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Hi, everyone. Hi, Amy. Awesome. Well, everyone is coming in slowly. We are… Oh, nice. We are, I think we’re live on YouTube also now. Cool. Hi, Joe, Carol, Holly. Hey, Holly! Nice to see you. Nice. Good, people are joining in. Awesome.
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So we’re going to get started because we have a lot to cover today. This is our episode 46 of SEO for Bloggers Webinar. This is our second episode of TopHatChats, which is a series of the SEO for Bloggers Webinar where we focus on in-depth conversations on specific topics and hopefully provide enough learning with very smart people and special guests. We are still going to continue, it’s a long intro, we’re still going to continue regular quarterly scheduled SEO for Bloggers Webinars with Andrew, Casey, and myself, and with our wonderful host, Melissa, who is here in the background pressing all the cool buttons.
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And just like with all of our other webinars, please submit your questions using the chat. Make sure you type Q in the front of your question so that Melissa can surface them for us and we can get them answered for you.
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Today, we are joined by Carolyn Shelby. She’s a principal SEO at Yoast, a really good friend of mine, a brilliant digital marketer, and a real-deal queen of Ladonia, which is a micronation that borders Sweden. Today, Her Majesty and I will be chatting about crawling indexing of blogs, essentially Google’s ability to discover, crawl, and index your website. And of course, we will talk about everyone’s favorite SEO plugin Yoast because that’s where Carolyn’s from.
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Queen Carolyn, welcome to the show.
Carolyn Shelby (00:02:19):
Thank you so much for having me. I am excited to be here, so.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:02:22):
Good. Welcome to Eyebrow Talk.
Carolyn Shelby (00:02:25):
Eyebrows and all.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:02:25):
Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. We have a bunch of questions. So our typical format, we have questions that were submitted when people registered. We’re going to ask you these questions and you’re going to provide us with amazing answers.
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But before we do, and just to cut down on some confusion and just to make sure that everybody is on the same page of what we’re going to be talking about today, I want us to quickly have a chat about the difference between discoverability, crawlability, and indexability of a website, and what that entails from a search engine perspective. So Google typically will discover a website and then try to understand what’s there, it will crawl through it, index it, but it’s obviously much more complex. Let’s talk about that.
Carolyn Shelby (00:03:06):
Okay. Well, that’s a big topic. So I think where people tend to get confused is the crawling versus the indexing, I think, is the biggest confusion point. The search engine has to crawl your site. It starts at the home page or it starts at an entry point. The entry point is usually where it discovers the link. So if it first finds your site on a link into a deep page, that’s going to be the entry point and it’s going to start crawling out from there. They call it a spider for a reason because it creepy-crawls like a spider, right?
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It has to crawl your site. It has to be able to traverse through your site to understand exactly what your site’s about, find content, collect the content, and then take it back to the mothership to be processed. I was actually explaining this to someone who’s very new to SEO the other day, and I said, “It’s like it goes out, the little drones, like your Roomba, your vacuum cleaner. It has to scoot around and figure out where the edges of the room are and then run the pattern of the room before it actually starts vacuuming because it needs to know where it’s going and what it’s going to do.”
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That’s like what the crawlers do. They go and they Roomba out your site, and if you have links that are written in a way that don’t allow it to enter the room, it skips that room. If you have a steaming pile of dog poop in the middle of your carpet, it’s going to hopefully avoid that, and if it doesn’t avoid it, it will run over it and inhale all of the poop and then boot everything. So actually, I think-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:04:49):
Was this a traumatic experience that you went through that you-
Carolyn Shelby (00:04:52):
No, I haven’t, but I’ve heard other people go through it and it’s horrible. Horror stories about just dog poop smeared all over the house. It’s just bad.
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Anyway, I genuinely think the Roomba analogy is probably the most accurate analogy that we could get at this point because there’s similar functions. But anyway, so that’s the crawling part. If there’s anything that you’re doing that is impeding crawl or preventing it from crawling around your site, it’s going to miss things. It’s going to miss rooms, it’s going to miss huge sections of the website because you’ve blocked its access basically.
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Now, indexing is what happens with all that data after it collects it and takes it back to the mothership for processing, so it’s finding things, and it’s almost like… We were just in California and we visited a gold mine. So the gold mines in the south, the gold is trapped inside rock. You have to mine a whole bunch of rock and then take the rock outside and process it. They pulverize it into dust and then they shake it until the gold comes out. That’s sort of like what the search engines do with all that data that comes back.
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The data that comes back from the crawlers is just ore, it’s unprocessed, it’s everything they could grab and stick in their little wagon, and then they took it back to the processing plant. The processing plant, they smash it up into little pieces that they can understand, and then they reassemble the pieces so that they can go, “Okay, I’m going to keep this part. I’m going to keep that part. This is junk. I’m going to throw that away.” And that [inaudible 00:06:26] index because now they’ve processed all of that raw data that the crawlers brought back and they understand what’s going on, and now they can pick and choose what they’re going to include in the index, and being included in the index means you’re now available to be found by the searchers. So, there’s that.
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Discoverability, on the other hand, is how easy are you making it for the crawlers to find you initially in the first place? Are you submitting a sitemap? Is your sitemap full of garbage or is your sitemap full of good things? Are you creating links out on the internet that link back to your site for it to find? Are you doing something stupid as it tries to come into your site that would block it from entering?
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So it’s like you might be sending out the party invitations, but if you have a bouncer at the door that’s only letting certain people in, that’s going to affect its ability to discover your content because it has to get into crawl it before it can discover it. The crawling is how they find stuff. So I think that’s probably everything.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:07:36):
I think you did a very good job explaining it.
Carolyn Shelby (00:07:39):
Thank you.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:07:39):
And everybody loves an analogy. Okay, so with that, and I like that, is there trash in your sitemap? With that, here’s a question that’s relevant to this. Does Google crawl every page of the website or is there really such a thing as crawl budget?
Carolyn Shelby (00:07:53):
There is really such a-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:07:54):
Does Google at one point say like, “Oh, I’ve seen enough”?
