Stopping your site from slipping through the cracks
You’ve built a beautiful site.
Your mum loves it.
You’ve even paid your developer for a super SEO package.
So everything should be right, right?
But for some reason when you Google yourself nothing’s coming up,
Or maybe just a measly page or two.
And you have no idea why.
Or perhaps you’re pumping out content on your blog and for some reason, it’s still not getting indexed as fast as you would like.
This week we’re talking all about crawling and indexing.
How to check, how to fix and the best tips for making sure your content is as findable as a findable thing.
Tune in to learn:
- What it means for your site to be crawled and indexed
- How to find out that your site isn’t getting indexed
- What is a sitemap, what is a robots.txt
- What is crawl budget
- Crawlability vs Indexability: Why Google doesn’t automatically index your site after crawling every page
- Common issues that prevent site pages from being indexed
- Gaston’s recommended tactics to get your site indexed
- How to troubleshoot indexing for a small website
- How large sites differ, and how best to approach indexing
- The difference between LATAM sites and English-speaking western countries (USA/UK/AU)
- Gaston’s go-to tools to get your site indexed
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And big thanks to chrispanteli87 from the United Kingdom for their lovely review:
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I absolutely love this podcast. Kate has a wonderfully released approach whilst being exceptionally knowledgeable.
She has that unique ability to bring the best out of her guest and I always learn something new, exciting and actionable.”
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About Gaston Riera
From doing questionable tactics with a +100 sites PBN and earning a living from Google Adsense, to being a freelance consultant, to founding an SEO agency and finally working on in-house Technical SEO for multimillion-dollar companies.
He is also a Gold product expert in Google forums and, because after spending 9 years studying it has to be at least mentioned, he has a degree in Electronics Engineering.
Fun fact about Gaston: In high school, he was a math-athlete and he failed Maths that year (In Aus it would be year 11, the year before graduating). And that was the only class he failed in all his high school years.
Connect with Gaston Riera
Useful Resources
- Crawl efficiency: How to help Google slip through your site with David Pagotto (NEWBIE)
- 10-Day SEO Challenge Course
- Google Search Console
- Screaming Frog
- Google page speed insights
- Lighthouse Chrome Plugin
- Core Web Vitals
Transcript
Kate Toon:
I’d like to dedicate this episode to the memory of Bill Slawski. It’s very sad to hear about Bill’s passing via Twitter, and yeah, just wanted to give him a shout-out. He was one of the very early guests on the show, he did an episode about Knowledge Graph and was also just super supportive to me personally, especially in a time when a lot of people weren’t. He was really helpful and never minded my dumb SEO questions, and he’ll be greatly missed, so rest in peace Bill.
Kate Toon:
You’ve built a beautiful site. Your mum loves it, you even paid your developer for a super SEO package. So everything should be right, right? But for some reason when you Google yourself, nothing’s coming up, or maybe just a measly page or two, and you have no idea why. Or perhaps you’re pumping out content on your blog and for some reason it’s still not getting indexed as fast as you would like it to be. This week we’re talking all about crawling and indexing. How to check, how to fix, and the best tips for making sure your content is as findable as a findable thing.
Kate Toon:
Hello, my name is Kate Toon, and I’m the head chef at The Recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. And today I’m talking to Gaston Riera. Hello Gaston.
Gaston Riera:
Hey, Kate. How’s it going?
Kate Toon:
I’m good. How did I do with my-
Gaston Riera:
Great pronunciation, though.
Kate Toon:
You’re liking it? Okay. I practised rolling my Rs. So I’m just going to introduce Gaston to you. Gaston, an Argentinian, moved to Australia in 2019, and has been in the SEO industry for 10 years now working with websites and clients of all sizes. From doing questionable tactics with a plus 100 sites PBN and earning a living from Google Ad Sense, to being a freelance consulting, to founding an SEO agency and finally working in-house as a technical SEO for multimillion dollar companies. What an adventure. He is also a gold product expert in Google forums because after spending nine years studying, it has to be at least mentioned he has a degree in electronics engineering. That’s coming in handy, I’m sure. Fun fact about Gaston, in high school, he was a mathelite, oh my God, and he failed maths that year. In Australia, it would be year 11 year, the year before graduating. And that was the only class he failed in all his high school years. So were you good at maths or bad? I thought you had to be good at maths to do engineering.
