2016·12·11 · 44:05
Joost de Valk: WordPress and SEO in 2016
I walk through what good WordPress SEO looks like in 2016, from the perspective that “SEO is dead” is one of the most persistently wrong claims in digital marketing. I cover why organic search still drives the majority of traffic for large sites, and then work through the practical elements: site settings, theme choices, mobile and speed requirements, and content. The talk is deliberately light on Yoast SEO specifically, because most of what matters comes before you install any plugin.
0:05 so good morning it's good to see a youthful woken up for me it's flatters my ego which didn't really need flattering anymore of it we're gonna talk about WordPress and SEO and I'm gonna try not to talk about a certain plugin first thing that I think is very important for us as a community to understand is why does SEO matter the mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing through open source GPL
0:36 software and just about six months ago Omar our CTO who looks somewhat like this said well basically what we're doing is to democratize SEO through open source GPL software and I think it's really important for the community to understand what we try to do is not just build a cool plugin but we try to do is give everyone the tools to optimize their site to the fullest extent through software that everyone can use so the Butcher around the corner is literally using the same software as
1:09 disney is using all of their sites we've decided to call that SEO for everyone so that's our new mission statement which also means that we still believe in SEO because I'm going to try and dispel a few SEO myths today and the first one of that is this dis often her thing that yeah but SEO is really that right Google that is like about the most utter
1:42 nonsense you'll ever hear this is a very recent research in which shows that like twenty two point six percent of all ecommerce orders in the US came from organic search on top of everything else there is no competition for organic search I've worked for many many huge sites in this world and all of them get the majority of their traffic from organic search people say you can't outrank a lot of these big sites well this is rel canonical' a standard that was invented by Google and Lucas ranking
2:17 number one hey that's us everyone can do this good SEO can meet everything and to be honest Google has a lot of craft content on their side so we can we can make better content than that that's why we rank better the question is how good is WordPress really we've done a lot in the last few years we try to be active in the WordPress community and we do a lot of patches in WordPress core to make things better and there's a few things I wanted to touch on but most of you will probably not have noticed that we did but that are important to how WordPress works and how WordPress works with
2:50 Google one of these things is robots.txt changes the ones of you who have noticed recently that we added an allowed WP admin slash admin Ajax dot PHP to DeRosa TC yeah that was me the reason for that's quite simple all those themes that load in content through Ajax on the front page Google needs to see that content if you're blocking that that bit of content Google can't see it Google can't tell you what's on that page it can't rank it that doesn't work we've had a lot of
3:22 improvements to how we handle titles mostly thanks to Constantine I don't know whether he's here but there's a lot been a lot of good work and work on that and finally finally in 2016 our content management system actually treats titles as content instead of something that the theme needs to handle we've defaulted to post name I think we did this in 2015 but there's a lot of these small settle and single things that we can do to make everything better and everything
3:53 else that you need to do is really only a small theme change away or you could use a plug-in and one of the things I wanted to touch on who of you were in wordcamp europe that's a lot more than I was expecting anyway at wordcamp europe during the interview with Matt Maile from Google who's speaking later today please go and
4:25 see her I said hey there's only like 72 percent I think she said of WordPress sites are mobile-friendly that is a disgrace I mean 72 percent sounds like a lot but it means a 28 percent of sites one in four is not mobile-friendly we need to get better and we need to get better soon so let's dive into bit deeper when we talk about SEO we really think about three different steps the first step we put
4:56 and we think about is crawl ability this really has nothing to do with optimization yet this is really the ability for Google to find stuff and we talked about findability about using the words and making it people impossible for people to find stuff and then we talk about optimization but optimization is really the last step of a very long process so let's dive in crawl ability we define is the ability for a search engine to spider everything it needs and everything you want it to find which means that those robot TC changes that
5:28 we made in core should really be on your site too if you have a static robust RTS T you might want to look at that and see if it's still up to date are you allowing Google and other search engines to see your JavaScript and CSS files because they need to see them because they want to see how your site what your site looks like I said core does is by default you might not a good way to test this is by going into Google search console who here has a Google search console account for their site that's
6:00 not enough hands people every single one of you should have a Google search console account I'm not kidding there is no other way to do this right get a google search console account for your site add your site to it and try this it's called fetch as Google in Google search console and you can see on the left how Google but for use to page and on the right how normal user would see the page and if they're not the same you're doing it wrong it will still say partial you'll you can probably not see that it says partial in small green letters somewhere there