Carolyn Shelby (00:07:58):
There is such a thing as crawl budget. There is also such a thing as, “I’ve seen enough,” so all of these things can be true at the same time. No one knows exactly how it functions, but we have a really good guesstimate of what happens. We know that… Back in the day, a long time ago, I used to explain this as it was a hungry, hungry caterpillar, and your website is a leaf, and it’s just chomping way down the leaf until it gets full. And every link, every link, every bit of thing that’s on your page is like a thing that it eats. So when it gets full, it just goes back to the mothership to purge basically and get rid of the contents of its stomach so it’s hungry again and can go eat some more.
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Crawl budget is how much energy is it going to have to expend to consume this piece of website? How many times has it already done that? And does it keep encountering the same thing that looks like it’s too much to bite off so it just starts ignoring that thing because it already knows that it’s too big to bite off?
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So when you’re dealing with crawl budget, ideally you would want to not have things on your website that are too big for it to eat. You would also not want to have copious quantities of duplicate content or empty pages that you’re making it crawl and expend energy on.
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Calendar programs used to be really bad at that. There were calendar programs that would, if you clicked on a link, it would make a page. So if it started crawling through your calendar, it would keep making pages, because they were generated on the fly, for every day that it visited. And if it’s a calendar that never ends, you’ve got that bot stuck in that calendar that never ends, and 99.9999% of the pages it encounters aren’t even going to have an event on them. It’s just going to be a calendar, an empty shell.
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So it’s going to see that. It’s going to remember that, “This was a pain in my butt. I don’t want to get stuck in that anymore. I’m just going to ignore everything that matches that beginning pattern in that URL,” and now it’s going to ignore everything in your calendar directory forever.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:10:12):
Right. Whether you want it to ignore it or not, right?
Carolyn Shelby (00:10:15):
It’s like-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:10:17):
So there could be pages in there that you want crawled?
Carolyn Shelby (00:10:18):
Right. It’s like that time that I went to a restaurant, I had a salad, salad didn’t taste quite right, got nasty food poisoning. You know what that taught me? I’m never eating a salad from that place again. It doesn’t matter if they change… It could be a different chef, it could have been extenuating circumstances. It doesn’t matter. I’m scared now. I’m never going back there again. Or if I do go back there, I’m certainly not getting the salad.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:10:39):
You’re not getting the salad, right. Okay, so that brings us to the next question here. “What page types on my blog,” and our audience primarily are bloggers and publishers here, “what page types on my blog should be crawled more, which should be crawled less, and how can we influence that?”
Carolyn Shelby (00:10:58):
I would say the pages you want crawled more often would be pages like your recipes, your category pages, and your cornerstone posts. So things that you deem important, those are the things that you’re going to want to have crawled more often.
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The things that you’d want crawled less often, tag archives maybe, depending on how you’re using them. And most people use them wrong, so I would say probably not the tag archives, unless you’re one of the few who’s using them right, in which case, good for you and get those crawled often. Any type of filtering URL. So if you have things that start adding filter parameters to URLs, you don’t want the crawlers to encounter those and start using them because it’s just a different presentation of the same content. It’s already found. It’s not going to add anything to the crawler’s understanding. I would block those. Comments probably don’t need those.
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Yep, filters, comments-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:11:58):
Attachment URLs for images.
Carolyn Shelby (00:12:00):
Attachment URLs, things like that I would definitely block. So there’s a way that you can do that too. You can use your robots.txt. You can use noindex. I wouldn’t use no-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:12:11):
You can use Yoast.
Carolyn Shelby (00:12:12):
Well, yeah, and Yoast does this. You can also use canonicals to help indicate what’s the core, but I think using robots.txt to explicitly say, “Hey, filter pattern that I have a lot on my website, just please, robot, please don’t crawl that.” And that’s what the robots.txt does. The robots.txt says, “I would like you to crawl this. I would like you to not crawl that. In fact, I forbid you from crawling that.”
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What the robots.txt cannot do though is prevent things from being indexed. So even if you tell the robot, “Whatever you do, don’t crawl this entire section over here,” if somebody somewhere else on the internet links into that section and Google finds that link and then can start scooting around inside of it, Google’s found it, now it knows about it. Nothing you can do about that. You can’t make it forget, and it might index that stuff. So if that stuff needs to not be indexed, that’s a separate function. It’s called a noindex, and you can apply that on the page level.
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So robots.txt controls the robot behavior, the crawling behavior, and then the noindex is a signal to Google that you would prefer to not have that be in Google at all.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:13:23):
Right. So robots.txt is essentially almost like a gatekeeper that sometimes will do a really poor job at letting Google in, but then once Google’s in, there’s instructions for the robots once Google is on the page, whether Google should either should crawl through it but not index it, right?
Carolyn Shelby (00:13:43):
You can’t tell it not to not index in, I mean, you-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:13:46):
Well, on page. Robots instructions, on robots-
Carolyn Shelby (00:13:48):
Yeah, on page. On page, right. Yeah.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:13:54):
Yeah, yeah. Good, okay. And we typically can control, we can create, and typically it’s not needed for smaller website.
Carolyn Shelby (00:13:59):
No.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:13:59):
Larger websites, you… But you want to optimize for crawl budget. And there is a lot of questions on crawl budgets, and I think it’s been overblown in terms of a crawl budget, budget optimization. And unless you have millions of pages, at that point, I would say you have to worry about it, especially with WordPress. Google has figured out the structure of WordPress and how URLs could be potentially formed. So Google can crawl, even if you’re not doing a good job at optimizing the crawl budgets or where Google is going, Google has made sense of that ecosystem by now.
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But with that, there’s a question here, “How do ensure that a site gets crawled regularly?”
Carolyn Shelby (00:14:43):
You can confirm that the site is being crawled regularly by looking at your log files. There are giveaways. The crawlers announce themselves. They’re not secretive about it. Cloudflare, if you’ve got Cloudflare, there are ways that you could monitor for bot traffic there.
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If you’re not getting crawled on a regular basis, it could be a couple things. The most likely culprit is that you don’t update on a regular basis, but I would imagine that you’re updating fairly frequently. Create signals that show that there’s signs of life, I guess, is the easiest way to say it. So are you posting on any of the socials with links back to your site? Are you doing something on your site that pings out as, “Hey, I’m here. I’m alive. Please come pay attention to me”? It’s not difficult to do that.