Gaston Riera:
I actually am good at math, but I used to be good at math because I was doing math all day. But when I was at school and in high school, I was a mathlete. That was the only class that I failed. It was so frustrating.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I was never good at maths… I think I got a B at maths, which sounds all right, but, I don’t know, I scraped that B. Maths is not my jam. I’m a word girl. I’m very excited to have you on the show. We met in Melbourne, didn’t we?
Gaston Riera:
Yes, we did. Yeah.
Kate Toon:
At the SEO-
Gaston Riera:
First of all, thank you for inviting me to your show. It is a great pleasure of mine.
Kate Toon:
Oh, it’s lovely, and that accent… I tell you, I’m going to get five-star reviews with this accent. Yeah, we met at the SEO meetup in Melbourne, which is run by Peter Mead and a few other-
Gaston Riera:
Saijo I think.
Kate Toon:
Yeah Saijo, a few other little sexy SEO beasts in Melbourne. You’ve got great little community there. Anyway. I’ve been following your adventures. So I was super excited when we could connect and get on the show. And this is such a good topic. You know, crawlability is something that we consider in the big course in module two, it’s one of the first things we look at after speed. So let’s explain to the complete newbies for the listeners who don’t quite understand what we’re talking about. What does it mean for your site to be crawled? And what does it mean for your site to be indexed? And why is that dog barking in the background? Let’s do it first. What does crawled mean?
Gaston Riera:
Well, if you’ll allow me to use an analogy because this is the analogy with cooking. Crawling and indexing is like going to get all the ingredients to bake a cake, that’s the crawling part of things, just getting everything ready. And then the indexing part of things is just actually baking the cake. So crawling in that case would be Google trying to find your website, find every page that you have and storing them in their database. But it’s just finding that. Then there’s a second stage of that that is analysing the content, comparing the content and comparing your website to the rest of the websites of the entire world, of your industry, your language and all that. That’s the indexing part of it. This is a very brief idea. Crawling and indexing is very complex and no one knows actually how it works. This is what we think it actually goes like.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, no, I love that analogy and it works very well with the recipe for SEO success, which is the name of my course. So thank you, ingredients, cooking. Fantastic. So there are little bots or spiders that are sent out from Google HQ. They’re crawling from site to site, from link to link from page to post to product. Then they come back to Google HQ. All the information they’ve collected is pushed through the algorithm and then it’s plurped out… Plurped? I just made that word right up… Into the search engine results page and it’s indexed. And where it is in the position is this million dollar question, you know how that’s decided, we all talk about the 200 factors and whatever, but as you said, no one really knows.
Kate Toon:
So if I have just got this sexy little website that I’ve spent my money on and I’ve just started Googling myself, because we love to Google ourselves. I’m sure you do Gaston. I’m going to Google you after this. How do you find out if your site is indexed or not? I mean, that sounds really simple, but like for the complete newb, if they just type in their URL, what are they going to find?
Gaston Riera:
Well that’s a great comment because I was thinking, Hey the very first thing that you have to do with your website is just Google it to see what Google has already indexed. If they have indexed something. If you are not finding anything, when you Google your brand or your website, you could go just to search console. Google Search Console is a platform that you have to verify and all that. I wouldn’t get into much detail there how to verify at least. And then within search console, you have a report it’s called coverage report where Google tells you, at least it breaks it down in three or four categories. Pages that are have errors, that are not indexed, pages with warrants, valid pages that are the ones that are indexed, if you have any excluded pages. If you haven’t found any page when Googling your site, go straight into search console to see if Google has at least seen your website. Because it could happen that for some reason, Google has never seen your website because of server issues, robots.txt, or just because it’s not accessible to
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Yeah. I’m going to backtrack on a few points there. So you mentioned Google Search Console. We have got a couple of episodes on Google Search Console. It can feel intimidating. The verification process can be a bit kerfuffly sometimes. It’s very easy for someone who knows how to do it to set it up. It’s entirely free to set up. So you’re going to set up your Google Search Console and you’re going to go in there and look at the crawl reports in there and see what’s happening. And then a couple of other things that you mentioned there. If it’s not being indexed, there are a couple of files that have major impact on whether you are crawled or not. One is the robots.txt and one is the XML sitemap. So can you explain to us what the robots.txt is?
