Does page experience still matter?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I am joined by, now batting, number two, this shortstop, Crystal Carter. Number two, Head of SEO Communications.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you, Mordy for that introduction. I never played shortstop. I played outfield. I used to do a little bit of that when I was playing softball, when I was 12 years old. Yeah. On the Reds. We won no games that season.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not even the actual Reds.

Crystal Carter:

There you go. Yeah, there you go. We had a good time.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's all it counts. By the way, just that was my Bob Shep... Bob Sheppard is a legendary announcer for the Yankees. He literally announced the players from 1900 through 2014.

Crystal Carter:

What?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. He was 550 when he retired.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

He looked like the Crypt Keeper at that point. That's how he announced. He announced, "Now batting, the shortstop. Number two, Derek Jeter."

Crystal Carter:

There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know why you were the shortstop, because you're number two, which is Derek Jeter's number. The only person who's getting any of this is basically Glenn Gabe right now.

Crystal Carter:

Hey, we to cater to lots of folks, including our SEO friends, all of our SEO friends.

Mordy Oberstein:

Before we completely lose the audience on my baseball nonsense, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also measure site performance, including Core Web Vitals no matter what. No matter your site's level of traffic, yep. Probably the only place on the web, where to be honest, you can have field data without traffic thresholds, is right inside of the Wix Site Performance Dashboard.

Crystal Carter:

I love that site performance dashboard. It's one of my favorite things, because I also love field data, because field data is better than lab data. Lab data is useful, but field data is what actually happened.

Mordy Oberstein:

What position in the field did you play, shortstop?

Crystal Carter:

Ha, ha, ha.

Mordy Oberstein:

That was so perfect. I didn't even plan it.

Crystal Carter:

Ha, ha. The field data that I got when I was playing outfield was that I needed to run around a lot to make sure that I was in line with the shortstop, in order to get the ball back towards the home base so we didn't get so many runs in from the other team.

Mordy Oberstein:

Why are we talking about baseball today? Don't know. But why are we talking about performance? Well, performance, it's a little bit scandalous right now. Okay. Performance, as it pertains to SEO, needs a little bit of clarification, so today we're covering, what did Google say that brought the question of page experience and ranking back into question? What is the status of the page experience update? Performance and SEO? What's the deal with that? To help us, legend, legend, absolute legend, Britney Muller stops by to share her thoughts on the future of tech SEO, and we'll dive into a special little tool to help you go deep into page performance. Of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, take a bow and bask in the glory of a great performance, as Episode Number 46 of the SERP's Up Podcast pulls up the curtain on the significance of performance in SEO.

Crystal Carter:

So, many metaphors.

Mordy Oberstein:

I can't help myself.

Crystal Carter:

You're doing it over time.

Mordy Oberstein:

Literally the highlight of my week is writing that little section.

Crystal Carter:

I would say you need to get out more, but I know that's not your thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, not my thing. I have a Shakespeare one coming up, by the way.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, yeah. By the way, I hate Shakespeare for the record.

Crystal Carter:

To B2B or not to B2B?

Mordy Oberstein:

I obviously use that one because that's like-

Crystal Carter:

Oh, okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

I only know three.

Crystal Carter:

Alas.

Mordy Oberstein:

I use all three.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Look for it wherever you consume your podcast in the future.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed, indeed. Well, moving on to a non-Shakespearean topic. We're talking about page experience, and the reason why we're talking about page experience is because, basically in April, 2023, we had an update from Google on the page experience situation, which said that they were basically adding it into the Helpful Content Update. This got a lot of interest from different SEOs.

So, essentially they said, in their blog post on Google Search Central, they said, "Helpful content generally offers a good page experience. That's why today we've added a section on page experience to our guidance on creating helpful content, and revise our help page about page experience. We think this will help site owners consider page experience more holistically, as part of their content creation process." They basically said, "It's not one thing, it's all part of the whole SEO experience." This was written by Danny Sullivan. They posted that onto the Google Search Central blog. Then later on, they added a note clarifying and they said, "We haven't introduced any major new aspects of page experience to consider versus our previous guidance. If you have been paying attention to these things we've talked about in the past, such as Core Web Vitals, all that remains as before." The reason why they had to make that clarification was because SEOs had a really big response to this, a really big response to this.