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Now, I guess I would wonder what would make you think you’re not getting crawled on a regular basis? I would say that if you suspect that you’re not being crawled, it might be more that something’s wrong with your site and it’s being crawled, it’s just not being understood. And then that understanding is not being reflected in the index because I think it’s unusual that you would not be crawled. Unless something has happened and you’ve accidentally blocked the crawlers, it’s very difficult to get banned from being crawled. That’s just not a thing.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:16:14):
It could potentially be like you just migrated from one website to another, one theme to another. There could be… Yeah.
Carolyn Shelby (00:16:22):
Well, and that’s a blocking issue, I would say, where there’s something technically miscommunicated that is either causing the crawler to get lost between point A and point B, or it’s getting the wrong address. Something’s technically wrong. It’s not a function of the crawler has just decided that it doesn’t want to visit you anymore.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:16:43):
Right. And typically, this is more on the advanced side when you want to start looking at your log files. I posted a link in here for Google Search Console Crawl Stats Report. It’s buried in the settings. It’s all the way at the bottom on the left-hand side, but there’s a link there, a Bitly link, and there’s a video directly from Google on how to read that report, and you can get a feel for how frequently Google is visiting your website without having to pull in log files and all of that.
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Here’s a good question. “Should we request Google to crawl a page or a post after we publish it or update it? If so, what would be the examples of when to do it?”
Carolyn Shelby (00:17:27):
So when I was at the newspaper, we would immediately cross-post or announce an article publication to Twitter, and doing that would cause Google to come fetch it quicker.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:17:45):
Right. Oh, hang on, let’s explain that, the mechanism of that. Sorry, I got ice in my mouth.
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So you’re basically, instead of going to Google and saying, “Please crawl this,” you’re publishing a link to this new article to a platform like Twitter or X, whatever, where we know Google is rapidly crawling new content, especially from if you’re a publication, you’re consistently posting, we know that there’s a direct pipeline from Twitter to Google, and Google sees this new link-
Carolyn Shelby (00:18:19):
Or there was.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:20):
Or there was, right. I mean, same thing with Google+. Back in the day, we used to go there before we would even go to Search Console because that would get picked up right away. Right?
Carolyn Shelby (00:18:28):
So if you’re a small site and you go through Google Search Console and you say, “Could you please crawl this page for me?” you’re going to go to the back of the line because you’re not a high-priority customer. It really does favor sites that are big. It wants sites that are big, that are popular, that get requested a lot, that get visited a lot, that get high click-through rates. So you can ask it too, but it’s not going to do it immediately.
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I think you have a better shot at getting that URL crawled if you can, even if it’s somewhat artificial, generate outside interest in it, some velocity. So posting it to Reddit, posting it to Twitter, posting it to Facebook, well, Facebook not so much because it’s a walled garden, maybe LinkedIn if it’s appropriate, but please, for the love of God, if it’s not appropriate for LinkedIn, don’t put it on LinkedIn because I hate that, but ditto Pinterest. Use some judgment. But you get the gist.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:19:35):
Right, right, right, right. So Google will crawl your content at one point. It might not be the same day, it might not be the next day. And again, it all depends on the quality of the website, what’s happening during that time. And we do notice that sites that are generally in better health from a technical perspective are much more hospitable to Google’s crawls. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah.
Carolyn Shelby (00:20:02):
Especially on smaller sites, Google is more likely to come check your home page to see if there’s been any changes. They’ll check your site map, they’ll check your home page. If you have a section of your home page where you have recently posted or most recently posted articles, that can help that new article get found faster. If it’s new but it’s three clicks deep, it could be a while before it finds it because it’s got to traverse through the site and decide that it’s worth visiting three more levels of that site before it discovers that there’s a new article there because it is discoverability. If it’s on the home page, it’s going to find it right away.
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And this is why they say that… People talk a lot about the depth of your site, and people think that that just means in the URL, you just have hanging off the root. That is not what that means. It means what is literally one click away from the home page? So if you want it to be found faster, find a way to get it on the home page for a little while.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:20:57):
Right. And a lot of you who use some of the themes from Skylar or Cultivate, you already have that ability where your content, especially the food bloggers, where your content gets pushed to the home page whenever it posts. And at the same time, internal linking is a very, very good helper in getting your content discovered.
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One of the things that we constantly talk about, especially with checklists of what to do before you publish, is one of the last things that we talk about is once you publish, to make sure you go in and build internal links from relevant sources within your website. Cool.
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Okay, so let’s shift focus a little bit. So we talked about discoverability, we talked about indexability, requesting index. Let’s zoom out. Let’s look at it from an architectural topological perspective of a website. And there’s a question here, and we’re talking about structure, your categories, internal linking, nesting, parent-child relationships, “Can you share an overview of how a site structure organization can impact crawling and indexing?” That’s a good question.
Carolyn Shelby (00:22:02):
And again, I think that largely goes back to there’s two different functions here. There is the physical connection points and then there’s the understanding, the contextual understanding. So having your categories and having your tags and having a logic to how you structure your site helps with the understanding. The crawling and discoverability architecture though is 100% dependent on the links. It’s the links in your navigation, it’s the internal linking from page to page. That’s your architecture. That’s not at all dependent on what category you have something in or what tag you have something in.
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You could have a link in your top nav that goes to most popular recipes, and every recipe in that dropdown could come from a different category. So the categories in that case have nothing to do with what’s in that dropdown menu, but that dropdown menu is one of the most important things on your page because it’s in your top nav and Google’s going to find that or the crawler’s going to find that on every single page of your site. So the things that are linked to in that are going to have a higher priority and are going to be perceived as being more important because, again, it’s the number of clicks away from the home page. So how deep do you have to go to find that piece of content? And if that content’s in the top nav, it’s one click. Right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:23:35):
Right.
Carolyn Shelby (00:23:35):
If you have to go to a category page about ground beef and then another subcategory or a tag about Mexican food, and then you find the taco recipe, that’s three, four clicks, that’s going to be buried.
