Candour

Episode 52: SEO myths and misconceptions with Natalie Mott

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What's in this episode?

Natalie and Mark discuss the range of myths and misconceptions that are still alive and kicking about SEO. From social media links to duplicate content penalties, Natalie gives her advice and tips on how to focus on what is effective.

Show notes

SEO mythbusting talk https://not-a-robot.com/talks/behind-the-scenes-seo-mythbusting/

JavaScript SEO Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSwzfEn5-6A

Slides

Transcription

MC: Welcome to episode 52 of the Search with Candour podcast! Recorded on Friday the 13th of March 2020. My name is Mark Williams-Cook and today we are joined by guest speaker Natalie Mott who is a freelance SEO consultant and trainer, former agency director and she is going to be talking to us about SEO myths and misconceptions.

Natalie, thank you so much for joining me today.

NM: Thank you for having me.

MC: So Natalie, for those of you that aren't aware, was meant to be coming to our Search Norwich SEO meetup event yesterday to essentially do this SEO myths and misconceptions talk as a presentation and unfortunately, like so many events over the country in the last 48 hours, we did make the decision because the coronavirus to cancel the event. Natalie has very, very kindly agreed to come on the podcast and just chat us through it so thank you Natalie.

We were talking just before so Natalie is someone who I've followed and interacted with on Twitter now for absolutely ages, so I'm really excited. This actually the first time I've spoken to her which is brilliant and I've always followed her and looked up to the things she said, she speaks a lot of sense on Twitter because as we know, if you are on SEO Twitter, there's a lot of sh#t on there.

So Natalie, again, thank you so much for joining us. Do you just want to give us a really quick overview of your background before we get going as it will be useful for the people that don't know you.

NM: Sure, so I've been in the industry now knocking on 12 years, in house for a bit and then most of my career has been in the agency side. I’ve seen a lot of stuff in SEO you know the good, the bad, and the ugly, been through some of the major algorithm changes, seen all of it - to the point where an awful lot of myths and misconceptions have come up and some of them still don't die. So um I thought it would be appropriate to cover these kinds of things and try and set the record straight on some of them once and for all.

MC: I mean this is one of the reasons I tell people that we set up Search Norwich, which was to help businesses get a better understanding of SEO, so apart from having people in the SEO communities talking and mixing and PPC people as well, the thing I've noticed you know being agency side for well over a decade now is, even though I'm over a decade in I'm still getting the same questions asked by businesses and seeing them making the same kind of mistakes over and over. And you know, it pains me to say in 2020 I still think SEO, like you said, is seen as some dark art, do you think that's still the case?

NM: It comes up so often. So some business owners will come to you because they do not have time to look into their marketing full stop, so they want to outsource the whole thing, part and parcel, but then some of them do take interest in some of their marketing and then seem to have a bit of a block and they just think, oh it's too technical for me, oh no you do weird things with Google and in actuality it is a marketing channel. If SEO is a dark arts then marketing arguably is, I mean it kind of is I suppose, marketing - there's an awful lot you need to learn about it, but SEO can be taught, can be learned and I don't know if this does people out of a job but it's not as hard as it looks once you know what you're doing.

MC: Oh that's controversial. So, historically we've seen really good cases and this is I guess how a lot of black hat stuff comes up, which is people testing specific things that work in terms of SEO and getting sites to rank. So, in terms of blackhat they're finding parts of the algorithm that they can exploit and I think you know it's the consensus within the SEO community, taking black hat for instance, that that's a lot harder nowadays because of the the way Google's algorithm as a whole and all the little algorithms that make up the rankings, how that works now, it makes that kind of approach a lot harder and we often hear about SEOs who are “chasing the algorithm” and how that's a bad thing to do. Do you want to give us your take on that and what it means when someone says you shouldn't be chasing the algorithm and why shouldn't we do it?

NM: Well I was thinking about this obviously for them for the talk and I was thinking has there ever been a time in my career where I have chased the algorithm. The times I can think of were quite a while ago, panda and penguin initially, when a lot of the industry saw them get with the program, that there are webmaster guidelines for a reason, you know we all had a massive shock then, so there was an element of having to really react to an algorithm change then. And then the other one, possibly the medic update in 2018, but even then - I always say to my clients we've set a strategy for a reason, it's all in line with SEO best practice sometimes you might need to change your tactics because the competition is doing something dodgy, so you need to dial up the activity on the white hat side of things to combat the black kind of thing the competition is doing, but otherwise I always recommend just keeping on. I've not been involved in blackhat before, but there was a gray hat period.