6:33 because there's some stuff that Google can't get to usually Google's own files and yes that's stupid one of the things that we run into still even in 2016 is a proper URL structure people still don't have proper URL structures on some of their sites so use something like post name if you're a new site add the date to it if you're not a new site don't do that make it as simple as possible make
7:05 sure your URLs make sense and that you've really thought about what's in my URLs if it doesn't say anything about your content is probably not a good idea to have your URLs like that and then there's this small thing called canonical URLs a canonical is a tag that indicates to Google which page and it should index as if it sees similar versions of of a page we have had canonical URLs in WordPress core for a single single pages for quite some time
7:38 now but we don't have them anywhere else some plugins at them I could mention a few but I won't but basically any good SEO plug-in adds him but core doesn't do that for everything yet and it should and why should it do that well because when you have example a calm and this with a UTM campaign parameter which is for Google Analytics so you'd think Google would understand that you'd think that Google would understand that the first one is more important right and
8:11 that it shouldn't index the other one people seem to think this and la Google is surely smarter than that that's when we throw a big fat rookie alert because honestly Google is not that smart and the best example I can give to you is of our fearless leader Matt because that second year or elder is really the same URL so he's ranking format which is awesome that's why I def footer link on
8:44 wordpress.org is there but the fact that he's number two - is actually rather stupid and that is simply because there is no canonical on that homepage another thing that we think reading these improvements XML sitemaps XML sitemaps are by now and accept an expected feature of any CMS you can see that by the fact that almost everyone has some sort of axonal sitemaps plug-in installed and that's why we think it
9:16 should be in core so yep is here he's sitting in the front row he's leading to feature project that got approved to actually get XML sitemaps into course if you want to join us in building that talk to him we've got a few more tricks up our sleeve there talking to Google about possible other ways of doing that but we're still going to push forward and trying to get this into core and out of all those plugins because that's better for everyone I did mention you needed a mobile-friendly theme right I
9:51 cannot stress this enough if you're not taking your site as serious as this if you're not in time to like bring that site to everyone now you can say hey I only have 10% mobile traffic you know what if your site's not mobile-friendly you're gonna lose that 10% - because Google is not stupid I can tell you that is stupid in all these other things but it can see whether your site is mobile-friendly and it will take all that mobile-friendly traffic on mobile traffic away from you so if you don't have a mobile-friendly site looking at
10:23 whether you have an off mobile traffic to actually justify building a mobile-friendly site is about the stupid thing you can do so don't another thing is that you'll always need some form of cash every once in a while we'll run into this discussion into whether why WordPress needs caching and whether WordPress needs caching stop the whining get caching and if your host doesn't help you in getting decent caching get a decent host every CMS in the world needs
10:55 caching and so does WordPress there is no other way of doing this but when you've done all this and when you've fixed all this for your site you've really only fixed the first bit you've made sure that your site is crawlable now we're going to go to the next step which is findability which is the ability for anyone to find everything you want them to be able to find which starts with and this is where the hard part comes in because you can't really install a plug-in to do this for you you need to do keyword research and you need to figure out what people search for
11:29 when they need to find you and nine times out of ten that's not the name that you gave your product so please stop doing that I've worked for some of the biggest companies in the world that had branding officers that told me that their product was named X and I was like you're wrong the problem with browning officers is that they're usually too high up the food chain but keyword research is not something that's simple I'm just gonna tell you that you need to do it now
12:02 because I can talk about that for days and still not have taught you everything you need to know but it is the basis of every SEO project just thinking about what do I need to be found for people ask us why we don't distill the focus keyword from your post why we don't automatically tell you which key focus keyword you've been writing about we don't because we want you to think about that before you start writing and you simply cannot be found for you works as
12:34 you never use and that is that might seem very simple but even though we've been telling that for years as SEO S&I I'm not the only one there's plenty of people in the room we've been telling that for years people still don't seem to grasp but this is the D most important truth of SEO each topic and I don't mean each keyword but each topic needs a post or a page don't try and cram 15 different things
13:06 onto one page build a site structure that works you can't rank for all four different words on one page and this is exactly why we're pressed us so well and has such a good reputation because most of the time when people write a blog post they write about a single topic and that is very easy for Google to understand and it's easy for users to find but you use that when you're writing other stuff too when you're writing your about page and you have a couple of different things to write about your company well