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So for crawling purposes, I would make sure that your navigation is structured around your understanding of your target audience and making it easy and logical for them to find the stuff that they need to find. And presumably, that will help Google find the stuff that the people who want to find it will find it, and then it’s all supported.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:24:20):
Right, right. So assuming the perspective of the way I’m presenting the structure of my content to the user from a logical navigational path, we can safely assume that that’s how Google’s going to interpret our structure versus looking strictly at categories or how our URL is formatted with directories.
Carolyn Shelby (00:24:47):
Yeah. So the URL formatting really plays no role at all in helping Google understand. It doesn’t help it crawl your site any better, and it doesn’t necessarily… It’s not a great help in helping it understand the architecture of your site. I think that there are aspects of that that can be helpful. Is it helpful to clarify that your taco recipe belongs in Mexican food and not maybe Colombian food? Because I presume they have tacos too. Everyone has tacos. Or American food. You wouldn’t want to have it listed under American food unless it’s a very American… Here’s example.
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Let’s say you have a recipe for Taco Bell tacos. That would fall under American food because that’s not Mexican, but you have a different recipe that’s a very authentic Mexican recipe that you want to have in the Mexican category.
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So it’s not so much communicating to Google the structure of your site as it’s communicating context to the specific articles that you have. So the categories are important because they help with context. Google might say, “Hey, Bob, I see that you’re looking for Americanized tacos. I know that Jane’s site over here has 12 different nationalities of tacos and American’s one of them, so I’m going to go over here and grab this American taco recipe and serve this up in this recipe carousel for you.”
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So it’s important for context, it’s important for organizing the SERPs, the results, right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:26:33):
Right.
Carolyn Shelby (00:26:33):
But it’s not hierarchical. It’s not important to the structure of the site, and it won’t affect the crawlability or the discoverability of the content. That’s strictly mechanical navigation and crawling.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:26:46):
Right. So a post can perform very, very well and still live inside of an uncategorized category.
Carolyn Shelby (00:26:54):
Yeah.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:26:54):
Right, right. But where you organize that post, and that post can live across multiple categories, where you organize that post signals to Google from a context perspective and even maybe topical depth, like explaining to Google, “Hey, I am an expert at Americanized tacos because I have this category, American taco, Americanized taco recipes, and I have, let’s say, 10 posts per page, and this category has 10 pages in pageant in its sequence so we have 100 assets on the topic of Americanized tacos. So most likely, there’s good information here. I’m going to trust the site on this topic.”
Carolyn Shelby (00:27:33):
Yeah. So I guess silos aren’t as big of a thing as they used to be, but siloing your content is still, I think, a helpful concept to understand. So the bigger the silo is, the more good stuff is inside that silo. You want to make sure that you have… But you don’t want to cross-pollute your silos. You don’t want your soybeans mixed in with your corn type of stuff. I’m so Midwest, I’m sorry.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:27:59):
We dig it. Let’s go.
Carolyn Shelby (00:28:07):
Yeah, it shows that you’ve got depth. It shows that you’re an expert. Google likes deep wells or tall silos, but they don’t like cookie sheets. You don’t want to be broad and flat. You want to be deep and narrow. And if you have several deep and narrow silos, veins of gold, I don’t know which. I’ve used so many metaphors, now I’m so confused.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:28:28):
Is it safe to say that silos/categories, taxonomies, can be, when properly used, can also serve as clusters or cornerstone pieces to-
Carolyn Shelby (00:28:43):
They are clusters, yeah. Cornerstone’s not so much. I mean-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:28:45):
Right, okay. They’ve been rebranded from silos to clusters.
Carolyn Shelby (00:28:48):
Okay. So I’ll start using clusters. See, clusters reminds me of pecan clusters, and those are just tasty chocolate things, and now I’m hungry.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:28:58):
Good. Okay. So we have one question here, “I have a pop-up on my site. Can Google keep crawling the page after the pop-up arrives?”
Carolyn Shelby (00:29:10):
Yes. However, depending on how the pop-up is executed, there is a high probability that what happens is when they… See, I can see this in my head. I’ve got this matrix thing going on.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:29:27):
Right, right. Let’s go.
Carolyn Shelby (00:29:28):
I wish I could show you guys what I see.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:29:30):
Talk through it. We’re here for this.
Carolyn Shelby (00:29:32):
So you guys have looked at the view source, right? You’ve looked at the view source. It’s just so… So imagine you’re the crawler and you pop the view source and you’re like, “I’m just going to crawl through here and I’m reading it top to bottom. Here I go.” A delayed pop-up, so it’s like, “Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Boop!” and it just injects additional content into what had been a solid block of text. So it’s like, “Food, food, food, food, food, buy some stuff!” and you’re like, “Whoa, that’s not relevant to what I was just looking at. What just happened?”
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And it’s not so much that it stops. I mean, it can stop. If there’s something broken in the JavaScript that gets ejected, it can stop, but it doesn’t usually. It just gets a little confused because now it’s injecting stuff that wasn’t relevant to the article into the middle of the article and it gets confused.
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So I would say there’s a higher probability that it’s going to dilute the relevance of the article than it is [inaudible 00:30:31] unless it’s popping up something that’s broken. Sometimes with programmatic ads, some of the ads break and there’s so many ads being pumped around the system, you don’t always catch the broken ad when it comes through, but sometimes the broken ad comes through while Google’s there and then that particular crawl, it’s going to be like, “I don’t know what the hell just happened, but I’m going to leave. I don’t know what this was. I’m out of here,” and then it might not connect for a couple days.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:30:57):
“Looks weird. I’m out.” Right, right.
Carolyn Shelby (00:30:59):
Yeah. It’s like it saw a mouse, it ran away. It happens. And that’s a situation where if you’re a very high-volume site and you find that’s happening a lot, especially maybe on your home page, you need to reach out to your ad partner and say, “Hey, I’ve caught these ads coming through and these ads are broken. Either I don’t want this advertiser anymore sending stuff to my site, or you need to get your stuff cleaned up, Mr. Ad Company.”
(00:31:27):
There’s things you can do, but you’re generally only in a position to [inaudible 00:31:31] a very high-volume earner for them. When I was at Disney, I could do stuff like that. “Get these people out of here. Get out.”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:31:39):
Right, you can flex. Right, you can flex. Right, right. Because it’s Disney. Yeah.