MC: Isn't the definition of gray hat though just the black hat stuff you don't think you're gonna get caught for?

NM: Well, indeed. But you know, possibly before the guest blogging update in 2014 that's when I was like, no I'm a hundred percent white hat now, so I'm not the person to ask about that cat tactics but I do know that my white hat SEO does tend to work in the long term.

MC: Yeah I think you know, that's now hopefully a fairly well accepted fact. I mean I've seen there are still things that you can do to trick Google but as you say, I think there's definitely a shelf-life on those things because we're basically playing the technological gap between Google not being able work out what we're doing and that's ever closing and you know it's just sitting on the train tracks because you will get caught at some point, so all the white hat stuff like you say, it's longer term but you know it's like an investment basically, rather than a trick to get you to rank.

So your presentation you put together I've just picked out, because there was a lot in there, I just picked out a few of the myths and misconceptions that you'd listed and I've got some favourites that I wanted to go through with you, you can help me grind my axe here. So I mean one of the first ones you had on your presentation was actually about fresh content, so this is something that we see repeated throughout the industry which is, oh we're doing SEO therefore you need to, you know Google likes fresh content, so you should do this many posts a week, so we see this advice all the time. How would you explain that as a myth to potential clients?

NM: Well the first thing I would say is the content, it could be as fresh as you like but it has to have it has to be good, it has to have quality and and the idea of selling packages of blog posts as if it's SEO is just not the right thing, it's a misunderstanding. I've had cases where I put together an extremely detailed and nuanced SEO strategy with you know, all the things you need to do across technical content and link building and people have zeroed in on and gone but what about the blog, aren't we supposed to be doing the blog? How many posts? How many words do they have to be? And it's like, well we can do that if the keyword research tells us we need to do that, if the competition aren't doing it properly and if there's a place for it in the strategy, but nine times out of ten, it's just oh we need to do this because this is what we've heard SEO is and that's not the case.

MC: I think maybe even in terms of specific verticals; so to give the example, like to take an extreme example, obviously news websites like freshness is important in that specific case I guess because news is by definition something that's new, but you know if you've got say a research-based site with papers on it and stuff, the freshness of those papers is really almost completely insignificant because it doesn't matter if it was written one week ago or two years ago, because the paper is the paper and the date is the date.

NM: And they have editorial guidelines, you know journalism has quality, there is quality control, you know depending on your views, but there is quality control on those kind of publications, it's not just the freshness of it that is causing those articles to rank and if somebody had their heart set on a blog strategy because they genuinely thought it was going to help their business, sure, but you need to focus on the quality as much as the quantity.

MC: So I bring this up now while we're talking about SEO context to produce content. So we've said before about SEO being a little bit more straightforward, maybe than some people say and we've talked about the quality of content in terms of SEO. Does the job SEO copywriter exist or not?

NM: Well, should it? No, I think a copywriter these days, I would say, needs to have SEO skills, but the role of SEO copywriter from way back when was the people you'd look for who can churn out an awful lot of content quite quickly and going back to the subject of quality, it wasn't always there, we had a good however many years of just churning out stuff and flooding the internet with it. There are some excellent copywriters who are working in the SEO industry, but I do think the title “SEO copywriter” sort of limits people and I wouldn't hire somebody with that job title.

MC: It is interesting. I mean for me, as you say there are good content copywriters who are really important and having some SEO understanding is important and it's just something I've seen crop up with this advice that that job title seems to surface quite a lot well. While we're on content as well and we hear now, I think more than we have done in the past, about how link building is dead and I'm sure anyone now working in outreach or link building is just rolling their eyes like, oh not again, and a lot of the link building, you know I've seen it's definitely in fashion over the last few years, basically for link building/ outreach it seems to be like 90 percent like digital PR. What are your thoughts on link building now? Is link building dead and is digital PR the route people should be taking?

NM: Link building is definitely not dead and digital PR can be extremely powerful and draw an awful lot of attention to a brand and amplify that brand and have a positive impact on SEO, if there is other SEO activity going on. So in the context of the presentation I was going to give, my advice was really don't try not to put all your eggs in one basket with digital PR, it's not necessarily going to be the Silver Bullet you expect it to be. It can definitely help as part of a well-rounded SEO strategy, but there's plenty of things that you can be doing or your SEO agency or partner could be doing to acquire links to your website, that don't involve going out to journalists and having a huge hero piece of content. An awful lot of the links that those will be building in the background are the ones that are a bit more traditional SEO prospecting for links in an old-school way, so still linked lists, resource lists and areas of the web where you definitely should be referenced if your brand is in a certain industry.