Gaston Riera:
Yeah. So the robots.txt is… If I could use another analogy, but this is not related to-
Kate Toon:
I love analogies. Is it like a bouncer? I think it’s like a bouncer at a club.
Gaston Riera:
What’s yeah, actually. Yeah. I think like that. I think it like doors. If you’re in a house you have many doors and Google tries to access every door, every room in your house and robots.txt is… Basically it has the keys to those doors. If you don’t have a robots.txt or you have it disallow nothing or a blind robots.txt, you have every key to every door or every door is open. With the robots.txt What you can do is telling Google, “Hey, I don’t want you to go to that door or go to that path, or that page.” Technically it’s blocking things. That’s the main reason that we have robots.txt, is just blocking Google or any other bots that follow robots.txt. It’s blocking that.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, no, I love that. So I like the bouncer thing where if you’ve got a pass, you get in, and if you don’t you don’t. I like both of those. So yeah, the robots.txt, generally you would allow people to access most things, but you know, if you’ve got a WordPress site, you probably don’t want Google going to your WP admin page or your login page. And you find your robots by just putting in your domain name, then a little slash then robots dot TXT. If you are on Shopify, you’re going to get a whole big heap of things that are disallowed all to do with the checkout. If you’re on Squarespace, your robot.txt is going to be ugly as, if you’re on WordPress it’s pretty clean. And the thing is that often what developers do when they’re building a site is they do block Google in the robots.txt-
Gaston Riera:
Oh, I hate that.
Kate Toon:
… And then unfortunately when they put their site live, they forget. So I once had somebody come on the course, and poor thing they’d been blogging for a year, but the developer had checked the little box in the back end of WordPress that said discourage search engines from crawling this site. So nothing had been crawled. So that was devastating. Now the best mate of the robots.txt is the XML sitemap. Sitemap.XML. Can you explain that to us? I hope you’ve got another analogy ready for me.
Gaston Riera:
Well, I have an analogy, but technically it’s the name of the file is sitemap. It’s the map to get to every page. The thing that I really like about sitemap is that… Or at least the advice I have for many web masters is that you should only put in the sitemap the page that you want to be indexed. You could go ahead and put every single page that your site has, but that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it’s better to just add… If you have five important pages, those five pages have to be there. It’s an important clarification that it doesn’t matter if you add the pages at the top of the sitemap or at the end of the sitemap, there’s no ranking in there. It’s Google saying, “Hey, what do we have start? I don’t know this site. I don’t know anything. So let’s see if I have a site map and see if I have some keys to go around this house.” That’s the sitemap and robots.txt.
Kate Toon:
I love that. And you know, most of the content management systems these days have the sitemap baked in. So Shopify, Squarespace, WIX, with WordPress, you can use Yost. The only issue that you sometimes have to look at with Yost is that the taxonomy, so often it will have posts, pages and products, which are kind of the ones you want. But then it has tag archives and author archives and while those are interesting pages, they might be drawing traffic away from the core site. So this is something I wanted to ask you about as well. What about crawl budget? So there’s this notional idea that Google has… It gets worn out, like we all do. So it’s got the keys, it’s got the sitemap, it’s opened about 30 doors and it goes, “You know what? I’ve had enough.” Where does crawl budget come in to this?
Gaston Riera:
Oh, crawl budget is a sensible topic for some SEOs. Let’s say Google has said many times that actually the idea of crawl budget doesn’t exist. There is no actual budget for crawling for any page. It’s just a concept. I like to say, instead of crawl budget it’s crawl capacities; how many pages Google decide to crawl on your site. It depends on way too many factors. The factors that usually Google… Or at least, that I have proven that are most important for the crawlability, how authoritative your site is, how many backlinks it has, if your site loads fast, if there are any issues with your server and all that. I would say that if you have a site that is not that big. When I say not a big, a small site would be less than a couple of thousand pages. Google has a number that says if site is less than a hundred thousand pages, that is a incredibly big side, if you have less than a hundred thousand pages, you shouldn’t worry about crawl budget.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I agree.