13:37 maybe this should not be one page but a couple of different pages maybe you should think about what are the things that you want to be found for outside of just your products but also your mission statement and all these other things what is important to you let me dispel another SEO myth who here was was in this room or at that room actually for Chris lemmas talk yesterday Chris was talking about finding your own voice as a blogger and he told you to write a lot I will not disagree with that but I will
14:08 disagree with anyone who tells me that you need to blog daily to do good SEO I really really really would prefer any of you to write good content every once every week or every two weeks put a bond good post is so much more preferable than to just push out crap every day so instead of writing that new posts I've got a couple of suggestions and what you really could be doing to your site as
14:42 well find a bit of good old content on your site that's doing well update it bring it into 2016 and change the publication date it's really as simple as that you can do a lot of technical work so you only have to change the last modified date and it shows data on your site but most themes are not really capable of doing that what were you doing yes calm but our WordPress SEO article I wrote the
15:13 original version of that in 2008 it still ranks number one for WordPress SEO to this day and the only thing we do to it is we update it once a year and of course that's a beast of an article but it attracts about 5,000 visitors daily if you can write something like that and build upon that every time that you republish it that's a lot better than just cranking out new every day another thing you should really do is
15:44 optimizing your tags and categories there's so many sites where we come in to have 200 posts and 400 tags that doesn't really work think of it as a way to structure your content think of it as a library and shrink that number down to reasonable sizes some of the publishers I've worked with had a tag manager a person who was responsible for deciding whether something had to become a tag
16:15 yes or no that might seem like a weird thing to do it actually that's it a fact that the Guardian has the SEO position that has right now because they have four and a half thousand tags they published four hundred articles or so a day so four and a half thousand is not that much but it really meant that everything was structured in one in the same way all the time you need some librarian skills to do that and I hate that we call them taxonomies because tags are really not taxonomies because they're unstructured but update this go
16:47 through it look every once in a while why do you have tags that have only one or two posts in them and if so delete those tacks redirect them to something else the thing that people seem to think as a Google will find everything by itself it will not you need to link to it if you don't link to content no matter how good it is
17:19 you will never rank whatever Google tells you about links and they tell a lot of things about links that are true you still need links to rank if you don't have links from within your site and from outside of your site you will never rank so work on that that in itself is also hard work link building is not easy it's something that comes from a lot of talking to other people telling them hey I wrote this piece so
17:50 you like that maybe you would want to link to that and you'd get those emails and you probably find them just as annoying as I do yet they work but the problem with most of those emails is that you don't really get into a real conversation first we link to plenty of people but we link to people that we know and know we trust so the chance of you getting a link from us com is a lot higher if you talk to any of us here and we see that you have a
18:21 cool product and we talk to you for a while and then we'll link to you we're not unique in that everybody works like that so do not go out talk to people figure out what who's writing about your topic and go to where all those these people are it is almost just like this which according to Matt we've only discovered in 2016 that it was important
18:53 but we're gonna work on that but just like in real life he can't cut corners don't buy any links don't do any of the things that feel fishy if they feel fishy to you they probably are and it's harder than ever to get sites to rank well after you've done stupid stuff so please don't because I've helped enough a few people get back and it's not fun it really is not fun I've done projects where we've had 40 people on a helpdesk
19:25 do outbound Co work for a month to get rid of links that we bought don't do that so the last step is optimisation that's the improve your chances of actually ranking and getting clicks once you rank it's as simple as thinking of your most important keyword think of which cited page on your site should rank for that keyword and then do this this nifty little trick the query in
19:57 Google site : your domain name that keyword if the page should you thought needed to come up first did not come up first you're doing it wrong if it did come up first but it's still not ranking very well start with linking the other pages that you find in that top 10 to that number 1 that's just a simple method of fixing your internal linking and you'd be surprised how much good that can do on many sites it's a very simple way of getting your your keyword
20:34 I'm talking too fast for my own slides yeah it really means that you need to go into Google search console I did tell you to get that Google search console account right in Google search console there's this awesome feature called search analytics and in search analytics it has a lot of data the data assess you should look at you can show you where you ranked for watching which keywords and what the click-through rate the CTR is that you get for that search result
21:06 so if you're ranking number one you can see hey thirty percent of the people searching for that keyword click through to my site look at the data and compare keywords you'll quickly figure out that for some keywords that are ranking number one or number two or number three you're getting a lot more clicks than for others look at why that is look at those titles look at those snippet previews and figure out hey this one is more enticing than that one maybe I should improve that one and then