Carolyn Shelby (00:31:42):
Yeah, yeah. But you know, if you’re not there, then it’s a different… It’s more like, “Please. Please, sir, help me.”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:31:50):
Okay, let’s shift into more of the Yoast stuff. Okay, so I have a bunch of questions here. Actually, most of the questions that came in had to do with the Yoast.
(00:32:03):
Okay, let’s start with this one. I think this should be a good one, a fun one. “What top three things should content creators focus on when utilizing Yoast?”
Carolyn Shelby (00:32:12):
Well, that’s…
Arsen Rabinovich (00:32:14):
Let’s start from three.
Carolyn Shelby (00:32:16):
That’s a big question.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:32:18):
Let’s do a YouTube style, “Coming in at number three.”
Carolyn Shelby (00:32:26):
I don’t know. Okay. The first thing I would tell people when you’re using Yoast is to make sure you actually go through the configuration and configure everything because the number one thing that I encounter when someone says to me, “I’ve got Yoast and I don’t think it’s doing anything,” I go in, I’m like, “Well, you do have to configure it because if you don’t configure it, it’s not actually going to do anything.”
(00:32:53):
So there’s a thing called the first-time configurator, the FTC, when you get into it. That is not the first-time-complete configuration, that is the bare-minimum-to-make-it-work configuration. I implore you, go look at all the other settings and anything that isn’t grayed out that you’ve got access to set, please set it. Set a default for it. Make sure you’ve got a default set for your descriptions because if you don’t write a description and you don’t have a default set, then the description will be blank. But you have the opportunity to set a default, and the default can be like “percentage excerpt percentage.”
(00:33:32):
What that’ll do is that’ll say, “I’m going to take the excerpt and if I don’t have an excerpt defined, it’ll default to grabbing the beginning of the article.” And boom, now you’ve got a description even though you were too lazy to set it on the page. So set all of those.
(00:33:50):
I know that for organizations in the schema, which is in the beginning, if you do not have an image provided, it will not include your organization schema. So for the love of God, provide an image if it asks for an image. Do the things it asks. Just make sure that you filled it out completely. That goes a long way towards making sure everything works.
(00:34:19):
Chasing the green lights, I would say, is not-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:34:23):
Ah, okay. Go, go, go because we have more questions. But yeah, you go. You go, you go, you go.
Carolyn Shelby (00:34:27):
Chasing the green lights is not a thing I would hyperventilate over. Is it great if everything’s green? Sure. Did you start chopping up your sentences to make sure that they’re all short enough to get that green light if they’re mostly there? No, no, no, no, no, no.
(00:34:48):
They’re recommendations. Those are guidelines. Is it great if you follow all the guidelines? Yes. Are there situations where the guideline isn’t 100% applicable to yours? Also yes. And if your audience and your article is discussing something very specific, but it’s something very specific that the system doesn’t like it for some reason, you can’t change the topic. You serve the topic, you serve your reader the best you can, and if the machine is not 100% happy with it, that just means you’re an edge case and not average. And that’s not bad. You know?
(00:35:31):
So just don’t get so fixated on those green lights. The green lights are wonderful. I love the green lights, but you’re probably not going to die if you don’t have 100% green.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:35:44):
Right, right. And you definitely, and I’m guilty for this, and I say this very frequently, I say, “Don’t chase the green light. Do not chase the green light,” because it’s going to position you, just from just following that methodology, it’s going to put you in a position where you could potentially over-optimize where you’re going to try to fill in as many blanks as possible without understanding the intricacies of repeating the same keyword in the headings and repeating that over and over.
(00:36:12):
And that leads us to the next question here. “Yoast SEO makes a ton of recommendations. SEO experts say following all of the recommendations might lead to over-optimization. Where do we kind of draw the line for this?”
Carolyn Shelby (00:36:28):
Okay, well, I don’t know what SEO experts said that, and… Well, you and I can have a conversation later then.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:36:35):
Right.
Carolyn Shelby (00:36:38):
I think it’s difficult to over-optimize unless you are deliberately being boneheaded about how you’re interpreting the guidance. There was a certain level of guidance that I found to be particularly objectionable and it was related to the number of words in a sentence, and everything had to be shorter than 10 words long or something. I’m like, “I don’t think in sentences that short. This is beneath me.”
(00:37:12):
And I literally, I went through and I tried to make things as short as I could, and then I literally started to feel like I was in Dick and Jane territory where like, “Dick has a ball. Jane threw the ball.” You’re a good reader. You’re a good writer. Read your content and you’ll know if it feels off. You’ll know if it feels stilted. Don’t force yourself to do something that feels wrong to you to appease a machine.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:37:45):
Google. Right. Well look, we always recommend, we say, “Look, write the content. Write it for humans. Don’t pay attention to the green light. Read it back to yourself.” Obviously, you want to sprinkle in some SEO, but it’s not the end of the… You can always add more stuff later. It doesn’t have to be a green light when you publish your post. As long as you’ve read it to yourself and it feels like it’s written naturally and you’re not over-optimizing or writing for search engines, you should be good to publish. Okay, I like that.
Carolyn Shelby (00:38:17):
There’s a caveat though that I want to add. So the green lights that are related to how many words are in a sentence, those are the Flesch Reading Ease score, that is… The way it’s defined the scoring I think is part of the problem with the scoring is that you want to get a high score because a high score means it’s easier to read by younger people. So I think they’d say, “Oh, you want to strive for an eighth-grade reading level.” So to me, that’s like, why would I do dumb down my writing? Right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:38:53):
Right.
Carolyn Shelby (00:38:53):
But that’s not entirely what it means, and it is an easy way to explain writing for clarity, but it is possible to be clear in your writing and still score well on that or not be clear in your writing and still score well on that.
(00:39:10):
The reason you want to have shorter sentences that are one thought per paragraph, make things easy to understand and extract, is in the process of becoming less for Google now and more for the LLMs because that’s how the LLMs are understanding and tokenizing your data. And I actually have an article coming out this month that talks just all about that, so I think that’s going to be in Search Engine Journal in a couple of weeks.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:39:46):
Nice. Very cool. So LLM is large language models, that’s artificial intelligence.