Gaston Riera:
Not for now. Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. And we’ve seen some big eCommerce stores in the UK cutting down the number of products they have to speed this up. It makes sense that you don’t want to have extraneous pages, especially if you’ve got an e-com store and you know that 20% of your products are making 80% of the sales that maybe you do retire some products and you… And we’re going to talk about some common issues that stop crawlability in a minute, set up your redirect. Anyway, we’re talking about Google, obviously there’s the party line from Google, and then there’s the reality. But if Google’s so great, why doesn’t it just crawl my site immediately? As soon as I put my site live, why isn’t it crawled? What causes the delay?
Gaston Riera:
I’ve been in the industry for 10 plus years and I always think that it’s like, if Google is so good, why they don’t just index everything? Because they are fantastic machine. Everything works so well from their side, that’s what they say. So there are hundreds, if even thousands of reasons why Google wouldn’t index a page right after they crawl it. The simplest one is that, Hey, this is two different processes. One is just scrolling and finding the page, finding the crawl path, technically speaking. And the other one is just assessing the content.
Gaston Riera:
And this is the part that is more resource intensive from Google’s side. That is understanding the content that you have. If you have content, what type of content? If that content goes for any particular industry, some languages or your competitors, if even that page has any merit to rank. There is one thing that people… We, I’m included in that, we don’t realise that it’s more than 80% of the internet is copied. So chances are that your content that you’re putting out there is already copied. Someone has already written it. Even they are the authority unit, even if I’ve been in the industry in this SEO industry for 10 years. And I think I know my stuff, whatever content I put out there, someone has already written it. So…
Kate Toon:
It’s a great question.
Gaston Riera:
I don’t want to get too passionate.
Kate Toon:
No, I like that. And I think it’s really important that we’ve drawn this distinction between crawling and indexing. It may have been crawled, but it being indexed is a completely different thing. I think that sometimes people don’t, they think the two happen immediately, synonymously, whatever. But I like that. I think that’s fantastic. Okay. So look, we’ve talked about a couple of issues that can prevent sites from being… And as you said, there are millions of reasons. We talked about the robots.txt and mistakes in there. We’ve talked about the sitemap and mistakes in there. What are some other common issues that prevent site pages from being indexed?
Gaston Riera:
The way I think about it is just two big blocks, the technical side of things and the content side of things. The, the most common ones are the technical side of things that is blocked in robots.txt, not having a sitemap or just someone, as you said, clicking on WordPress and say, Hey, don’t get this site indexed and having no index across site or the most complex one to solve, I think is when Google cannot render your page. Not with the good CMSs that are out there, but if you have a custom site that someone is using a lot of JavaScript or many plugins and things like that. Sometimes Google just cannot render that page, or because of they are using so many resources, it takes minutes to load and Google just say, no, I will not wait one minute for this page to load. If it doesn’t load in a couple of seconds, I’m not interested in that. That’s one thing.
Gaston Riera:
The other thing is content. As I said before, chances are that your content is not unique. It could be uniquely written, but it’s not unique as content. So it could be that your content is not good enough at the eyes of Google. Or that, because you are new in SEO, and you want to make things fast, push your site faster, you start copy and pasting the same description on every product page that you have. That’s not good, because it’s duplicate content. Even though it could be unique content, but if you’re repeating the same content on every page, Google can’t understand, which is the actual value of those many pages. And they say, well, if your site has a hundred pages and it’s a hundred copies of the same content, I don’t care. I don’t want this type of sites indexed in my search results.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So on the flip of that, those are all the reasons why you wouldn’t get indexed. I mean, I guess we could just do the positive of those. What gives us the best chance of being indexed? What are some things that we can look at to ensure that we give ourselves the best possible chance to be indexed?