Mordy Oberstein:

Understatement.

Crystal Carter:

Understatement, to the point where some people were like, "Google's saying it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter at all. What were we doing spending all of our time worrying about that?" Marie Haynes was like, "No, I think it still matters. I think it's still important. It's just not their system anymore." Google went back to clarify after this, explaining that one of the reasons why they changed it... So, they wrote one of those...

Twitter's allowing people to write really long posts now, and they wrote one of those really, really, really long posts all about this clarifying their guidance, and they said that, "If you want to be successful with the core ranking systems of Google, consider these and other aspects of page experience." So, not just Core Web Vitals, not just being mobile friendly, but consider these as well as other things. They also said that they should have never had page experience on their ranking systems page at all, because they've said that they are ranking signals. So, they're saying that, "We had some things that were listed there that shouldn't have been there, and they shouldn't have been on the ranking systems page. They're signals that contribute to systems."

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not one unified thing.

Crystal Carter:

No. Which is what they clarified when they said, "It's part of the helpful content system. It doesn't mean that it doesn't apply, it just means that it's part of the system." It's not its own-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not a separate system. This is where it gets... You can see why people got really confused.

Crystal Carter:

People were really confused. So, I think that when we're thinking about this, it's really important to remember that, because at the end of the day, they said, "Google's core ranking systems looks for reward content that gives a good page experience," end of. I agree with that, and I always have, because the page experience thing, and with all of Google's ranking systems, they're all a metric of value for users. What the page experience system and the Core Web Vital situation was helping us to do was provide better value for users. Slow websites, websites are loading super slowly, they're annoying. Websites with cumulative layout shift, they're annoying. We didn't have a name for that before we had that. Interstitials that are popping up all the time and you can't close them and you can't find them-

Mordy Oberstein:

You said interstitials. I'm forever calling them that now forever. Forever interstitials.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, gosh. So, these things pop up all the time and they're everywhere, they're not good page experience. I think that these are things that we need to make sure that we're providing that for our users, that we're providing good page experience for our users, because that is genuinely helpful. It doesn't matter really whether or not it's a ranking signal or a ranking system, it's still valuable and it's still important and it's still worth measuring and worth looking at. The thing I think is interesting about this whole thing is that Google seems to be rolling back some of the elements that they're doing around this. So, for instance, they're deprecating the Mobile-Friendly tests at of the end of the year. They're also deprecating the Mobile-Friendly API.

Then they also deprecated the Test My Site tool in 2022. This means that, SEOs will have different tools for accessing this, and SEOs who want to access web performance elements and want to improve web performance elements might have to invest in more dedicated tools, more specific tools. There are a number of web performance tools around this, rather than having them available as openly to everyone. But they've also added loads of these tools into Chrome, so the Chrome Web Dev tools as well. So, there's opportunities to see all these things. But I think that if you're an SEO and you're wondering, do I need to worry about Core Web Vitals? Do I need to worry about having good page experience? Yeah, you do. But do it because it's good for your users, and that's why you should be doing it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, that was always the thing. All the data studies show, and its been Barry Schwartz's big thing when he talks about the ranking impact has been minimal in aggregate. That doesn't mean in specific instances, because Google's talked about this, that if it's a tiebreaker between this page and that page, it could be a very big deal, or in certain instances it could be a very big deal. But as a broad impact across the web, meh on the rankings for basically whatever data study has come out. Which is a separate question, by the way. I think what's gone on here is so confusing at so many different levels. One is, the deprecation of a tool sends a signal. It sends a strong signal and it's very confusing. At the same time, it's very confusing that they said, "Wait. They're not one unified ranking system. That's why we're separating them out," because the way they marketed it, and I'm not being critical here, I'm just talking fact, the way that it was presented very, very strong was like, this is the new page experience update.