The main one that you see all the time when you pick up a new client, there's often going to be unlinked mentions or broken links because of 404 and all of that is housekeeping at the start of the campaign, but you'd be surprised how much that, actually I guess you won't be surprised at how much that comes up. Look into who's linking to your competitors, if there's sites that link to two or more of your competitors, then there's a much better chance of you obtaining a link.

MC: In terms of those couple of things you mentioned, there are two things I think would be quite interesting just to go into slightly more detail for people that maybe haven't done these things before, which are unlinked mentions and we'll touch back on link reclamation. So could you explain just very quickly, what are unlink mentions? How do you find them and how do you go about making them link mentions?

NM: So unlink mentions are what they say they are; they are references to your brand name on the web, that do not link back to your website. Sometimes that will occur because say your brand is referenced in a newspaper or online newspaper and they have a policy of not linking out, those kind of unlink mentions you probably don't want to chase. but when there are mentions of your brand across the web and it makes sense for the sight featuring to link out to you, that's a great opportunity to get in touch with them to say you notice you mention us, perhaps there was a piece of joint PR with them at some point or you've exhibited at an event or some kind of real-world business relationship, that tends to result in a unlink mention and that gives you the chance to pick up the phone and try and convert that to a link and you also asked how do you find them?

MC: Yes, how would how would someone go about finding unlinked mentions?

NM: So there are a few tools out there that will help you speed the process up, but generally I will typically use Google. I'll typically do the site using this the operator - “site:” in Google search, I will not cite, yeah it is - you can find them in Google, you do a search for your brand in quotation marks and minus any reference to your brand from your website so - site: enter website here.

MC: So that’ll stop your own website appearing for your own brand which would presumably appear quite a lot.

NM: Yep so that clears up any self referencing mentions of yourself and then you can, depending on how well-known your brand is, you are able to scrape those results using the scraper Chrome extension. Well there are Chrome extensions that will help you get that data into a spreadsheet, then run that list of links through Screaming Frog and filter out - you want to then do a custom search for your domain, your root domain, look at what contains your root domain and what does not contain your root domain, the data that doesn't contain your root domain will be your unlinked mentions and then manually go through that and see which ones are appropriate. I hope I’ve explained that right.

MC: Yeah, you have. That was very clear. You mentioned earlier as well when you find these you said to pick up the phone, is that actually the approach you take off the bat? You don't email, you try and ring first or?

NM: It depends. So I was talking about it for a situation where there might be a real-world business relationship and there has been some joint account or some joint content apart depending on who owns the relationship with the linked prospect, sometimes it will be more appropriate to pick up the phone. Most of the time, you know SEOs don’t tend to pick up the phone, in my experience you have SEOs who hide behind the screen and PRs who love to pick up the phone. But that's another way to get in front of the competition really, if most SEOs aren't picking up the phone then that's one way to get in front.

MC: The other thing you mentioned there and I don't think you even gave it justice for what a technique it is and that I think a lot of people just look straight over, was where you are finding web sites that link to multiple sites that belong to your competitors. So if you've got ten competitors for instance, if you can find websites that link to three, four, five of them that don't link to you, that's you know a very well qualified, huge opportunity or at least very interesting to see where they are being mentioned that I'm not. How do you go about finding those?Is there a particular tool you use to do that?

NM: Well I think the reason I glossed over it is because there is a tool that makes light work of that. A couple of tools, the main one is a ahrefs link intersect, which will pull the link profiles of whichever competitors you mentioned and then will exclude any sites that do currently link to you and it spits out, very quickly, a list of link prospects for you to look at. Majestic has a cleat hunter but I think link intersect is a bit more user-friendly and then also you can manually do it as well, if you're so inclined for all your link profiles and mash them in screaming frogs somehow but ahrefs is where I’d start.

MC: I like how you've been really fair there and given ahrefs and Majestic a mention. Cool, so what else did we have in here. So you've actually got in your presentation, something that relates to a question I normally ask everyone I interview for SEO roles, which I quite liked, which was - you had a slide here saying it's a myth that social media has a direct impact on SEO. So if you ever interviewed me for an SEO role, this is probably a question I'll ask which is, do you think social media links have a direct impact on site ranking? And to be honest, I've got strong opinions on this, but I don't mind what people really answer as long as they have a good, logical thought process and explanation behind that. So you've labeled this here as a myth, do you want to talk to us about it because I think that is a really widespread myth that getting links, even on stuff like Facebook, is gonna help me rank.

