Website SEO Migration

Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world metrics Google will use (from May 2021) to measure key aspects of user experience when loading a webpage such as a website’s loading, interactivity and visual stability. All three are related to site speed in one way or another.

The metrics(supplied by Chrome User Experience (CrUX) Reports – that Google will use to measure key aspects of user experience when loading a web page such as a website’s loading, interactivity and visual stability. All three are related to site speed in one way or another. In addition to being signals for Google scoring, Google is considering labelling search results with symbols to indicate pages with good or bad CWV scores. The assessment should include recommendations on how to ensure that the site receives a good CWV score.

The Core Web Vitals assessment includes the following:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measure of the overall loading speed of a page – the faster the page loads the better. It’s marked in the timeline when the majority of content is loaded in.

First Input Delay (FID): Measure responsiveness to user interactions. For instance, if a user clicks a link, or selects a dropdown – how quickly will that action be executed on the page. Usually, user interactions will be delayed when a browser is busy executing other tasks.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measure the stability of a URL as it loads. We’ve all had that frustrating experience of reading a news site and having the article text jump lower as the navigation is loaded, and CLS is a measure of that across a whole page.

Hreflang tags are a technical solution for sites that have similar content in multiple languages. The owner of a multilingual site wants search engines to send people to the content in their own language. Say a user is Germany and the page that ranks is English, but there is also a German version. You would want Google to show the German page in the search results for that user. Hreflang mark-up has been designed for this solution.

It does not matter whether the content you have resides on one domain or multiple domains. You can link variations within the same domain but can also link between domains.

SEO Benefits of hreflang Implementation:

From an SEO point of view, there are two main reasons why you should implement it.

1. If you have a version of a page that you have optimised for the users’ language and location, you want them to land on that page.Having the right language and location dependent information improves their user experience and thus leads to fewer people bouncing back to the search results. Fewer people bouncing back to the search results leads to higher rankings.
2. The second reason is that hreflang prevents the problem of duplicate content. If you have the same content in English on different URLs aimed at the UK, the US, and Germany (their might be subtle differences on these pages such as contact details, price or currency). Without hreflang, Google might not understand what you are trying to do and see it as duplicate content. With hreflang, you make it very clear to the search engine that it’s (almost) the same content, just optimised for different people.

How Hreflang works:

In a hreflang implementation, every URL specifies which other variations are available. When a user searches, Google goes through the following process:

1. it determines that it wants to rank a URL;
2. it checks whether that URL has hreflang annotations;
3. it presents the searcher with the results with the most appropriate URL for that user.

The user’s current location and language settings determine the most appropriate URL. A user can have multiple languages in his browser’s settings.

Crawl Budget is the number of pages that Googlebot cawls and indexes on a website within a given timeframe. Search engines have a limited amount of resources that can be used to  crawl through a site to catalogue and index the content.

If the number of pages exceeds the site’s crawl budget, there may be pages that will not get indexed or refreshed in the index. If pages don’t get indexed they will not appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs). If pages already in the index aren’t re-indexed regularly, they may lose recency and relevance and start declining in their SERP rankings.

Poor site structure (such as incorrect pagination and interlinking) may prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your site. Your crawl budget can also be adversely affected by duplicate content on your site, or incorrect or conflicting canonicalisation. Site speed can also have an impact on your site’s crawlability.

Wasting crawl budget can seriously impact your pages’ visibility in the SERPs, and in turn, severely affect your other SEO efforts.