21:43 crafting good titles that people click on is an art that takes years to master the only way I can tell you to improve that is by doing it a testing with it and playing with it and it's different for every site and different for every niche so play with it now there's a couple things that are really new in 2016 I wasn't a big fan of at first but I'm slowly starting to warm up - and one of them is dis you can see a few subtle
22:15 differences between the left and the right result and if I tell you that the left verse all took about two and a half seconds to load and the right result took about 1.2 seconds to load you're probably getting a good guess of what the difference is that's a web mobile page that's an amp page of Google's our project now to be honest with the current amp or press plug-in you can't make it look like that just yet
22:46 so you'll have to do some manual work but amp is scanning is gearing up to be very very awesome just a few weeks ago Google completed forms for amp which means that by now you can have a complete canonical amp site pull back as one of the lead developers for amp at Google has a website that is purely amp there is no normal HTML version anymore it's purely app and it's crazy fast and it has a sidebar a menu and everything
23:20 you would want so for those of you are web developers that have not looked at amp start looking at amp because I think that in two three years from now we will be building sites purely an amp and that's a bit scary because it's so owned by Google but it's a lot faster and to be honest the thing that Google is right on is that speed really really is that important
23:51 it would amp will be everywhere so if your site is big you need it now if you've got a smaller site you can study it and see like okay how are we gonna do this but I thought I'd show you how big it is by showing you how the traffic is evolving this is the amp traffic for Yoast calm over the last few months that's 5,000 pages a week which still for us is not that much yet but I've worked with publishers where it's almost 10% of a choose now that's a lot of
24:23 traffic traffic that you're not getting for a lot of these results if you don't have amp pages so you need to do all this analyze what's working and then rinse and repeat if you think wow that sounds like a lot of work a lot more work than just installing that plugin I'm sorry a CEO as I tell people stands for seriously effortful optimization it's
24:59 very effective but it's a lot of work so you're just getting started I wish you good luck my name is Joseph welcome to Farmer CEO of yes and I'll take your questions [Applause] which I can hardly see yeah hi hi great talk thank you so much I think
25:31 I know the answer to this but I guess my question is about Amp are we finding already that Google is ranking sites that have amp higher than just regular mobile-friendly sites well the problem is there's no hard truths in SEO so in general my gut feeling yes do I have statistical proof for that no but what you do see especially for publishers is that the amp carousel that they show first a lot of news results
26:04 well that only has amp sites so if you if you're not amp you're not in there so in that way yes and it'll be in more places you've seen the new recipe markup requirements actually state that you need to make an amp page so there's more and more of these things where they for you to show up will require that you have an amp page thank you hi my name is Chris and I'm new to WordPress and I've got two clients that I've built sites
26:36 for and I've used a paid theme for them and on every page there's a you know you put your content on there and then there's a lot of stuff for SEO is that worthwhile or is that a waste of time or should I just buy the unnamed plug-in you keep referring to well you don't have to buy it it's free that's what Chris keeps spanking me for so your question was what are the SEO data and that theme is worthwhile it really
27:08 depends on the theme the only problem I have with SEO data in themes is that you'll at some point switch themes and then your SEO data is in your theme and you need to move it somewhere else now that can be done but it's a painful process so I'd like to keep like the separation of content and design clean and do the SEO stuff in a plugin and a design in a theme hi my name is Corey thanks you said that new sites should add the date to permalinks but if you're
27:41 an old site you should not do that and I wonder if you could unpack that no no sorry did you said the question was I am repeating for WordPress TV hi there news what our new new site should have added a to the permalink I think you misunderstood these news sites suicide in which sometimes is that easy my name is Tom and I'm I mean I'm a dmoz editor
28:14 and I do SEO for people in Atlanta for businesses Atlanta I just my question is how important do you think is a link on the dmoz these days and say like other directories like best of the web I know you said you shouldn't buy any links but best of the web is like one of the I guess the top SEO directories what are your thoughts on that so how important is a directory link for your SEO well to be honest no single link is going to help you get anywhere okay at least no single link that's with diets acquired
28:48 that easily so if you can get a link in a site that mentions you that really has a lot of authority and that's worth something dmoz in my eyes is still work to be worthwhile for a site but spending money to get that I would not do at the same time even for us calm we about a year and a half ago we got a mention from The Guardian after we completed the Guardian migration to the guard komm that single link increased our traffic by about 10% in one month so
29:21 there there are sites where you can have a gigantic impact by getting that link but these are always sites that are fully editorial and that don't link out easily so is it worthwhile yes best of the web sorry I knew these guys back in 2006 when SEO was still all about that I would not spend my money there right now even though I've partied with them hard