NM: Yes so back for the idea of unlink mentions. There is nuance here because of the changes in rules to nofollow links, so I reserve my right to change this opinion at some point, but in my experience obtaining links on social media it's just the same impact as getting an unlink mention. There are different schools of thought on this and some SEO providers will swear blind that unlinked mentions and nofollow links will have a direct impact on your SEO, but I have seen that be the case. They can give an indirect uplift to your SEO and as much as your brand mainly become more well-known through going viral on social media and so that means it gets put in front of more people and in theory, it will be put in front of more people that have the ability to link out to you, with a followed link from an actual website but otherwise, I think it's a red herring and I would be wary of anyone saying this has a direct impact on your SEO.

MC: Yeah I mean I wouldn't feel comfortable if that was like the basis, the primary basis of link acquisition or link building - that would make me very nervous. The other myth you've got here is one we actually did a whole episode about this - we did a whole episode about different types of penalty in Google that you could get because we're trying to clear up this misconception about sometimes when there's an algorithm update and your competitors increase in ranking and you go down, people think they've got a penalty, so we talked through the different types of penalty and I think it's slightly less now, over the last few years, but I still do hear it and we had lots of questions about it which is customers and clients being worried about a duplicate content penalty. So did you want to talk us through your thoughts on duplicate content and penalties and what's true and what's not?

NM: Yes, so I was actually when I was looking into this and I found that there was an article from Google from 2008, so the length of time I've been in the industry, basically said that there are there is no duplicate content penalty, back in 2008 and that has remained the case even through panda when the school of thought was that we were all being penalized for having duplicate content, actually it was about thinness and quality of content, but yeah the myth still prevails.

So a penalty is a manual action; if you've received an actual penalty from Google, you will receive a message in your Search Console. I haven't seen one of these for a long time, not not at all. The thing about duplicate content is that you do want to minimise the amount of content that you serve to search engines because there is a risk that the duplicate page or the page that is thinner than the page that you want to rank, the one that you would make canonical, there is a risk that that page can outrank it and cause your preferred content to be ignored. The other thing, this is most frequent with ecommerce sites or large travel sites or something, if you reduce the parameters or filters or pagination, you are allowing all of that thin content to be served to search engines and that can take up a lot of what's known as crawl budget. Now, Google will say don't worry too much about crawl budget, but if you analyse or if your SEO partner analyses your server logs, you'll be able to see this thin content being crawled and sometimes the content that you want to rank being ignored, so that's why duplicate content is still a major thing SEO. We've paid an awful lot of attention to it but you're unlikely to have been penalized. If you see a change in your visibility and you're convinced to do your content, it's more likely that the algorithm has identified higher quality answers to the queries your site is supposed to be targeting.

MC: I think that's really interesting. So we've got probably two camps of people when we say duplicate content. So from an SEO point of view, people working in that industry, maybe web developers, there is that thought about the website internally cannibalising itself over very similar or identical pages like you mentioned when we come to things like filtering, faceted navigation, reordering lists on eComm sites, that kind of thing. Then I've had queries from clients who are literally just thinking about stuff like, oh we saw a competitor has just copied one of our articles over, we're really worried that Google's gonna give us a penalty for copying content because it exists in two places at once, and I think that's like you said, it's important to understand that thing, you know especially in tiny cases, isn't gonna trigger any kind of penalty. The worst thing you can probably expect is Google will probably filter one of those results in there, it will only show one and if you're unlucky it can be sometimes the person that's copied it. I think we mentioned before as well, there are other routes to deal with that like the Digital Millennium Copyright requests you can send, Google I can't seem to action those quite quickly if people are you know nicking content.

And actually, I don't know if you saw this, I almost missed this, it was a few weeks ago now, Google said if there are multiple upheld DMCA takedown requests against the site, they'll take that into consideration algorithmically, if you saw that when it was announced but I thought I was quite interesting. And then that led to a discussion about whether that's going to cause a black market almost, well not black market, but people literally blackmailing people about DMCA requests. There we go, another sub economy in the SEO world.

So we’ve talked about duplicate content penalties, I really wanted to talk for the last sort of 5-10 minutes about audits. So we had Aleyda Solis on a few episodes ago, who just blew our minds with this huge, whole episode about how to produce actionable, valuable audits and one of the points that really interested me in your presentation deck was basically saying look, audits don't need to be massively long and have hundreds and hundreds of points because that's not where the value is, do you want to talk talk through that? Because I've got strong opinions on different types of audits, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on on-site audits and myths and misconceptions.