Gaston Riera:
I would say have a very lean and small website try to not create many pages just because you want to have many pages. If you are in eCommerce and you have the same product that has variations for that product, don’t create a hundred pages for the same product and one page for each colour that you have in store. That’s could be one thing. So a small site is a good website in this case. And try to have all the technical basics correct. That is the site that has to be reasonably fast. I’m not saying that you hope you should go ahead and try to get a hundred in the page speed insights report. No, nothing like that. It just should be good enough. What is good enough? That it takes in mobile less than three seconds, in desktop less than a second or a second and something. That’s good enough. And the last thing-
Kate Toon:
That’s pretty good. That’s pretty hard. But yeah.
Gaston Riera:
Yeah. And the last thing I would say to run a couple of your website… Sorry, a couple of your pages through some of the Google tools, let’s say the URL inspection tool or the model friendliness tool to see if Google can render most of your page. If Google can render your page and you have a reasonably fast enough site and you have good content, it’s very likely that Google will index your site. Relatively fast.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. The URL inspection tool is great. It gives you some great data about what’s working and what isn’t working on your page. You don’t want to sit there putting them in one by one, but you know, if you do get some issues and it’s flagged, that can be really useful. The other thing that I see a lot is just especially with sites that have been around a while is they haven’t been well maintained. So you pop them through something like Screaming Frog or you look in Google Search Console and you just find there’s a lot of 404s, there’s temporary redirects. There’s just weird stuff going on.
Kate Toon:
Even though I keep a clean site, Gaston, every year, I do like to run my site three Screaming Frog and just double check, because I’ve got multiple people working on the site, they’re creating pages. Sometimes they’re leaving them in draught, but sometimes they’re, accidentally publishing them and I’d just like to do a little bit of a cleanup. Set my redirects, keep it pretty clean as John Mueller always says, “Sometimes a 404 is the right result.” Sometimes that’s okay. But especially as we talked about if you are making an effort to remove that duplicate content, or you have a store where products are coming in and out of stock or you’re ending product lines, you have to keep that site hygiene up. So you’re not just having hundreds and hundreds of 404 errors.
Gaston Riera:
Yeah. Sometimes I tend to use when I try to educate people that are new to SEO and they have these messy, medium to large websites. I tell them, “Hey, imagine that you go to your wardrobe, and you have thousands of clothes there and you want to find something, how do you do it? If you have thousands of things and you want to just pick that one thing that you wear three years ago that suits you really, really well. It will take you days even months to get that. So if you have, if you have your wardrobe organised, well maintain and everything nice and tidy, you will find it easier and faster. That’s what we want. We want a website that is well organised, tidy and maintained.”
Kate Toon:
I am so stealing that analogy. It’s also like, for those of us who’ve changed size. Don’t keep all those tiny clothes that you’re not going to get into anymore that are out date. Clean it up, redirect, update content, keep your site current and interesting and relevant. Don’t just have dead wood in your site. So you mentioned there, you’ve talked about small websites, large websites. You’ve worked on all manner of sites, huge sites. Do you approach crawlability and indexing differently on a large site versus a small one?
Gaston Riera:
Well, the short answer is yes, but the main idea is the same, is try to have a clean and well maintained site. The problem with large website is that the solutions that you have to implement are different. And sometimes because those sites are very large and you just cannot for half of the site, because you would be killing the half of the revenue potentially. Or you cannot just index half of the site. So it takes a little longer to understand what the needs for the business are if you can or cannot redirect or clean half of the site. In my current company, we have a site that has 50 million pages and we found out that 20% on the site was duplicate. We had two Spanish translations and we went to the CEO saying, “Hey, we have two Spanish translations they are pretty much equal one to the other.” And I told him, “Hey, I’m Spanish speaker. I know what I’m talking about. This is just crap.” And we ended up pretty much redirecting 20% of the site that makes hundred plus million dollars per year. And that was scary. Oh.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Because those redirects they say it’s a bit like a leaky bucket and it takes a little while for you to… Can have a bit of an impact, can’t it? How that all [inaudible 00:23:24] happening. Yeah.
Gaston Riera:
And it took Google nine plus months to understand all the redirects. It was pretty much 10 million pages that we had to recrawl, but we understand all of that.