29:52 back then and what one more question how long does it take for you to crank out a blog post on the average so how long does it take me to crank out a blog post it really depends on what cut and kind of blog post it is I'm very good at ranting and when I do that it takes about 30 minutes when I we I recently wrote a very long post on href Lang that took me about four days to write and then another day of consulting with people at Google and everywhere to make sure everything and it was completely
30:24 correct so that's about a week for an article which now ranks for every term around HRF lang so it's worth it but good content takes a lot of time to to create we have a content team of three people at Yoast and we and everyone in management team agios writes regularly because we think that it's very important to keep sharing our content but that is a lot of investment to make so it don't look at the time spent look
30:55 at what it will get you and that's something you'll have to practice and hi my name is Donna and I have kind of a two-part question one I want to hear your thoughts on the implications of voice search on SEO and kind of related to that whether json-ld should eventually make its way into WordPress core okay well first of all whether the impact what's the impact of voice search
31:27 the impact of voice search is by now at this point really limited to stuff that you do when you search with your voice which is stuff that you do when you're in your car or when you're somewhere that and where you need directions or to find a place so it's the impact is it's mostly related to queries around which where's a store nearby how can I find something stuff like that I don't see anyone in this room doing hey Google here or at the hallways we're Ottomans around my dinner
31:58 table all the time that I have three teenage boys yeah III I won't tell you that that won't change I think it will change but at this point it's most probably mostly about that the thing is though overall is a trend that we have anyway of people searching for longer search terms because basically when you're doing hey Google you're you're talking in a full sentence and the funny thing is you see people typing like that too so Google needs to get better at determining which part of the sentence is the findit you're searching for so it really needs to be
32:29 can get better at language and that's what their hummingbird update basically did it made them better at recognizing what they were certain what you're searching for and how to handle that that means that they're getting slightly better at natural language which means that you can bright posts and have very readable posts and Google get can get better at understanding those now the big caveat here is something that you most of you won't ever bother with but it's very good at that in English in
33:00 Dutch not so much so in all languages that are smaller it's that takes a lot more effort in Google side so there's a really a two-way stream in SEO now and how you optimize some of that stuff and in English that's really different from some other languages now second your json-ld question some of the stuff that we do in our plugin should probably be in core I think that over time we'll add more and more stuff more and more off that stuff in core but at the same time
33:34 there's a lot of specific json-ld stuff for recipes and movies and all and it's the things like that that will always be theme or a theme or plugin land it would be good if we at some point got an API to make these things a bit easier and a bit more workable with each other but that's probably a few years away to be honest okay and what if just a little bit following because it's not only asking voice but when you have you know Google now telling you answers
34:05 invoice or Alexa with Amazon's thing and Siri how do you optimize for that the fact that you know Google really doesn't even want to take you to your site they just want to give you the answer to your question well yes but if you can get and can be that answer that's usually a very good thing I mean the answer boxes in Google that you see now when you do a search query are really just a precursor of them telling you that rely in with a
34:37 computer voice and so far it comes down to writing good copy that is actually something that they can read out loud and make sense at that point so it really boils down to good writing in the end whatever you do great thanks hi hi my name is Robbie I'm an alcoholic I I really look forward to amp when it first came out I was installed it got it running
35:08 my problem with ant though and I surged your site on a mobile phone it's killing my bookmarks if I I got this nice little picture it says it's your site Yoast SEO yeah you're on Google's cash yes do you know if they're gonna fix that because it's really killing a mobile bookmark so I don't know if I know my no no I hope so but I'm not the one deciding so I'm not the only one losing my mind right well no it is a problem and it's aids leads to weird things the canonical on
35:40 am pages is required to point back to the original site so to us so if you share that URL that you're looking at now in the Google cache on Facebook it should pick up the right one from our site but this goes wrong everywhere all this and it's well the web is inherently broken and just breaks it just a little bit more is there a fix I saw one site they had a link that you could actually tap it and would take you out of amp well you can do that I don't think that's the solution to be honest I think the
36:13 solution for Google is to try and actually come up with a way that we see the real URL when were on that page and still serve it from their cache but that would lead to a whole other side of of trouble to be honest my biggest scare is not just that it's the security implications of using a google.com URL in your browser and and Google com asking for a specific password and people trusting Google far too much okay so there's a lot of implications there
