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Is Information Gain Actually an SEO Ranking Factor? I don't think so. Thoughts?

I keep seeing information gain / “non-commodity content” discussed as though we have fairly good evidence that Google rewards pages for saying something new. I’m not convinced we can actually isolate that. I mean, Google’s own example makes me more skeptical. They compare something generic like: “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers”, with something much more specific and experience-based like: “Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line.” The second one is obviously more unique. But it is also a completely different search problem. It is narrower, more specific, probably has fewer directly competing documents/pages, uses more specific vocabulary, and is much closer to a long-tail information need. So when that kind of content performs better, how are we separating: information gain uniqueness better query relevance lower competition fewer competing documents See, I totally get that info gain or diversity makes a lot of sense when choosing sou...

Does domain authority matter more than technical SEO for getting Google to actually crawl new pages after a migration?

Genuinely asking because I just spent 2 months fixing every technical thing I could find on my own site (pre-rendering, canonical/redirect loops, hreflang, internal linking, sitemap) and indexed pages stayed stuck at exactly 2 the whole time. Turned out Googlebot was rendering the pages fine — a chunk of them just had never been crawled at all, weeks after being in the sitemap. The domain had migrated earlier this year and has almost no backlinks outside a few self-referential ones. So now I’m wondering if that’s the actual bottleneck — Google not prioritizing crawl on a low-authority domain — rather than anything technical. Anyone else run into this on a migration? Did building real backlinks end up mattering more than expected? submitted by /u/YogurtclosetFirm9890 [link] [comments] from The SEO Authority https://ift.tt/b8ri5fX

How do you check if your cookie banner is doing its job?

We have a cookie banner on our site and I always assumed that meant we were pretty much covered from a compliance perspective. Lately I have been wondering how much that actually proves, especially when it comes to third party trackers firing before someone makes a choice or different rules applying depending on where the visitor is located. For those of you managing websites or working in marketing, how do you usually check this? Do you rely on the built in reports from your CMP or do you run separate scans to see what is actually happening on the site. I am also curious whether anyone has switched cookie banner providers because their original setup looked fine but was not enforcing consent properly. submitted by /u/Comrade-Kiwi [link] [comments] from The SEO Authority https://ift.tt/VMzQ2Ka

My sitemap has been showing "Couldn't fetch" for five days now.

So, before I start, I have two domains. The first one is an expired domain that I recently bought. Its sitemap has been showing "Couldn't fetch" in GSC for the past five days. The second one is a brand-new domain. I submitted its sitemap, and within just 10 seconds, the status changed to "Success." Both websites are hosted on the same server. I've checked pretty much everything, but I still can't figure out what's wrong or why the first domain's sitemap keeps showing "Couldn't fetch." So here's my question: Could this be happening because I bought an expired domain? Is it possible that Google has flagged it as spam or something? I've already checked its history, including the Wayback Machine, and found nothing suspicious. Does anyone know what might be causing this or how to fix it? I also tried submitting the same sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools, and it worked perfectly fine. submitted by /u/irmemon225 ...