Kate Toon:
That’s a lot of work for Google. This is it, you know? So when you’re setting up redirects best practise is to leave them there forever, but it can take a long time to Google to recognise, recrawl, reindex. So it doesn’t happen just like that. You can kind of encourage it, like sometimes I’ll go and use the URL inspection tool or upload my sitemap again, even though it’s not necessary, it makes me feel like I’ve done something, right? And gone, “Hey, Google, I’ve changed some stuff.” And you know, I think that was a unique instance, but you would avoid doing dramatic changes to hundreds of pages, do it incrementally and see what the impact is. Yeah. But hey, you are Argentinian, which is rather exciting and you’ve been working both in Latin America and in English speaking countries as well, the US, UK, AU. Is there a big difference, do you think, in the sites and how they work?
Gaston Riera:
In how sites work there isn’t much of a difference because it’s pretty much the same technology, it’s the same technology across the world. What I would say, the difference that I found is that how users engage with technology. The spending habits of people from the English speaking countries and from Latin America. Yeah and they are very much… Latin American people, we are way more patient. If the site loads in more than three seconds or five seconds or 10 seconds, we have that. We wait.
Kate Toon:
Mañana, mañana, right?
Gaston Riera:
Yeah. And also it’s very common in Latin America that you have only couple of players in the industry, at least big players. The companies that I’m working for. So you have one or two really large eCommerce and you don’t have many options. Whereas in US, UK or Australia, you have tens of options for everything that you want to do. So the competition is way more fierce, I would say, in English speaking countries, and they are more conservative. That was a surprise for me. Because if you have a very large competition, you cannot be conservative. You have to try new things to push forward.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. You have to be brave and risky. Yeah. So, we’re not rule breakers, especially in Australia, people are very law abiding, which is upsetting. Anyway.
Gaston Riera:
Upsetting is just being polite.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. My partner refuses to ever cross the road when the lights aren’t green and it’s like, “There’s not a car within miles, but we have to stand.”
Gaston Riera:
I know the feeling. I know the feeling.
Kate Toon:
I don’t understand it. Yeah. So let’s talk about tools. We’ve mentioned a few today and by the way, if you’re listening, I will drop these tools into the show notes. And also by the way, if my accent or Gaston’s accent is a bit difficult for you to understand, there is a full transcript of the show in the show notes as well. Because we’ve both got very sexy accents. So what are your go-to tools if you’re thinking about indexing and crawlability. Do them in order, where would you start?
Gaston Riera:
I would start with Google Search Console 100%. Because there you can debug and try to understand what’s happening with Google’s eyes. Then Screaming Frog 100%. I’m the biggest fan of Screaming Frog, I don’t know what I would do without Screaming Frog. It’s just amazing. And I think that could be pretty much it. If you have a relatively small website, then you can use other Google tools, such as page speed insights or Lighthouse. Also you can use the Core Web Vitals add-on if you’re on Google Chrome to check where every flag is triggered and yeah, that would be pretty much it for small websites.
Kate Toon:
Yeah-
Gaston Riera:
If you are thinking, sorry.
Kate Toon:
No, no, I agree. I agree. I’ll come back to you, but, and I think as well, being confident about finding your robots.txt and your sitemap and understanding them, they’re not written in like gobbledygook JavaScripty weird language. It pretty much says crawl this bit, this bit, disallow this, disallow this and look at my pages, post and products. Not too hard to understand. So make sure that you can understand those and if you’re using WordPress, make sure you understand how to turn off and on the different taxonomies. I think that’s useful as well.
Gaston Riera:
Yeah. And also for the content side of things, I usually find it very useful to reread the writer’s Google guidelines. I don’t know how to pronounce all that. It’s a hundred long page guideline from Google. It’s a pain in the B, I know. But it helps a lot to understand how Google tries to assess… Well, at least how Google tells other people how they should assess the content of the site.
