SEO Basics

Search

Like most websites and certainly most blogs, this website is powered by the open source WordPress CMS. WordPress comes out of the box with a lot of great functionality and has a plugin infrastructure to allow the core functionality to be conveniently extended.

While WordPress default settings are generally okay to get a site to show up in Google, most websites use a 3rd party plugin to help optimize the configuration. These optimizations could include configuring meta data on each web page, generating specially formatted files to tell Google what URLs exist on a site, restricting certain URLs from being crawled or which can be indexed and a raft of other features.

The image below is from Google Search Console for https://www.lattimore.id.au and shows how many URLs Google is aware of and how many are actually indexed/discoverable within search. WordPress is generating about 900 URLs in total and in the first half of the chart approximately 150 are indexed. The decline midway through is caused by switching from HTTP to HTTPS recently.

The next image is for https://www.lattimore.id.au (after switching to HTTPS) and importantly after reviewing the configuration within the All In One SEO plugin.

The following changes have been made to help Google crawl/index the site more efficiently:

  • Applied noindex to date based archives (/<year>/<month>/<day>/)
  • Applied noindex to tag based archives (/tag/<tag-name>/)
  • Applied noindex to author based archives (/author/<author-name/)
  • Applied noindex to search based URLs (/?s=<query>)
  • Removed noindex from paginated category based archives (/category/<cat-name>/)

The broad based noindex changes above have cut the number of generated URLs in half, most of which were thin, low quality or broadly duplicative of other URLs in the site.

The second major change was indexing the paginated category archives, such as /category/search/2/. Before the change the top level category URLs, such as /category/search/ were indexed but pages two and onwards were noindex.

Interestingly, Google had a crawl path to the posts via the Archives link in the main menu and also each of the date based archives that were noindexed. I’m now curious if the 300+ URLs which are currently indexed remain that way in the mid/long term or if it is just short lived fame due to them being ‘new’ URLs from switching to HTTPS and it had nothing to do with deindexing the various archive type URLs above.

Only time will tell ;-)

Endless Ride Mountain Bike Race

Health & Fitness
Screenshot

I recently competed in my first cross country (XC) mountain bike race & it was a blast!

The event was named The Endless Ride, named after the seemingly endless days associated to the summer solstice. The event started at 7pm, which seems crazy, however in Seattle at this time of year the sun doesn’t set until after 9:00pm.

Lemon Peel, who are the event organisers have a highly inclusive approach to their events. They support classes for different ages alongside supporting mountain bikes, gravel bikes and runners! I guessed and entered myself into Cat 2 Open as I was certain the Cat 1 Open was going to be outrageously fast.

The course used the Grand Ridge trail system, which connects Sammamish to Issaquah. Total distance was 12.5km, with 350m of climbing. While it mightn’t sound too tough, when you combine sections with 15-20% gradients, roots, rocks & ruts – even with the massive gearing on a mountain bike it is definitely challenging!

My race plan was simple, go out really hard in the first 3km to try and get a gap on the pack as that section only had 50m of elevation. Between 3km and 8km, I knew I was going to lose time as there were competitors who were 15-25kg lighter than me. The weight difference doesn’t hurt you on the flat or downhill, but is a huge penalty on gradients over 4%.

Overall this worked out pretty well, by the time I got to 3km mark – I couldn’t hear or see my competitors behind me. As expected, some of the other racers got past me by the 6-7km marker. Fortunately, I was past the steepest sections by that point and the downhill started at 8km mark. I crossed the finish line in 53 minutes and was shocked to hear my name called for 2nd place at the ceremony.

From an effort stand point, it was definitely an all out – Garmin said it was “highly impacting V02 max”. That doesn’t surprise me whatsoever, my max HR is 183bpm (which I hit) and I averaged 170bpm even after accounting for the downhill where it ‘recovered’ to 160bpm.

It was a heap of fun being on a course with other people racing!

Moving To HTTPS

Websites

HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, it makes sure that information sent between your browser to the website you’re viewing is encrypted and can’t be decrypted by any machine or person in between.

Traditionally HTTPS was only used on important sites such as banks or checkout pages in ecommerce websites where your privacy was considered paramount. HTTPS wasn’t broadly used in the early days of the internet as SSL certificates were only available to purchase from a relatively small number of companies, they were expensive and it came with a performance penalty due to the additional work needed for establishing the secure connection and the ongoing encrypt/decrypt process.

In 2010, low single digit percentages of internet traffic were encrypted. By 2015, encrypted traffic was at about 25%. In the following 10 years, the barriers that were holding back adoption have been removed. Thanks to Lets Encrypt, you can get free SSL certificates. Web hosts integrate with Lets Encrypt, automatically issue/re-issue and install the SSL certificates. The original performance penalty has been removed. With HTTP/2 (the second version of the HTTP protocol) which requires HTTPS, websites load dramatically faster. Couple that with a big push from companies like Google, suggesting it is a ranking factor with their algorithm and by 2025 over 90% of all internet traffic is encrypted.

