-first indexing last... More

When we first started link building we'd talk about raw number of links. Most would like to think that those days are gone and that, since Penguin, quality matters more than quantity. As a result, many have moved to talking about number of links above a certain metric - typically Domain Authority... More

Handing over technical recommendations often comes with some trepidation; how long might it take for them to be implemented, will they be implemented at all and, if so, will they be implemented correctly? That's why understanding how development cycles occur, how items are prioritised and who you... More

We've previously talked about running Screaming Frog's Crawler on Google's Compute Cloud. Now, I want to share how we took this to the next level - how you can use this to automatically crawl as many websites as you want simultaneously. Running Screaming Frog In the Cloud As a quick reminder, the... More

Screaming Frog is the industry standard SEO crawler, but it can slow down your computer and monopolise your internet connection. By running it, instead, on Google's Compute Cloud it can run significantly faster and you're free to get on with other jobs whilst it runs. Moreover, if you can run one... More

Want to understand the real value of the links you’re building? Here at Verve Search, for the past five years, we’ve been developing a proprietary metric to do just that. Up to now, we’ve kept it exclusively for our clients, but, in the interests of transparency, and for the benefit of the... More

Optimising page load times on mobile devices has been a hot topic for sometime now. Different techniques, best practices and technologies have been suggested to improve load times and provide better mobile user experience. AMP is a method that is taking a rather different approach to web page... More