Will removing self-referential breadcrumb links improve organic traffic?


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You may have forgotten that you signed up to this newsletter due to how long it has taken me to send another one. Anyway. Stuff below.

SEO tests and interesting pices of analysis below:

General takeaways these:

Google's JavaScript Rendering

The study, which analysed over 100,000 Googlebot fetches, showed that most pages are rendered within minutes, not days, and that JavaScript-heavy sites do not inherently face slower page discovery.

I will need to do some testing on this at scale again for my own sanity.

Breadcrumb Navigation Case Study

The case study kind of showed that removing the self-referential link from the last breadcrumb on product listing pages led to a 5.5% decrease in organic traffic.

The primary issue though was an inconsistency in the schema markup, confusing search engines and negatively impacting rankings.

The study shows the need for thorough testing and alignment in SEO strategies to prevent unintended consequences.

Reddit’s SEO Growth Surge

The shift towards user-generated content and discussions reflects Google's preference for authentic, community-driven content. 🤣

While this poses challenges for traditional SEO strategies, it offers new opportunities for businesses to engage with highly visible communities on Reddit and other community forums.

My general thoughts on SEO currently:

In the last few months, most of my time has been involved in showing site owners that the order of their content is just as important as what is in it. This seems to be yielding some great results.

I mean, why wouldnt it? Would you rather read an article where the order of what you were expecting to read is not accurate?

Or would you prefer to get content delivered to you just in time, with the right context, in the right order?

If you can align this with functionality, as well as meeting user need in terms of them being able to complete their desired transaction, be it information, functionality or a bit of both, you will win.

Further down the line:

This makes me think further on about how AI Overviews play a part in this and how ordering your content, references and general outlook on informaiton gain (that has proven expertise) will eventually win.

All the big players will have to fine tune RAG results, real time authentication and content stress testing for accuracy for this to end up being cost effective, reliable and something users will actually respond well to.

As currently, it is far from that. No matter what they say about user satisfaction.

Some tools you may want to try (no aff links):

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