I’m late to the party, but I’m doing my part in switching to HTTPS :P

Dirty Bloom 50mi Mountain Bike

Health & Fitness, Photos

Since I bought my Scott Spark RC mountain bike last year, I’ve been eager to attend my first mountain bike event. Last week while on Instagram, serendipitously I was served an ad for Dirty Bloom 50mi. The ad said it was their inaugural event, as such it had very limited spots and there were only a handful left. There is no time like the present, so on a whim I signed up four days before the event.

Dirty Bloom is held in Wenatchee in Eastern Washington, it is about a two and a half hour drive from Sammamish across I-90. It’s just close enough that I could drive there in the morning versus needing to go the day before and stay in a hotel – so the alarm clock was set for 4am. I arrived into Wentatchee at about 7:15, went to the nearest McDonald’s to grab a coffee, bacon & egg muffin and change into my cycling gear.

The course for Dirty Bloom is 50mi/80km in length with 8000’/2666m of elevation. For those that aren’t familiar, any ride (regardless of distance) with over 2000m of elevation is going to be a tough day. I was lucky enough to get a ticket for RAMROD (Ride Around Mt Rainier in A Day) last year, it was 160mi/255km with 10000’/3333m of elevation and it was a huge effort.

As it turns out, the climbing was front loaded on the course and was absolutely savage. At the 5km mark the climbing started with gradients regularly going into 12-15%. In sections, they were so steep, I couldn’t ride them even in the lowest gear and had to push my bike.

Without question, this uphill section was the hardest effort I’ve ever done on a bike and lasted three (3) hours and 15 minutes. For some perspective, my max heart rate is 183bpm. When I do a one hour max effort and bury myself, I can sustain a heart rate of 168-172bpm and produce 300w. I averaged 162bpm over this section, absolutely brutal!

When I made it to the second aid station, the elite riders had completed an additional loop and were passing back through that aid station a second time before making their way back toward the finish line. A whole bunch of them commented how tough the course was.

I’d been riding for about 4 hours at this stage, guessed I had at least two hours of riding to the finish line, followed by a 2.5hr drive home. While I knew I could have completed the extra loop of about 20mi, I decided to drop it and begin the ride to the finish line.

I’ve heard people speak of ‘single track’ a thousand times, but having never ridden a mountain bike event or a trail network as massive as this before – I didn’t fully understand the wonder and magic of it. With the exception of another 2.5km climb, the next 23km were downhill – blasting through meadows covered in wildflowers, fast, flowy, up, down, left, right – it was like a rollercoaster!

I crossed the finish line in 6 hours, an average HR of 155bpm & just under 50km under my belt.

Can’t wait to do my next mountain bike event!

Opportunity (Revisited) & How I Moved To The USA

Work

I joined Wotif Group in January 2014 and that same year it was acquired by Expedia Group for AU$703M. While I was nervous about what the future would hold with regards to possible/likely layoffs, I could see an opportunity ahead and it ultimately led me to joining Expedia Group.

I’d been working for Expedia Group for a little over three years and I was a Director of SEO responsible for Expedia, Wotif & Lastminute in Australia and New Zealand.

Expedia Group sends out an email each week listing all job openings and I saw two job listings for a Sr Director for SEO, one to lead brand Expedia and one to lead a collection of brands associated to Expedia that leveraged the same technology platform such as Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif and several others around the world.

I remember speaking to Claire about these job listings at the time and I described them as the Mt Everest of jobs for someone in the organic search profession:

  • eight different product categories (hotel/flight/package/etc)
  • dozens of countries and languages
  • huge footprint with millions of URLs in each
  • underpinned by sophisticated product & technology capabilities
  • generates an astonishing amount of revenue annually
  • handful of ecommerce websites operate at this scale in the world

If I missed this opportunity, these jobs wouldn’t become vacant in the near future.

I knew that these roles would be advertised both internally/externally and would garner a lot of applications. Claire asked ‘what if I get it’ question and I said we’d cross that bridge down the road if we needed to cross it. Given the interest in these roles, there was no certainty that I’d get an interview, let alone be successful in getting one of the roles.

Claire commented that she knew I’d get it immediately, forever my biggest supporter <3

As it turns out, Claire was right and after a bunch of interviews I was offered one of the Sr Director roles in August 2017. That bridge that I couldn’t see on the horizon, yeah it was now firmly in view!

It took a few months for the US visa for myself and family to be processed but it came through in November. I relocated at the beginning of January 2018, with Claire and the kids coming in June/July once the US school year had ended.

While moving to the US was completely unplanned, it did turn out to be an incredible opportunity which I’m eternally grateful to Claire, Hugo & Evie for enabling.

If you see a great opportunity, give it a rip – something amazing might happen!