It wasn't like, "Oh, we have this signal and that signal, and this is all going to contribute together." It was not presented that way. It was very, very much cohesively, "This is the page experience update." When they took that off the page, off their ranking systems page, it was very confusing because of that. At the same time, I think there's a third thing going on, which is I think Google doesn't want you to define page experience in terms of Core Web Vitals. I think it wants you to look at page experience much more holistically, which is why they added it to the Helpful Content Update Guidance, because they want you... By the way, when they did, they also added things like, making sure that you can easily access the main content on the page as part of experience, meaning they're trying to make you think of experience in a much wider way than just Core Web Vitals.

Crystal Carter:

I think that that's really interesting, because I think during all of the... There was a lot of furore about around getting ready for Core Web Vitals and all of that sort of stuff, and certainly at Wix we invested a lot in things to make sure that we... I mean, we increased the Core Web Vitals performance by tenfold.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think it's more than that. The tenfold number by the way, we came with that number years ago. I think it passed that at this point.

Crystal Carter:

I think that that's a prime example. So, I think, last time I checked it was something like 65% of US websites on Wix were passing Core Web Vitals. That's good. Fundamentally, that's a good thing. But it's a fundamentally good thing, and that is something that Google is giving people tools to measure, and help people measure those things, but they're not all of it. In the same way that if you were trying to get healthy, losing weight for instance could be a relevant metric for whether or not you are healthy, but it is not the only metric, for instance.

So, if you lost a bunch of weight, that might be a sign that your lifestyle is healthier, that might not be a sign that your lifestyle is healthier. I've definitely lost weight in times of stress, where that was not good. That was not good. So, sometimes I think that it's a question of Google making sure that people are approaching page experience in a more nuanced way, and in a way that is more beneficial to the web overall, which is their general goal. All of these signals are tools for measuring value for users. I've seen it before where I've worked on sites, and this was before I think, even the page experience update came in, where at a site we improved page speed and we saw our rankings improve. But part of that can be because there are other signals that improve. Users are staying on the site longer, users are bouncing less often, users are moving through more pages because they're confident that the site is...

Users are able to find the things that they want because they're able to see them more quickly, things like that. So, there's lots of ways that these things benefit you. I think that the skills that you develop in order to manage Core Web Vitals are useful, valuable, and really, really important as a business, because you end up talking to lots of different stakeholders about what is valuable to the website, how the user's experiencing it. You're going to have to test on lots of different devices in order to see these things. You're going to have to make sure it's compatible with different browsers in order to make sure that your page is performing well. All of that stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think it goes back to that interesting point, talking to the user and what they're actually experiencing, because I think the CRO angle of page experience is stronger than the ranking angle, because again, the ranking angle hasn't been a very powerful narrative because a lot of people haven't seen a lot of improvement based upon the corporate files. A lot of people have. Again, I'm not saying that's not a thing, but it's not a widespread thing to get widespread adoption. What is, is CRO. If you tell a site owner that if this thing moves around, this button moves around, the user will not be able to click buy. That gets adoption.

I think it's interesting, just as a meta-analysis, and we discussed this briefly before we were recording the show, that it's funny that page experience and the factors that go into page experience, or particularly Core Web Vitals, haven't been widely adopted across the web. Its been a big thing in SEO or I would say in certain corners of SEO, we haven't seen the web which was Google's real goal I think, we haven't seen the web really transform into being way faster and way more efficient. Which is, by the way, good for the environment also. But leaving that aside, I think that's because it doesn't really align with how people approach building webpages from a conversion point of view.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I think the thing about it is, I talked about losing weight, and it's like if you were trying to lose weight, you might say to yourself, "Okay, I won't have a donut. I won't eat that cake. I won't eat that slab of cheese. I won't have that third tub of ice cream," or whatever. That's hard because, let's say the donut is just sitting there, the donut looks great, or maybe you love eating french fries and they're your favorite thing and it's really easy for you to get those. I think it's the same with when you're building a website. People are like, "Oh, yeah. Throw this extra third party app on there, put this on here. Let's have giant photos, let's put seven videos. Let's put all of these things on there." So, you have to be, in order to do performance, and I've had conversations like this when working on web projects, where I'm like, "Yeah. No, no video." They're like, "But..." I'm like, "Nobody can see it. It doesn't load. It's not working. No. We're going to lead with text." They're like-

Mordy Oberstein:

