Deep diving in Search Console data

Bellow a list of interesting ressources to play with Search Console data.

I’ve put in bold what makes the dashboard somehow different.

Feel free to comment to complete this list.

DataStudio

Using Google Sheet

Search Console Explorer Sheet by Hannah Rampton

Using R

Average position per Continent analysis by Pascal Schmidt

google analytics r search console

Correlations for Clicks, Impressions, and Positions

correlation google search console R

Finding the LCP node with Chrome DevTools

Official documentation about Largest Contentful Paint is super interesting and explicit. But it misses one thing: How to identify the largest node / block / image /text ?

Chrome DevTools allows you to find which node you should optimize. Simply follow the steps below.

  • Open Chrome
  • Open the page you want to find the LCP block on
  • Open Chrome DevTools
    • If you are on a PC, type Ctrl+Shift+C
    • If you are on a Mac, just type the following hieroglyph:
The shortcut to open Chrome DevTools
  • Follow the steps recorded in this video or follow steps written below the video if you need more details.
  • Open the tab “Performance”, between “Network” and “Memory”
The horizontal menu with the Performance tab
  • Two options to record all the events and other data
    • Option #1 – Record and manually reload and stop
      • Click on the Record icon and reload manually the page by clicking on the icon next to the URL, then come back in DevTools and click on the blue button “stop”
    • Option #2 – Automatic record, reload and stop
      • Click on the Reload icon
Three buttons: Record, Record->Reload->Stop and Clear results

Which option choosing ?

It depends… Sometimes you will have to interact with the page to get the LCP. In this case you should choose to record manually.
  • The LCP tag should be in the Timings row. This section is below Frames and Interactions. If you don’t see it immediately, try by scrolling below Interactions.
  • Click on LCP, it will show you which element is considered as the LCP
  • Click on the related node (if present), it will send you directly to the node in the source code of the page

I hope it is clear enough. If you have any question, feel free to contact me on Twitter.

Google and Canonical URL

In this post I will change the canonical URL in the <head>, just to see how Google and Googlebot behave between discovery of the URL discovered in the tag.

The canonical tag looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.url-to-crawl.com" />

I’ve changed the URL in this example on purpose, in order to make sure that Googlebot discovers the URL only through the rel canonical tag.

I’ll keep you posted with the results !

Edit 15 days after: Googlebot didn’t crawl the URL set in the canonical !

A slow page, just to check the impact on log

It took a certain to load this page, isn’t it ?

It took probably a bit more than 10 seconds.

It’s normal, the idea is to check how Google SERPs behave with this slow page.

I’ve added a PHP code snippet to make this page to take at least 10 seconds to load using “Insert PHP Code Snippet” WP plugin.

FYI, it is how it looks in the UI of WP:

Well, I had to add content to make this test to work, so here it is !

To find this page during the test, he magic word is: drumblebassseo .

I’ve copied and past few sentences below, found randomly on the web, just to give to credibility to this page:

The classic editor does not solve this issue nor does the tinymce help. I’m embedding HTML from Amazon. Amazon gives HTML for products for their affiliates.

And also this one:

A few people were expressing their frustration with inserting Amazon compliant images in WordPress.  The problem seems simple enough.  Take an image from Amazon and put it on your website.

edit: I’ve removed the tag to slow down the website. I’ll check the results now !

Impact of search of images on log for SEO

I recently stated a huge difference between the traffic monitored in the Search Console and what I could find in the log files using Kelogs log analyzer. My first hypothesis is that Google Image could be at the origin of this difference, with a preload in background. Second hypothesis is that the first results in Google Web is preloaded if the page is usually too slow.

Protocol to check the first hypothesis:

I’ll try to get the image below indexed for this website, despite it is hosted on amazon, and I will live check the impact on log files when I search for it in Google.

Let’s come back in few days when Googlebot will have indexed this page and display the image in Google Image (I’ll use “site:quentinadt.com” to check it).

So here is the picture of someone swimming:

A women crawling

To check the second hypothesis, Ill make a page which is very slow but ranks on a specific unique keyword.

Test of Indexation of images in background by Google

In this post, there is a background image. It is the picture of my 3 years old Macbook Pro 2016 which is already dying… The screen is sometimes not usable, and most of the time there is just one line, vertical.

The idea is to check if either of not Google will index an image which is accessible only from a background CSS call.

John Muller, from Google, in 2018:

And as far as I know we don’t use CSS images at all for image search.

Source: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-image-search-css-25068.html

Let’s see what if it is still true in 2020 with the mobile first passage, chrome evergreen, the interpretation of the JS, etc.

Results of this SEO test in a few days!

Edit: One month after…

The image is still not indexed.
Current conclusion is that background images aren’t indexable by default.

Who knows this rare fish ?

If you’ve read my last blog post, you will see that it didn’t help to use the title of an image to rank in the SERPs.

So I decided to push the test a little bit further, until I manage to get the image indexed.

So here is the picture of a very rare – endemic – fish that you can found only in Croatian rivers. I’m note passionate about fish, but I thought it’s an ok picture for testing the ranking capacities of the title element.

So again, I’ve added a title, but this time, it contains what most probably is the name of this endemic fish.

Does the Title of picture help to rank in Google in 2020 ?

I recently read that Google uses the title of the images to rank them in Google Images.

It would be kind of a little revolution, since it has never been considered as useful.

I decided to make my own test, just to make sure it works also for me.

So here is the picture, it’s a screenshot of a presentation shared on Linkedin. There are 34 keywords in the title. You can only find the keywords in the title.

This page will be updated with the results !

Edit 1: 3 days later, the page is indexed, but the keywords in the title aren’t findable in Google. So currently, the title has zero impact.

Edit 2: 2 weeks after, still no result when I search a keyword found in the title.

Comment augmenter la précision des rapports “Vitesse du site” dans Google Analytics

Il suffit d’une ligne pour augmenter la précision des rapports Google Analytics de web performance (timing utilisateur):

ga(‘create’, ‘UA-XXXX-Y’, {‘siteSpeedSampleRate’: 100}); // Théoriquement 100% des pages vues

Vous n’obtiendrez pas 100%, notamment car certains navigateurs ne sont pas compatibles avec la mesure du timing utilisateur. Néanmoins, vous devriez facilement dépasser les 25%.

Source: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/field-reference#siteSpeedSampleRate