Carolyn Shelby (00:39:46):
The AI stuff, right. So like ChatGPT, AI Overviews. There’s a particular way that they like to have the content structured that makes it easy for them to understand what you’re saying and it makes it easy for them to cite you. It makes it easy for them to grab it and put you in the AI Overview. So when it comes back and you said, “Can you find me a good recipe for an American taco?” it’ll say, “Actually, yeah, I can, because this lady writes really well, so go look at her stuff.”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:40:12):
Right. “We’ve picked that up.” And that makes a lot of sense.
Carolyn Shelby (00:40:22):
Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware I was telling you something you already knew.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:40:22):
I’m willing to learn from you. Especially the LLM stuff is so intriguing, especially how recipe publishers can benefit from it because in some situations people are just like, they’re blocking, they don’t want to be crawled for that.
(00:40:41):
“Is there a way,” there’s another question, “is there a way to bulk noindex pages using Yoast?”
Carolyn Shelby (00:40:52):
Right now, I don’t know that there is. I don’t know that you would want to though. What is the point of having a page if you’re going to hide it from the search engines?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:41:01):
Right. So in certain situations, and especially with us when we do a content review and we find a bunch of pages that should not be presented to Google for indexing, and let’s say these are blog posts that were written back in the day, they don’t have much information, the topic is not really interesting from a volume perspective, but they should still be available on the website for a social traffic, email newsletter traffic, so we want to noindex some of those pages.
Carolyn Shelby (00:41:30):
I don’t know that I would do that personally, but that’s just me.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:41:32):
Okay. Why?
Carolyn Shelby (00:41:36):
So just because you noindex something doesn’t mean Google doesn’t find it and doesn’t know it’s there, and I think these signals that it’s sending that, “I’ve got all this content on my site that I don’t want to share with everyone and that I’m not proud enough of to have included in the index,” I feel like that’s sending a bad message, but I don’t have any proof of that. I just know that that makes me feel bad inside and I try to avoid things that make me feel bad inside.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:42:03):
Right. So let’s say this is content that, an example, things I did today, and there’s a hundred of these posts where the only difference in the title and the H1 and just the structure of the post is the change in the date of things I did today and it’s just a list-
Carolyn Shelby (00:42:24):
But why wouldn’t you just delete that?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:42:26):
Well, maybe there’s value in having that on the website for other purposes, for, like I said, sending traffic through email, sending traffic through social, but you just don’t want that crawled. You don’t want… I mean, you’re okay with having it crawled. You don’t want to have it indexed.
Carolyn Shelby (00:42:42):
Well, so if you’re okay with having it crawled, crawling things and then not indexing things, it starts to get tricky. If you’re okay with just not having it crawled in the first place, you could block that whole section in the robots.txt, but individual noindexing is not an easy thing to accomplish with the tool. It would sort of…
(00:43:01):
So the way I would do it, you can go to bulk edit and I’m pretty sure that you can-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:08):
Select, yeah.
Carolyn Shelby (00:43:09):
… just click things all the way down. You could probably do a toggle, but I think for that particular item, you might have to just manually go through and click everything, but you do it from a single screen at least. It’s not like you have to open up the page and then go to the da, da, da, da, da. Right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:23):
Yeah.
Carolyn Shelby (00:43:23):
I don’t think it’s that complicated. I do think you can do it with a bulk edit. I also know that if you’re at all good with spreadsheets, you could go into the database and you could do some SQL magic and set large sections. But if you’re not good with SQL and databases, I would urge you not to do what I just said because-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:43):
Don’t listen to Carolyn, right.
Carolyn Shelby (00:43:44):
… if you mess up, you can destroy everything.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:47):
Don’t do it.
Carolyn Shelby (00:43:48):
Yeah, that’s like recreationally playing with radioactive material.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:51):
Yeah, yeah. Please.
Carolyn Shelby (00:43:52):
Maybe don’t if you don’t if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:54):
We usually say, “Don’t even look, don’t breathe in that direction. Don’t, you don’t”-
Carolyn Shelby (00:43:57):
Okay. I’m sorry.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:57):
… “you have no business going there.”
Carolyn Shelby (00:43:59):
Well, you asked me how I do it. That’s how I’d do.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:44:02):
Well, I mean, yeah, listen, I get it. Well, the question was can we do it in Yoast? And maybe there is a way you can select a bunch of posts and maybe there’s an action from a dropdown that allows you to do it that way.
(00:44:12):
Okay, next question. And so there’s two of these questions and they want to format this in the cool way. It’s about Yoast. So one question is, “What are some cool features of Yoast that we might not be using on Premium and on the free version?” And then there’s another question, “Which is the least-known feature of Yoast plugin that food bloggers should be aware of?”
(00:44:38):
Tough questions today, huh?
Carolyn Shelby (00:44:42):
Gosh. Gosh. Okay. The Premium version has an orphaned content filter. Are you guys familiar with the orphaned content filter?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:44:55):
Well, let’s explain what orphaned content is.
Carolyn Shelby (00:44:58):
Well, so the Yoast definition and the auditing tool definition are maybe slightly different. The Yoast definition is it’s looking for content that doesn’t have any in-body links to it, rather than any links at all. If you have a link to a page and that link only exists in your footer or the link only exists in your navigation, but there’s no body copy links over to that page, Yoast will count that as being orphaned.
(00:45:32):
So the utility there is if you’re looking for building up your internal links, you now have a list of pages that could use a little affection, and it’s nice to not have any Little Orphan Annie’s floating around your site because then they get discontented and they start revolting and singing aggressive songs about slipping people mickeys.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:45:55):
Uncomfortable.
Carolyn Shelby (00:45:59):
The full social previews, I think, is pretty cool. I think if you’ve forgotten to go through all of the configurations, you can very easily miss the full social previews because especially if you’re on Premium, you can define a default social image. So maybe not all of your images grab correctly if you’re just posting them, that defaults, it’s going to take the first image thing. Maybe that first image isn’t the most optimal for social. Maybe you want to go into Canva or something and make a nice social image. You can upload those, a default, in the settings. And then you have the option on the per page level of overriding some of the social settings too, if you have a special one just for that article. So, that’s definitely a Premium thing.
(00:46:50):
There’s the redirect manager. That’s one that I think can be misused so maybe don’t play with that if you have questions.
