Vanessa Fox

Hello all! Looking for a couple of recommendations: a local SEO agency and a freelance writer/editor. Any suggestions?

Why does TikTok now auto suggest “smallest woman” when you search for “the smallest man who ever lived”? I dug in a bit: vanessafox.com/did-the-us-tik…

We've already lost Twitter (re: find me on Bluesky). I wrote about losing TikTok: whilewemay.com/posts/what-we-… (re: find me on Red Note?)

@rustybrick @brightonseo Your ability to go without sleep will never cease to amaze me

People keep asking if I will be at @brightonseo in San Diego - well, sure, I booked a flight in and out the same day - no need for hotel - see ya there

@chowell18 @Suzzicks @googlesearchc @Goog_Enough My blog posts stand the test of time! 😀

Wow, an 18 year old Search Central blog update is the best result here? @googlesearchc cc: @Goog_Enough #google

@KathleenBellMD It seemed like a whole choir was attending somewhere in the audience for sure!

Went to Ben Folds concert last night. Best thing was his interaction with the audience who, incidentally, sang better than any audience I ever heard. Must have all done a capella.

@mattmcgee @rustybrick @gregfinn @gsterling @MordyOberstein @dannysullivan @pamelaparker @rustybrick - we’ll never leave you! We just are too tired to help write stuff anymore.

@rustybrick @gregfinn @gsterling @MordyOberstein @dannysullivan @pamelaparker @vanessafox I miss those days, too. Fun times. Great work. Good friends.

The "new" Google thing I just discovered has...[Googles]...been around since 2016. 🤪 (And yes, @rustybrick wrote about it then. When I was his "boss" at SEL and likely assigned it to him. 😑)

The curious career of the illustrator Louis Wain tells the story of how our feline friends came in from the alley and took up their place at the hearth. nyer.cm/BH6VQ7l

No part of this Google generative AI result is correct. Google, you are making it difficult for me to do deep dive analysis on the Tortured Poets Department!

@rustybrick Team effort for sure 😀

@vanessafox So it’s Google’s fault our SEOs are to blame? Our team effort?

I know I'm not the first one to say this, but has Google's favoring of Reddit in rankings ruined Reddit? The year old Reddit thread that ranks for "best hot tubs" has a 1 day old post linking to an affiliate site. I know, no one is shocked. Sigh.

@taffyakner Please don't take my rag & bone sweatpant jeans from me!

can't believe what we've allowed jeans to become, guys

@Marie_Haynes @dowsonQA Many years ago, I gave a (non-SEO) talk about the tendency of searchers to equate high rankings with best/accurate, when actually those rankings equated with popular. (Google has done lots of work since related to accuracy but the general concept remains true, I think.)

The DOJ vs Google documents are really making me think. So much of the algo seems to be reliant on predicting where the searcher is going to end up, and then using whether or not that prediction was right to keep improving on those predictions. If that's right, the key to ranking is to truly be the result users are likely to choose and be satisfied with.

I think there are lots of great websites that never get a chance to rank. But here's the thing. Let's say I built an offline business -a hamburger restaurant. Everyone who came in told me that my hamburgers were better than McDonald's. Yet, for the majority of people in this market, when they think, "I want a hamburger" they end up getting a burger at McDonald's. If a search engine was trying to choose which of these a person would like to see when they do a search for hamburger they don't base it off of which burger is the best. Rather, they are trying to predict what the searcher is likely to engage with and end their search journey with. And in our silly example, in most cases it's going to be a McDonald's. So then you would argue ok, it makes sense for McDonald's to be first, but my little burger restaurant should still be suggested on the page somewhere because it truly does have the best burgers. The problem is, the search engine can't taste your burgers. They can only learn from the knowledge that is on the web and, as we are learning, the actions people take that indicate whether a search has been successful. You can build something better than Google flights, but unless people are consistently seeking it out and preferring it over Google flights, it makes sense to rank them first.

@SwiftOnSecurity It's odd that some of the pages load fine (ex: taylorswift.com/tour/) unless the home page is generated from a different platform for some reason.

@lilyraynyc Speaking of spam, have you seen how spammed Google Trends is lately? These are the rising queries for "engagement rings" (!)

I'm just not trying to spend 2024 SEOsplaining why the SERPs are filled with this stuff. Talk about mental gymnastics. PS I need a break 😭😭😭😭

@GregBernhardt4 Yeah, that's really the issue. The use case is that the site needs to do facet value cleanup (duplicates with singular and plural values for instance) and wants to be able to redirect the values being cleaned up. Any way to do this?

@vanessafox Or is the problem you can't redirect URLs that aren't 404?

New Shopify question! When facet values change, how can the original URLs be redirected? Ex: (collections/cat?facet=value becomes collections/cat?facet=valuenew) It seems you can't redirect Shopify URLs that begin with the path /collections? help.shopify.com/en/manual/onli…

@watchinthesky Mine do this too! They'll be packed in at one feeder and waiting for a spot while a feeder 10 feet away is empty!

@danielwaisberg @lilyraynyc Ah - so if verification is lost at some point and then restored, there will be a gap in data?

@vanessafox @lilyraynyc You won't start from 16 months. According to our help centre: "Data is collected for a property as soon as anyone adds it in Search Console, even before verification occurs. However, it takes a few days for data to start to accrue for the property." support.google.com/webmasters/ans…

I posted about this a couple of years ago but I forgot what the answer was. Does anyone know why GSC would abruptly skip from January to October in this chart? @danielwaisberg