NM: Sure, so I've seen some of the content that Aleyda’s been putting out about tech audits and all of that stuff, although it sounds like it's contradicting what I'm saying, I actually have a lot of time for because it's designed to surface the things that are actually going to move the needle, there's a lot of stuff in there about strategy and doing the right thing at the right time. The kind of massive tech audits that I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about are the ones that contain information such as, you have a thousand message descriptions that are too long, you have too many h2s - let's be real, those are incorrect from an SEO standpoint and if we had unlimited time and resource, in the ideal situation, yes of course we'd address them. But as often, I pulled this number out of the air, but I would say that 80% of technical improvements will come from 20% of the issues that could be at play.

I also want to say before I go through the ones that I think are going to be the most important, I do massive tech audits all the time, so sometimes if it's a huge site with lots of things that could go wrong, it would be naive to say oh we don't need to to check everything, but say it's a smaller site - not hundreds of thousands or millions of pages, you can focus your attention a lot better then. Don't think you need to do a two hundred point technical audit to improve your SEO, you can you can do that iteratively,

MC: I think actually Aleyda was kind enough to use a very beautiful graph I hand drew which is showing this relationship I think you're describing, which is that sometimes the larger the site you have, the more important some otherwise unimportant technical issues can be because they scale. So the problem scales, that you know if you've got a hundred page site and there's some inefficiencies, it's not gonna make a huge difference if you fix it, if you've got half a million pages, then problems can really start getting out of hand and having a big impact. So do you want to take us through what you think are the things that normally move the needle, that you look for?

NM: Yep. So I’ll try to keep it brief. There will be nuance in every single SEO situation but generally the things I come across that are causing a massive issue technically are canonicals, so whether they are incorrect or whether they're not in place, that's the duplicate content thing - you need to make sure that you mitigate against any duplicate content issues there may be. Hreflang not being implemented correctly; I've had big success with sorting that out. It is surprising how often that is not implemented correctly.

Poor internal linking structure and if you have a poor internal linking structure and no way of mitigating that through your XML sitemap, so XML sitemaps not containing the URLs you want to serve to search engines. Some people will say XML sitemaps are not required, I don't agree and I especially don't agree because nine times out of ten those are the kind of sites that some people will say, oh if the navigation is fine and all of the pages can be discovered then an XML sitemap isn't necessary but honestly when does that happen? XML time that's very important for that reason.

Many things relating to redirects, so redirect chains or older versions of sites, if your URLs are not being redirected to their most up-to-date counterpart. So a loss of link equity, despite the assertions that 301 redirects pass 100% and link equity now so what's the what's the problem? Well firstly the number of redirects that a bot needs to go through or a server needs to check, slows down the page load time, so it's a site speed issue. But also there's evidence that a redirect doesn't actually pass 100% link equity, it doesn't always happen.

MC: I think there's, they said there is like a hard limit on what Google bots are gonna follow off, I think five change redirects as well and I know that sounds like a lot, but these things can stack up really quickly, so if you leave even two redirects for instance so A to B, B to C live, when you don't realise that's stacked upon someone trying to access an insecure URL or one without a trailing slash and there's already rules, you're immediately up to four redirects then and you're in danger of just, like you say killing off the crawl I think yeah that's that's really important.

NM: Yeah so a few others, so index blow. This is with the the bigger site, your e-commerce and big travel sites and marketplace sites, that's typically one of the major issues you're just serving, you're allowing your thin content to be served to search engines you need to do something about that to ensure that the right pages are indexed and crawled indexed right.

Issues with robots.txt file. Sometimes they're the most extreme, in that the site could be blocked using that. You know that's always that facepalm moment many people like to share that on Twitter when they find it. It happens a lot.

MC: It does. I actually had someone email me two weeks ago saying they were looking for a new SEO partner and they sent me the site and I had a look at it and I was quite confused because the whole site was indexed and when I looked at the robots.txt it was blocking everything and I emailed them back and just said look, just to mention this, it looks like your robots.txt is blocking everything. It turned out actually, they'd put a new site live the day before, so I sort of rechecked it three or four times, as I was confused as to why everything was indexed and and ranking properly, but yes it hundred percent still happens where whole sites get blocked.

NM: Yep, you caught it early, that's the main thing.