(00:47:01):
Internal linking suggestions, I don’t know how many people are using that, but I would think that as a content and a conscientious content creator, I would not need internal linking suggestions because I know where my content is and I have a good idea of what I want to promote, so I don’t know how helpful that one is.
(00:47:22):
If you have Premium, you have access to the AI enhancements, and I don’t know how many people who don’t have Premium are aware of that, but there are AI enhancements now to your titles and to your meta descriptions. And I think it can help you pick keywords now too. Every month they come out with new features and it’s all very difficult to keep up with.
(00:47:44):
But the titles and the descriptions, I think, are helpful because especially with… Sometimes you have a series and you’ve got a lot of articles that are kind of about the same thing, but they’re just enough different. You start falling into an, “Oh my God, I don’t know how I could possibly write one more title and make it different from the last one and my brain just will not work anymore,” and then you can press the little sparkle button and the sparkle button will go, “Oh, try these,” and it comes up with five new ones.
(00:48:13):
And even if you don’t use them exactly, it’s just like this little… You roll up to a roadblock, a writer’s block, and it just gives you a little boost to get you over that hump.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:25):
A little push, a little gentle nudge.
Carolyn Shelby (00:48:25):
And it helps, and I think it makes life a lot better.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:28):
I love that. I love that.
Carolyn Shelby (00:48:30):
Oh, just one more thing.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:30):
Oh. Go, go.
Carolyn Shelby (00:48:31):
The nice thing about the AI enhancements in Premium, we don’t charge you extra token, extra fees to use the AI. There’s no situation that we’ve yet encountered where someone gets cut off or they can’t use the AI anymore. It’s a flat rate. It’s transparent pricing that you’re not going to be in a situation where you’re paying for Premium and then you have to pay extra to use the AI. So do play with that because we’ve been working really hard on it for the last year.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:49:02):
I haven’t seen it. I’m definitely going to play around with it.
Carolyn Shelby (00:49:04):
How dare you?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:49:06):
I’m sorry, I have dishonored.
Carolyn Shelby (00:49:07):
In the name of John Cena, how dare you? Sorry, my kid says that all the time. I don’t know why.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:49:13):
So let’s talk about there’s a question here and I think it’s a good segue into… Because you’re coming to us with a little discount for Yoast, right?
Carolyn Shelby (00:49:25):
Oh, yeah.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:49:25):
For people who are listening, right? So it’s a good segue. So, “I am on the free version. What is the best,” and this is an actual question, “what is the best use of Yoast Premium, if any?”
Carolyn Shelby (00:49:38):
The best use? I think I would say the social previews and you get more schema available to you. You get the social previews, which especially in the food blogger content creator space, the social is huge. And the ability to control, the fine-tune control that you get over those social previews makes your life so much easier because you’re not then having to rebuild everything in Twitter and rebuild everything in Facebook and rebuild everything every time you share now. So I love those, and then the AI stuff, I love that. Those are the things I love.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:23):
Tell us about this discount that you… Thank you. Tell us about this discount that you came with today.
Carolyn Shelby (00:50:30):
Oh, so I don’t know if everybody knows, but Yoast is 15 years old this year.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:35):
Yay!
Carolyn Shelby (00:50:35):
So we are having a 15% off sale as one does when one turns 15. If you were to go to yoast.com/yoast-15th-dash-anniversary, you-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:50):
And we’ll post this up for you guys here in a second.
Carolyn Shelby (00:50:52):
Yeah. There’s a discount code there and it’s on all of our products. So if you have a Shopify site, if you want to get one of the add-ons for Local or News or Video, it is a 15% discount off everything. And that includes Premium. So I mean, please, if you have not upgraded to Premium, I invite you to do so.
(00:51:10):
Oh, and there’s a bundle. So if you want to get Premium, but you think you might want some of the other add onch and you’re just not sure which ones, get the Premium bundle and then you get everything, the whole shoot and match. You get everything all in one, access to that, plus any of those purchases gets you one year’s access to Yoast Academy. So if you want to learn about anything, if you want… We have certificates, if you want to get a piece of paper. We have all of that action going on.
(00:51:42):
So please, please, please join us. Come to the dark side. No, we’re not dark side. Purple side. Come to the purple side.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:51:50):
We have cookies. Come to the dark side, we have cookies. Awesome. Okay, cool. All right, so let’s answer some of these questions that came in while you and I were chatting.
(00:51:59):
We have a question here, and these are actually really, really, really good questions, so this means that we had a really good conversation. Okay. So KL asks, “You mentioned the importance of click depth in helping Google find your post sooner. Does that mean it’s better to have cornerstone content,” AKA categories, “on the home page so Google prioritizes,” or could be not categories, I don’t know what the questioner was writing, so, “having those on the home page so Google prioritizes crawling those? What are the elements, recent posts, seasonal content, et cetera, would also benefit from being placed on the home page?”
Carolyn Shelby (00:52:42):
So cornerstone content is a Yoast concept, and that is you’re telling the system to remember that this article is basically like the authoritative article about American tacos. So you have 50 different articles about American tacos, but this is the cornerstone article about American tacos. That concept is really only for within the plugin. The plugin uses that, and the plugin uses it for several things, and soon to be several more. But it will prioritize that particular article when it’s making internal linking recommendations. It remembers that this article is important. That being said, that’s not going to affect how Google finds it.
(00:53:29):
So if you feel that this is a popular enough thing that it would be beneficial for Google to see it in the navigation, it would then therefore also have to be something that your users would want to see in the navigation or on the home page. Right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:53:44):
Right.
Carolyn Shelby (00:53:47):
I think it’s a circular process where things that you put on the home page get seen as being important and then they become important because they get crawled more and they get more traffic. So I would prioritize putting things on the home page if they satisfy a user need, so your user’s coming in and the user’s definitely going to want the option of looking at this thing. Put that on the home page. It’s new and you want to draw attention to it because the user might like it. Put that on the home page. It’s a function that the user’s going to want to… It answers a question or provides a solution to something the user’s going to have a problem with. Put that on the home page. That’s what you should put on the home page.
