Happy "I missed the entirety of June because it seemed kind of gauche to be talking about SEO/web marketing when Important World Events were going on, but it turns out they're still going on, and there's a lot here, so" Wednesday, friends. If you can give, I'd definitely recommend giving to your local Mutual Aid Funds and Food Banks. There are a lot of people in need out there.
Anyway; web stuff. There were some updates this month-- they happen every day, but there was, in fact, a big update this month. This newsletter is really long; Here are 3 links I think you should definitely take a look at:
Barry Schwartz reported on some kerfuffle in the SEO community with regards to Guest Posting. John Mueller suggested that links from Guest Blogs should always have rel=sponsored or rel=nofollow links attached.
Here's the thing: I think he is definitely saying that.... to SEOs. I think generally, this kind of guidance is because Joh Mu and other Googlers know people who just kinda... have websites aren't hanging on their every word for loopholes in the Webmaster Guidelines. SEOs, however, are looking for an excuse to make something a strategy. There isn't any physical difference between Suzy writing a post for her friend's blog and linking back to her own and an SEO doing a link building campaign... but there's a scale difference, and there's a difference between what is considered "natural" behavior.
(Most folks, even folks with websites, don't really know what a nofollow link is.)
Carl Hendy wrote a long post about the history of web search engines-- definitely worth a read for SEOs. While you're here, The History of The Web published a post called "What happened to the Webmaster" which is well worth a read.
Roger Montti wrote about what was going on with GoogleBot and shopping carts. Basically merchants who participate in Google Shopping (or Google’s back-end for sellers the Merchant Center and Shopping ads) agree to have their sites crawled, including their shopping cart.
From Polemic Digital, a great article about PageRank. PageRank is a fundamental of SEO that is often misunderstood-- having a good grounding in SEO opens up a ton of mental blocks in how PageRank works.
Required reading! We do not live single issue lives; this blog talks about the ways that barriers are put up for marginalized communities around the web, from access and accessibility to hostile conditions-- and then some solutions to this.
Do you remember the web in the 90s? I do. Barely. That's where I cut my teeth on weird geocities websites. Max Bock talks about the ways we're seeing fundamentals from the 90s return today. Some of these trends include owning your own website, webrings, server side rendering, and more. Hopefully we'll be seeing some under construction gifs as well.
The Chromium blog came out with a blog post about the efforts they have taken and are going to take to improve browser compatibility in 2020; reducing the manner in which websites look or behave differently on different web browsers. It's definitely worth a read.
If you've ever had a conversation with me, you know I can't shut up about image optimization. WebP is one of the next gen image formats you may have heard of; Johannes Siipola tested WebP vs. JPEG to see if WebP really was better. While you're here, check out css-trick's guide to responsive images in HTML.
Sam Underwood wrote a Google Sheets regex generator tool and it's super useful, especially if you hate writing Regex like I do, but love using Regex like I do.
Yulia Startsev has started a new stream called Compiler Compiler, which looks at how the JavaScript Specification is implemented. This post involves the incredible line "JavaScript …is a programming language." It sure is. If that wets your appetite for more code streams, check out Cyberbarbie.
Valeri Karpov at The Code Barbarian wrote a great post about Curl. I think it can be really valuable even for non developers-- especially how to call HTTP GET requests, making POST and PUT requests, and authentication. You can also read "How and why to learn command line as a front end developer" from the Go Make Things blog.