YouTube is one of the things that's really slow. YouTube embeds really slow a page down. YouTube is not fast. The embed is not fast. But it's like when you go... The food example is the perfect example. But when you're hosting an event, you're hosting a PTA event, your kid's school, whatever it is. A local meetup, the food that you're going to offer is going to be junk food. You might have a carrot in the corner, one carrot for that one person kind of thing. You're going to have donuts and cakes and cookies and snacks. That's really the problem, because our association to, "If I'm going to offer light refreshments, donuts." If I'm going to build a webpage that's going to try to convert and bring my users in, and create a robust experience for them, you're thinking videos, multiple layers, fancy design, animations.

You're thinking all of the, from a page experience point of view, all of the junk food automatically. The way of thinking that goes into page experience and doing that well, and the way of thinking where the average person, the average designer, the average... Whoever it is, the average whatever, building a webpage are two totally different mindsets. I think that's why it doesn't work across the web. I think in order for Google to get widespread adoption, and to make the web faster, there's going to have to be an alignment with how I normally go about thinking about what a good webpage is, just my natural association. Two, what a good webpage is from a page experience point of view, they have to align.

Crystal Carter:

They have to align from the very beginning.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yep.

Crystal Carter:

So, when I've worked on projects where it works really well, it's ingrained already. So, the person who's building the website is building it, and their objective is to make sure that the website is fast, as well as is visually appealing, usable, and all of that sort of stuff. So, it has to be something that is at the forefront, because if you build and then you go back and try to... It's a whole drama. This is one of the reasons why Wix has invested so many elements into the CMS, for instance, that we convert images to WebP where-

Mordy Oberstein:

Auto compress images.

Crystal Carter:

Auto compressing, if you add your fonts to your theme, that's going to preload in the fonts. We crop the pictures. So, you might put a picture in your website and we'll crop it so that when it loads, it only loads what's visible on it. There's things where the dom orders should be... Lots of different elements that are cooked into the CMS, and anyone who's building a website should be thinking in that way, where they're building it so that it's built from the very beginning with the page experience in mind, with making sure that the page is able to load and able to function on the devices, and within the network that you have.

Because for instance, in some places, people are mostly on mobile, mostly. I think the last time I looked at this, the stats for Nigeria was something like 89% of people are online via mobile. I think that it's much lower in the US, but that's a real big factor. I know places where the cost of data is extremely expensive. So, if you have a website that's trying to load a giant video or something, that's not good for your users, that's not good for their page experience, that's not good for your business. So, these are things that you need to think about when you're creating content, and it should be something that's fundamental to the building process.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you had to ask me what will change the game for this, I think it's on the format side, meaning there's a video embed format that is just inherently faster. There is an image format, Google Traffic Web that's inherently fast. So, I'm a person building a webpage, I'm just adding... The video embed, it's automatically optimized that way. I think we're a long way off from that.

Crystal Carter:

This is why the food example is there. So, people are like, "Don't eat french fries, don't eat donuts, don't eat..." It's like, you need a replacement. A classic example is cars. So, people were like, "Oh, gas guzzlers and cars are gas guzzlers and it's terrible." It's like, well, if I don't have public transport where I live, how am I supposed to get where I need to go? Then people started making better electric cars, better electric cars that looks better, and that worked well, and they made hybrid cars and they were more accessible to people. So, now people can have a better alternative for something to use. If you don't have an alternative, then the idea of just going without is a harder sell for people.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. It's just a harder thing altogether because you're really just trying to pick apart and pick at the little crumbs, figure out ways to improve the page, where it's really about the infrastructure itself needs to change, and that's the future of page experience. Now speaking of futures, the whole idea of oh, page experience not a thing anymore. It's not a ranking system anymore. It's not important anymore. Nothing anymore. Bottom to the whole question of, is technical SEO still important? There was a whole lot of commentary on that. So, we thought we'd bring in an absolute SEO legend in Britney Muller, and have her talk about what exactly is the future of tech SEO.

