Philip Mastroianni SEO Presentation at Brighton SEO in San Diego

Summary of the great talk on how to get a large website crawled, indexed and ranked with SEO on Google. Learned a few good tricks to help some of my million + website properties rank well in Google.

Download Slides here: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/crawl-index-scale-brightonseo-2024-philip-mastroianni/273502630

Connect with Philip Mastroianni on LinkedIn Here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipmastroianni/

1. Site Architecture & Structure

• Simplify Site Structure: Reduce the depth of your URL structure. Avoid going beyond 5 tiers, as deeper pages are harder for Google to crawl. Focus on optimizing the 2nd and 3rd tiers for your most important content.
• Logical URL Structure: Use a consistent, logical URL structure that aligns with your website’s hierarchy. Make sure URLs are easy to understand (e.g., /category/sub-category/product) and add breadcrumb navigation that matches this hierarchy.
• Avoid Crawl Traps: Keep your URLs consistent and avoid dynamic parameters that could create unnecessary variations of the same content, which can exhaust your crawl budget. Use canonical tags and robots.txt to block pages that don't need to be crawled.

2. Internal Linking

• Strategic Linking: Ensure important pages are well-connected internally. Pages with higher authority should link to those with lower authority to distribute link equity and improve crawling.
• Perfect Internal Links: Ensure all internal links are clean — avoid redirects, parameterized URLs, and broken links. Use tools like Screaming Frog or Botify to identify issues in internal links.
• Anchor Text Optimization: Use descriptive anchor text that adds context to the link, which helps Google understand the relevance and relationship between linked pages.

3. Content Quality & Quantity

• Hierarchy & Semantic Clarity: Structure content effectively using proper H tags to represent headings and subheadings. This helps Google understand content relationships and page hierarchy.
• Optimized Content Length: Analyze your content to determine optimal length for your niche. Balance quality and depth to avoid overloading Google with unnecessary information, but ensure enough depth for valuable keywords.
• Tight Clustering: Focus on having tight clusters of related topics. Use tools like PCA and BERT (as mentioned) to identify content gaps or overlaps that could lead to semantic confusion. Reducing unnecessary content can make it easier for Google to categorize and index pages.

4. Site Speed & Crawl Budget

• Improve Server Response Time: Ensure your server can handle frequent crawling. A low response time (❤50ms) can lead to a higher crawl rate by Google. Analyze your server logs to check if there are spikes during crawls.
• Core Web Vitals: Optimize your site’s core web vitals to increase speed. Faster sites often get a larger crawl budget, allowing more pages to be indexed.
• Server Logs Analysis: Use a tool like Botify to analyze server logs to determine where Google is spending crawl budget. Look for unnecessary crawl activity on static or low-value pages and adjust accordingly.

5. Rendering & Semantic Clarity

• JavaScript Rendering Optimization: Prefer server-side rendering for critical content, as it allows Google to access and index your content faster without waiting for client-side JavaScript to execute.
• Pre-Rendering & Static Content: Consider pre-rendering static pages to speed up their load time, reducing resource demands on your server.
• Simplify Content for Google: Ensure each page focuses on a singular topic. Clear language and concise grammar help Google classify pages faster.

6. Sitemaps

• XML Sitemap Optimization:
• Split XML Sitemaps: Split sitemaps logically by content type, such as products, services, or categories. Keep each sitemap under 50,000 URLs and 50MB in size.
• Align Last Mod Dates: Ensure accurate lastmod dates for your sitemaps to let Google know when significant changes happen. Don’t default all pages to the same last mod date.
• Update & Monitor: Use Google Search Console (GSC) to monitor sitemap indexing rates. Consider creating specialized sitemaps for critical or seasonal content to boost its indexing.
• HTML Sitemap: Create an HTML sitemap that helps users (and Google) navigate to deep pages. Link higher-level pages to the HTML sitemap to provide alternative routes for crawling.

7. Monitoring & Ongoing Maintenance

• Google Search Console: Regularly check the crawl stats report in GSC. Identify spikes in response times and investigate issues with indexing using the page indexing report.
• Log File Analysis: Use enterprise-level tools to analyze server logs and understand Google’s crawling behavior. Identify areas where Google is wasting crawl budget (e.g., 301 redirects, error pages, parameterized URLs).
• Adjust Crawling Behavior: Use robots.txt to block URLs with parameters and limit crawling of low-priority static pages. Ensure you’re not wasting budget on terms of service or similar static pages.

8. Use Enterprise SEO Tools

• Crawl Frequency Analysis: Utilize tools like Botify, Screaming Frog, or similar enterprise tools to:
• Audit internal linking.
• Identify crawl budget wastage.
• Segment pages to evaluate which sections of the site Google is focused on and optimize based on those findings.
• Crawl Segmentation: Segment your pages to focus on high-value sections (e.g., product categories or services) and adjust your XML sitemaps or internal linking accordingly.