36:44 in in terms of people abusing that in in weird ways that I don't really like okay hello I'm wondering what you would recommend small businesses to do that don't have you know all the time in the world or resources to focus on SEO what's most important to like do an audit and what you do on an ongoing basis maybe from here just in general so what would you do as a small business
37:15 well as a small business first of all you really still need to think about what your marketing message is going to be so not just your SEO but your overall marketing message if you do that well it should be really easy to go from there to okay that means that we will want to be found for these keywords and that doesn't need to be a list of 10,000 keywords just 10 20 30 keywords can already be a very good challenge and crank out some content for Don and see where you end up and if you're a small
37:46 business don't aim too high the amount of people that we get in they want to rank for stuff like car parts or car insurance and that's just not gonna work right but car insurance plus location might actually work very well for you so go for a keyword that's attainable to you that that you see your peers in the search results and I'll start working on it and don't be afraid to start we like four or five pages and add gradually to it over time let's just spend a couple of hours every two weeks
38:18 or every month to write some new content to do some optimization and you'll slowly get better great thanks good luck alright Joe here great talk you kind of just answered my question what kind of person differently for small businesses or people who don't have a website that's quite as authoritative it's yost calm what kind of keyword research can we do you know if we don't have all the links yet if we're still kind of a young
38:49 website anything you can suggest in terms of going after more longtail keywords etc yeah I would go as deep as you can so where there are still people searching for it and then build your way up don't try and rank for the biggest keywords immediately so go deep and go very local especially if you're a small business the local part cannot be misunderstood and you probably have a couple of competitors locally but you but you usually don't have dozens and look for specific problems that people
39:24 address so if you if they call you on the phone and they ask for specific questions look at hey can I turn this specific question into a blog post and there's there's all these points where you're you know something that other people don't or you can help them by writing and writing about that and don't be too afraid to give away your knowledge and in your secret sauce because your secret sauce is really keeping up mostly so write about what you do and write about the questions that you've had and then you'll you'll soon figure out that it helps and people
40:02 hi my name is Jean thank you for this session I've read a few articles that said in that Google in 2017 will begin penalizing websites they don't have the SSL so I wanted to hear what you have to say about that because then that requires a dedicated IP address I have a lot of clients who get shared hosting so I wanted to hear your input on shared IP addresses as well so the question is is Google gonna make SSL more HTTPS more
40:36 important yes I think we all are because a lot of the stuff that we want to do in websites requires SSL because we need secure connections to do specific things modern web apps will want to do fortunately you don't need a specific IP address anymore for SSL there's a standard called server name indication that is about 10 years old that every modern browser in the world supports and that allows you to have multiple HTTP certificates on a server on the same IP
41:10 and so that's not true anymore and not not really needed anymore in fact there's more and more hosts that offer let's encrypt or another way to get free SSL in your site which is really really a big step forward the good thing about getting HTTPS on your site is it also allows for a lot of other speed optimizations like HTTP 2 and and all these other things that that technically I won't go into but they make your site a lot faster without you doing anything and I think we should all strive for
41:43 that and maybe a slightly political statement but it's in this day and age I'm very happy if everyone goes to SSL and your browser history is your browser hi my name is Chris um when I started doing this years ago Google Analytics was the easy choice for diagnosing website traffic and seeing what your traffic is coming from and what you can
42:15 do to fix problems hmm in recent years organic search results have been hidden there's a lot of referral spam which kind of skews the statistics to a point of making it unusable you still recommend that as your primary tool for diagnosing and just determining where your traffic is coming from and how you can change it so do I still recommend Google Analytics yes okay mostly because there is no competition that's affordable that's any good it is Google
42:47 Analytics hard to work with at times oh yes a and did they hide a lot of data yes as well so that's why you meet that Google search console account because that's off very often the missing link to the data that you're that you need and no that's not as good as what it was ten years ago and referral spam is annoying and there's a lot of more annoying things about Google Analytics but as long as I don't have a better solution for you that is what it will keep recommending there's a lot of work
43:18 that needs to be done in a lot of these areas to improve things for site owners I think Google is just as worried about a referral spam as everyone in this room is that knows about it because it makes them it makes it hard for advertisers to diagnose where their traffic is coming from - and while Google Analytics is part of their advertising the advertising part of our company so they afford admits it's a tool to get people to understand how how advertising works
43:49 and how it makes money and while they want people to spend more money so they need to figure it out so dude will probably fix that at some point but it's a very hard problem okay thank you let's give Yoast a big round of applause you [Applause]