Britney Muller:

Technical SEOs are in one of the very best positions, in my opinion, to understand and really harness AI technology. SEO is not going away, it's simply evolving. The future of technical SEO really looks like a couple of clear areas to me. One is really understanding how large language models work at their core. With your technical background, people will lean on you and trust your opinions on more technical knowledge. So, I think a lot of technical SEOs have a responsibility to better familiarize themselves with this information, so that they can effectively communicate it to the people that they work with and key stakeholders. Also to make sure that this tech is used responsibly and in the right ways, and not used for the tasks that they're inherently not good at, like information retrieval, facts, current events, you name it, that's a long list.

Another part of the future, is having really strong soft skills, human skills, especially effective communication and storytelling abilities. Another one is navigating how to better understand users. We are going to see more nuanced search behavior than ever before, painting an even clearer picture of customer journeys. Technical SEOs are in a wonderful spot to help teams make use of that data. Also, really strongly believe that foundational data science and statistics 101 knowledge, is going to be huge in navigating and understanding and investigating large data sets in the future. This will be a hugely valuable asset to have in a role, and it's been a big part of why I've been investing so much time and resources into my datasci101.com content, which will hopefully be coming out soon, that delivers all the essentials in a really easy to understand way.

Also, the ability to fine tune or leverage few shot learning to accomplish specific SEO tasks. So, the ability to help you and your team automate some of the more boring and repetitive tasks that occur on a regular basis, so that you can all really level up and work on higher strategy thinking, higher strategy planning, better outreach, more strategic content, you name it. You can start to free up resources to do more and more powerful things. I have a couple of quick examples. You could say, here's a content currently performing well on our site, create 10 new article ideas that might also do well. Or improve this content. Or summarize the following articles for an email roundup newsletter. I've heard that those take tons of time.

What topics are covered in these page titles and what are some related topic opportunities to create content for? These opportunities go on and on and on. Again, if you understand how large language models work, what they're inherently good at, you yourself can come up with a brilliant high value application of this technology for an SEO task that hasn't been thought of before. So, keep an open mind, play around with this stuff. Lastly, unpopular opinion, mentions will be the new back links. The way things are going in the generative space, having more and more impact on search results, understanding that the quality and the amount of brand product mentions will be more important in the future.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Britney. Definitely make sure that you give Britney a follow over on Twitter, and that's at Britney Muller on Twitter, that's B-R-I-T-N-E-Y M-U-L-L-E-R over on Twitter, give her a follow. We'll make sure to link their profile in the show notes. I love the point about large language models and really understanding them, being able to leverage them. That actually falls under technical SEO. If you're a technical person, you're going to be the one to be able to get into that.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, exactly. I think that that's certainly something that I've been really interested in, and I think that there's a lot of crossover when you look at how to engage with some of those things. She's absolutely right. I've learned a lot from Britney about understanding large language models actually. I think that understanding of how entities work and understanding how large language models interpret language, interpret the language that they're modeling, is really important.

I think also she was saying using it for some of the tools that it's good at for instance, I think is really, really important. What certainly what I found as a technical SEO, is that some of these tools are able to help you bridge gaps with some of the technical elements, that would normally have taken you longer to do. As a technical SEO sometimes you've got a new tech stack and maybe there's a new language, or maybe there's a new tool, or maybe there's a new way of coding or something, that the team that you're working with is using, and you have to learn how to unpack that or how to make the recommendation for the best way to do it.