Kate Toon:
But I think-
Gaston Riera:
And it can-
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I think the thing that a lot of people struggle with is there is normal speak and there is Google speak, because Google hates to be definitive and it hates to to give exact guidelines. So it kinds dances around the topic. And I think some people get those guidelines, because obviously I recommend them too, but you have to read a lot between the lines as well. And it can be quite challenging for the newb to wade through that.
Gaston Riera:
Yeah. Yeah. And I totally agree with you on that. However, I have to say that it’s a good resource. And also one of the things that I like the most about the SEO industry is that everyone is friendly. So if you don’t know how to do things, reach out to someone. Twitter and LinkedIn, everyone wants to help. Because we that’s how we learn.
Kate Toon:
Gaston, you’ve obviously met some nice people online. There are some good guys, there are some bad guys and girls.
Gaston Riera:
Of course there are shitty people, because that’s the internet.
Kate Toon:
That’s the internet. No, but I definitely find Twitter’s really useful. And I’m going to recommend you. I’ve got your Twitter, I’ve got your LinkedIn, I’ve got your website. And as I said that Melbourne SEO meet up, a lot of really amazing, really helpful people there. There’s some good eggs out there. And also some people to follow who are really sharing interesting information and articles and it’s cutting edge. So if that lights you up, if that’s your jam then check it out. Of course, as listeners of this podcast, you can come to the I love SEO group on Facebook and ask questions there as well. But Gaston, so we can find you on Twitter, we can find you on LinkedIn. Where else do you lurk?
Gaston Riera:
Sorry? Where else do I what? Do I live?
Kate Toon:
Do you live do you lurk. Where else do we find you? If we wanted to use your services, are we able to?
Gaston Riera:
I am not for hire for not for now. Because the thing is, I really like the company that I’m working for. It takes pretty much all of my time. Yeah. For the last two years, my approach was I want to keep updated with working with the small sites, but just only doing, not pro bono, but just for free for companies, charities or not for profit companies where they need a hand. And I just say, “Hey, I can give you a hand.” And this just two way thing.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. That’s great.
Gaston Riera:
But I love helping people and that’s how I learned SEO 10, 15 years ago thanks to someone that was very generous with me. And I want to return the favour.
Kate Toon:
That’s lovely. That’s lovely. And the company you work for is Envato?
Gaston Riera:
Envato, yeah. [crosstalk 00:31:24] Envato is very well known for ThemeForest. They are the owners of ThemeForest. That’s the place to find a Warcraft theme.
Kate Toon:
There you go. Little free plug for Envato. Envato, if you’d like to sponsor the podcast, please just get in touch. Gaston, it was an absolute joy to speak to you. Thank you very much for coming on the show and yeah, I’ll probably be tweeting you soon.
Gaston Riera:
Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
Kate Toon:
Right. So that’s the end of this week’s show. If you have questions about site crawlability or indexing head to my I love SEO group on Facebook. And if this episode was eye opening for you and you want to learn more, you should check out my newly updated 10 day SEO challenge course. We actually have a whole section on Google Search Console and how to verify, and a guide to the tool, including that URL inspection tool and how to submit your sitemap. All good stuff each day for 10 days, you’ll get practical lessons to help you reach new highs in the search engine ranks. But don’t worry if you don’t have time in the 10 days, you get lifetime access, as you do to all my courses and resources. So check that out. Now, I like to end the show, the shout out to one of my listeners.
Kate Toon:
And today it’s chrispanteli87 from the UK. Boo-yah! UK. I’ve subscribed to a lot of SEO blogging podcasts and a lot of podcasts in general. I absolutely love this podcast. Oh my goodness. I love these reviews. Kate has a wonderfully relaxed approach while being exceptionally knowledgeable. She has that unique ability to bring out the best of her guests and I always learned something new, exciting, and actionable. Thank you. And I think Gaston was just a smashing, smashing guest. Thank you for coming on Gaston with your gorgeous, gorgeous accent. If you’d like to leave a review, you know the drill, I would love one. You can do it on whatever podcast platform you use. As I mentioned, show notes for this episode are therecipeforseosuccess.com. You’ll also find a full a transcript of the episode links to all Gaston’s social media, and as well as links to all the tools that he mentioned too. So thanks so much for listening and until next time happy SEO-ing.