MC: And they weren't even a client, didn't even get sent an invoice. Couple things you've got left and this one's gonna, I think you know it’ll scare me here, because you've got stuff about JavaScript rendering here.

NM: Yeah and that's not something we can really do justice to in five minutes. But the things I want and in fact I I had to shave some of this out of the deck, I did want to talk about JavaScript in more detail, but essentially there's two myths attached to this one is that javascript is bad for SEO and one is that javascript isn't a problem for SEO anymore, Google can read your script now, so what's your problem? Both are incorrect.

I’m trying to summarise this quickly. Whenever you possibly can, you would need to serve your content and resources server-side or find a way of hydrating the content so that it doesn't render client-side. There's plenty of resources out there that will do this point more justice than I can at this time. There's a great series from Google from Martin Split where he goes into the detail around all this, so I would point to that if you're interested in that side of things, I direct you there. And Jamie Alba repo every time I see a talk, she blows my mind she knows this stuff inside out.

MC: I’ll put links to both of these in the show notes so listeners can get them.

NM: And then lastly site speed. I tend to have, I don't know weird disagreements with developers on this, as if site speed isn't going to be an improvement for everyone. It's not just SEO that is trying to drive improvements in site speed, it is a UX issue and it should be a development issue. Everyone in an organisation, I don't understand why people wouldn't want to; it will be a resource thing more often than not. But site speed, all other things being equal, if your site speed is better than a competitor ,your site should start to rank better, all other things being equal they rarely are. But yeah it can often be something that you can address quite quickly.

MC: So I think it's interesting, as you know I didn't think when I saw this, you were gonna be disagreeing with the Aleyda. I thought it is interesting from an outside point of view they seemed contradictory those viewpoints, but what I'd add in is and I've always been quite vocal on the automated SEO audits that come about, when people offer free audits because the 80% of those audits will be the things you mentioned, that are things like there's too many links on a page, there's a low text/html ratio, you know this Meta Description is slightly too short things that as you say, if you had infinite resource you would like to get to but they're not going to move the needle. And actually it's possible that you said even with the eight things you've mentioned, it can take quite a while to get to the bottom of these.

So we were working on an e-commerce site just last week where it had a very interesting issue when you're trying to view all the products - it was sending you to a different page if you didn't have JavaScript on, but that link was no followed and then the view all page canonical back to a filtered page, so it was a real thing to untie, so I totally get your point in saying that you know while there's this fairly short list of things that will provide most of the value, there by no means like checkbox exercises. They can't be caught by automated audits, you generally need someone you know, like yourself, to sit down understand what they are and understand how they're affecting that particular business in context of their website.

NM: Yeah, what you say about automated audits, in the right hands they can be a nice starting point but in the wrong hands, you just don't want to. The idea of this talk was to stop people from going down the rabbit hole of things that weren't gonna help or you know following red herrings where you can fix these things a lot quicker if you cut out the noise.

MC: So, we've already had almost 40 minutes here. This has been absolutely brilliant Natalie, have you got any leaving general advice for business owners or web developers to avoid the traps, myths, misconceptions of SEO?

NM: I would say if you have time, try and read around the subject and just try and don't take recommendations as read if you have suspicions about them. If you trust your SEO partner then trust them and that I'm not saying that everyone should have their work checked but yeah, cast a critical eye every so often on the work that's being done.

MC: So I have a talk that I have given, I think twice now, which is aimed specifically at developers talking about technical SEO stuff that usually gets missed and I opened that by apologising to developers firstly, for sometimes some of the advice that they'll get from SEOs because you know, it's a big industry and sometimes bad advice is given and my advice, exactly the same as you're giving there Natalie, is if you feel like something is wrong or it's gonna have a negative impact on the user, then yeah, absolutely keep questioning it because they're the experts as well in what they do and I think good developers need good SEOs and good SEOs need good developers and they’re trying to work together to get the best end product so absolutely agree with that.

Thank you so much for joining me today Natalie, I really appreciate it.

NM: Thank you, thank you very much.

MC: We are going to be back in one week's time which will be Monday the 23rd of March. You can get the transcription from this episode, as well as the slides we've been referring to at our show notes. The show notes are at search.withcandour.co.uk, I'll also include some links to some of the tools and resources Natalie's mentioned, so you can get them there. If you have enjoyed this episode and you're listening online you can subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, pretty much everywhere we've found that we could put the podcast, so I'd love it if you did that. Otherwise, I hope you all have a great week and I will speak to you again on the 23rd of March.

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