(00:54:32):
Whether or not something is deemed cornerstone is a secondary thing. It’s like, let’s switch to football for my analogies, it’s like getting a franchise tag. You don’t get the franchise tag until you’ve proven that you’re a franchise tag-level player. So it doesn’t get the cornerstone tag until it’s proven that it’s solid and it’s important. You can’t artificially make someone a franchise player. They prove themselves and they become indispensable, and when that thing is indispensable, then that thing gets the tag.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:55:03):
So Carol had a question in here, “How do we determine which content to label as cornerstone content?”
Carolyn Shelby (00:55:10):
The cornerstone is meant to be like the canon, the source of authority for that particular topic. So whatever article you feel is… If someone asked you a question about A, the article that is cornerstone is the article you would instantly send people to to read about that and become experts. So it is… Cornerstones on buildings are the first stone that you lay. It’s the thing that holds the building up. Think about it like that.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:55:40):
We got a few minutes. I want to quickly roll through a few questions here. “Is navigation dropdown more important than links on the home page?”
(00:55:52):
I’m going to say links on the home page are more important.
Carolyn Shelby (00:55:54):
I was going to say that too. I mean, navigation is great, but body copy links are pretty universally more powerful than navigational links. That being said, your navigation links do appear on every single page of the site.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:07):
But how are they prioritized? Because there was the reasonable surfer model where links inside the body of the post are weighted a little bit higher than navigation or sidebar or footer.
Carolyn Shelby (00:56:18):
Links inside the post used to also get scraped a lot. So when people were stealing your content, they would steal those links too, and you’d want to seed the links into your body copy so they would get stolen with everything else and at least you’d get some benefit from people reusing your content.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:33):
Right, right, right. People who own, right.
Carolyn Shelby (00:56:36):
I would…
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:39):
Both?
Carolyn Shelby (00:56:41):
Yes, both. I would put them in both places.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:44):
Right. So I would say that think of it from a perspective of, Carolyn, you touched on this, navigation is more of how do I get around on your website and you’re telling the user how things are organized. You’re directing the user on how you structure things, and that Google pays attention to that from that perspective.
(00:57:02):
Home page is it’s the page, the cover to your book, that’s the starting point. So from there, you want to link out to content that’s important, and you touched on that as well, but keep in mind that not everyone starts their journey on your home page. That’s why navigation is important because somebody will land directly on the inner post on a recipe post or on the travel post, and then the navigation, and breadcrumbs, which leads me to the next question, “How do breadcrumbs affect a post?” I guess where the post is organized.
Carolyn Shelby (00:57:40):
It helps a user navigate back up and get out of… This is a thing, a concept called recirculation. When you get somebody in in an article, you don’t want them to stop reading the article and then leave. You want them to scoot around your site and look for other stuff, which is why you have related articles at the bottom.
(00:57:58):
But the breadcrumbs at the top help them say, “You know what? I really like this article about raspberry-flavored jujubes. I would like to see what other flavor jujubes they have.” So the breadcrumbs will, assuming that that’s how you’ve logically laid out your site, you’re on the page about raspberry jujubes, if I go up one level to just all the jujubes, I will then be able to find that you have grape and apricot and lemon-lime.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:58:23):
Right.
Carolyn Shelby (00:58:24):
It’s all about the jujubes.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:58:26):
They also, when properly marked up, and Yoast does a really good job with marking up breadcrumbs, when properly marked up, breadcrumbs also serve as internal links. They signal to structure. We’re talking about the [inaudible 00:58:35]-
Carolyn Shelby (00:58:35):
Oh, yeah, they’re totally internal links. Links are links. If it looks like a link, it’s a link.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:58:39):
Right. And then also, it signals to Google from a logical navigational perspective where the content is and also from… And that’s my way to… I landed on your potato soup recipe and now I’m like, “Okay, well, I wonder if there’s more potato soup recipes. How do I get to that?” And that breadcrumbs should be able to take you to the parent category for where this post is, but also signals to Google from a logical organizational standpoint where content is being organized. And that’s what we talked about, topical depth and top, all of that stuff.
Carolyn Shelby (00:59:08):
And that you’ve got more stuff. It’s not just that I have this potato-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:13):
That we have more stuff, right.
Carolyn Shelby (00:59:14):
Yeah, it’s not just that I have this potato soup recipe, but I have a whole bunch of, let’s say, the potato soup recipes in my Crock-Pot recipe category. So Google will see that, “Hey, she’s got this recipe that you can make in the Crock-Pot. She’s got apparently a whole bunch of other Crock-Pot recipes. Let’s go look at that too.” Because as it’s ingesting that, it’s going to follow the links, and those links are usually very high on the page. So it’s going to encourage Google to go discover and crawl all of your other recipes for the Crock-Pot so it can then index them.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:44):
I see what you did there. That was a good way to wrap it up. You brought the whole point of this episode into… I love it.
Carolyn Shelby (00:59:53):
That’s why I’m a professional.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:55):
Carolyn, where can people find you? So you’re not a stranger to the blogger community. You’ve spoken at Tastemaker, you’ve been a part of that whole ecosystem. You’re currently at Yoast. Where can people find you? I think we have a slide on that at one point once we’re done.
Carolyn Shelby (01:00:13):
If you want to chat with me on X, I am on X. I’m @CShel, C-S-H-E-L. So C for Carolyn, S-H-E-L for Shelby. And that’s where I’m at everywhere. So I’m on Facebook, I’m on LinkedIn, all those places. I’ve got a website, cshel.com, naturally, and I’m at Yoast. So you can find me-
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:31):
And once that article goes live, we’re going to include it in our email newsletter, make sure that everybody gets to see it.
Carolyn Shelby (01:00:38):
Yes.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:38):
Carolyn, you’re amazing.
Carolyn Shelby (01:00:39):
Yeah, so I actually just finished writing it. It’s almost 2,000 words long, and-
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:44):
Did you get a green light on Yoast?
Carolyn Shelby (01:00:46):
I haven’t put it through there yet.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:50):
Awesome. Carolyn, thanks, thanks for spending time with us. I appreciate, I know you’re super busy, I appreciate you coming and sharing your knowledge with us. Thanks a lot.
Carolyn Shelby (01:00:56):
Thank you so much for having me. It was a great time. Bye, everybody!
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:59):
Bye, everyone. Thanks for joining us.