Summary of Key Implementation Steps:

1. Improve Site Architecture: Simplify your URL structure and use consistent patterns to aid in crawlability.
2. Internal Linking Optimization: Strategically link important pages and avoid internal link errors.
3. Content Optimization: Align content hierarchy with a clear focus, ensure tight topic clustering, and simplify page topics.
4. Enhance Site Speed: Reduce server response time and focus on Core Web Vitals.
5. Optimize Crawling & Sitemaps: Split XML sitemaps logically, use accurate lastmod dates, and add an HTML sitemap to aid crawling.
6. Continuous Monitoring: Use GSC and tools like Botify to monitor crawl rates, identify crawl wastage, and adjust your strategies accordingly.

By implementing these strategies, you can improve the efficiency of Google’s crawling and indexing of your 2 million-page website, ensuring the most important and relevant content is indexed effectively.

1. Tools for Tight Clustering and Semantic Analysis:

To achieve tight clustering of related topics and improve semantic clarity, the following tools can help leverage PCA and BERT to identify content gaps or overlaps:

1. Google Natural Language API

• Analyzes the content’s entities, categories, and sentiment. It provides insights into how semantically aligned your content is.

1. OpenAI’s GPT API

• You can use GPT models for clustering content by topic, summarizing content, and identifying content overlaps or areas that need more clarity.

1. SEMrush (Topic Research and Content Gap Analysis)

• Helps identify content opportunities, group related topics, and identify potential gaps in your current content clusters.

1. IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding

• Provides insights into the semantic structure of your content, which can help in understanding if there are areas with semantic overlap or confusion.

1. TensorFlow & Scikit-Learn (Python Libraries)

• Use TensorFlow to implement BERT and Scikit-Learn to perform PCA for visualizing content clusters.
• You can create custom solutions to vectorize your content and visualize the relationships between topics using PCA, identifying outliers.

1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

• Combined with content audits, Screaming Frog can help find content overlaps and weak content across the site. By exporting the content and processing it using Python, you can utilize BERT to analyze topic clusters.

1. Ahrefs

• The Content Gap Analysis tool allows you to identify topics and keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t. This helps you identify gaps and see if your content clusters are incomplete.

1. MarketMuse

• Uses AI to provide a content score based on relevance, coherence, and depth, helping ensure content aligns tightly with your chosen topics and identifies areas for improvement.

1. Botify (Content & Crawl Analysis)

• Botify can help understand how Google interacts with content, track crawl frequency, and analyze internal linking. It’s useful for understanding how effectively content clusters are being crawled.

2. Tools to Improve Server Response Time:

To optimize server response time and monitor server performance during crawl spikes, the following tools are useful:

1. Google Cloud Trace & AWS X-Ray

• Both Google Cloud Trace (for Google Cloud Platform) and AWS X-Ray (for AWS) help monitor server performance, visualize latency, and identify bottlenecks that slow down response times.

1. New Relic

• A server monitoring tool that provides insights into server performance, including response times, server load, and bottlenecks. It helps maintain server response times below 350ms.

1. Pingdom

• A performance monitoring tool that helps track server response times, page speed, and overall website performance. It provides detailed reports on how quickly the server responds during various loads.

1. Datadog

• A monitoring platform that provides infrastructure monitoring, server logs, and analytics. It’s very helpful for identifying response time spikes and troubleshooting server performance issues during high crawl periods.

1. GTmetrix

• Analyzes your website and provides actionable recommendations to improve response times. This includes suggestions to optimize the server and front-end to maintain quick loading speeds.

1. Apache JMeter

• If you want to simulate server load and test server capacity, JMeter allows you to perform stress testing to see how well your server performs under high load situations.

1. Loggly or Splunk

• Loggly or Splunk are log management tools that help analyze server logs. By analyzing server logs, you can identify when Googlebot or other crawlers are hitting your server and spot any issues with response times or server errors.

1. Cloudflare

• Cloudflare offers a CDN (Content Delivery Network) and server optimization features that reduce server load and improve response time. It caches content, minimizing the burden on the origin server and improving performance globally.

1. Nginx or Apache Benchmarking Tools

• If you use Nginx or Apache as your web server, you can use built-in benchmarking tools to monitor server performance and identify points of high response times.

1. Botify Log Analyzer

• Botify offers a log analysis feature that specifically helps you understand how crawlers are interacting with your website. You can see spikes during crawl events and ensure the server response time remains optimal even during high crawl rates.

Using these tools, you can achieve tighter content clustering for better semantic relevance and also ensure your server is optimized for crawling efficiency, which will lead to better search engine indexing and overall website performance.