One of the things that's useful about some of these tools is that they've got a lot of coding libraries within them, particularly ChatGPT is pretty much built on the back of Stack Overflow, so it's got a lot of coding knowledge, a lot of spreadsheet knowledge for instance. A lot of these things will help you to get to your answer quicker, because it can fill some of the gaps and reduce some of the discovery time and exploratory time that you have to do to get up to speed on certain bits of code. I agree that there are some great opportunities coming forth as a technical SEO in this space. I think that it will be fascinating to see how it unfolds. I think Britney Muller's a great person to follow to see how that all pans out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly. Speaking, by the way, of tools to help you with your technical SEO, we have a great tool recommendation for you. We haven't done this segment in a while actually, so let's go, Tool Time, as we help show you a tool that can help you with your SEO performance. So, Crystal, you actually threw this my way, and I think it's a really, really cool tool. It's over at webpagetest.org, and it's run by somebody that we're really connected with. Take it away, Crystal.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. So, this is a tool called WebPageTest, and Henri Helvetica on Twitter put me onto this, and they run this great tool that allows you to test your webpage for performance. They also have a number of different podcasts and a lot of events that they get involved with as well. But you can test your Core Web Vitals, you can do Lighthouse, you can do visual comparison. They also allow you to bury your location. You can test desktop, you can test mobile, and it's free. So, it's free to use. The way that they normally do it is that they'll run it through a few different scenarios and you'll get your waterfall tests, you can see what number of fonts you've got going on. You can see lots of different parts of your site, in order to make sure that you are getting a good performance. I know that there are a lot of people within the web perf community who are using this very regularly, and it's something that I've seen as being really super useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, big shout out to Henri over there. Give him a follow, we'll link to his Twitter profile in this show notes. It's a lot of follows this week, and we do have another follow coming for you, for our Follow of The Week, but in order to do that, we first have to do the SEO news. So, here's this week's, Snappy SEO News.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Little bit of a slow week for SEO News with July 4th in the US last week, but still have a juicy one for you, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. Google to work on complimentary robot.txt protocols for AI and more. Essentially, Google put in an announcement saying, "Hey, we need to figure out how to give sites control over what AI can or can't access on the site and the current construct for telling bots what they can or can't access, IE the robot.txt file is 30 years old, so we need to have a conversation with you, the web, to figure out a better way." This was a little bit contentious, and the reaction I've seen out there from folks was a little bit mixed. For example, Barry Adams put out, "Yeah, great. Now that they've already scraped all the content and they've trained all of their systems, now they're saying we need to have control, and rather give you control over it."

I think this is a good thing in general for the web to re-figure this out and to have some kind of way of giving instructions to the AI bots or programs out there, to tell them how they can or can't interact with your website. I think one of the points that has irked people over time has been, with Google we know the rules of engagement. If you don't know index the page, Google can crawl and index the content and it's out there. When, let's say open AI came out, we had no idea, for example, they were going through our content, they were running through the web and pulling in all this content to train their AI systems. So, the rules of engagement were unknown, and I think that's bothered some content creators. So, definitely going forward, having some kind of way of systematically and transparently having a way of blocking what the AI can or can't access is obviously a healthy thing for the web, regardless of where it's coming in the timeline.

Okay. Item number two. Something not that practically important, but super interesting from an SEO point of view, from Matt Southern, over at Search Engine Journal. "Twitter's Google rankings plummet following actions by Elon Musk." So, basically what Twitter did was say, "Hey, if you're searching on the web and you're not logged in and you come across," only the Twitter that is, "And you come across, let's say a Twitter URL on Google, and you're not logged into Twitter, you won't be able to access that content." So, normally if I was searching on the web, I'm not logged into Twitter, I come across a Twitter URL on Google, I click on the Twitter link, I am still able to see that Tweet. When Twitter blocked you from doing that unless you were logged in, Google stopped indexing content. Tons of content was no longer being shown on the SERP from Twitter, and they lost a ton of traffic and a ton of ranking URLs, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Long story short, Twitter put a fix in for this so that they showed an overlay, but underneath the overlay was the actual Tweet and Google was able to see the actual content anyway. Once that happened, once that fix went into place, so then the rankings came back and all those URLs were now back in the index, and all of the metrics around Twitter, from the Google SERP, are back to relatively normal. So, super interesting little case study. We'll link to the article in the show notes. You should definitely have a look at it. It's just one of those weird SEO anomalies that happen. It's very rare for something like that to happen. So cool to read about it, cool to see about it. Definitely again, check out that URL, look at it because it is super unique and super interesting, and that is this week's, Snappy News.

So, with Snappy News done now, we can actually get to... I hate putting it that way. Like, oh, we've just done the news, we can get to the Follow of The Week. Not true. But in terms of pivoting and continuity and flow of the show, here's this week's, Follow of The Week. It's the one, the only, Dan Shappir, Dan fricking Shappir, is our Follow of The Week. Dan Shappir used to work over here at Wix. I had many, many, many, many, many, many conversations about performance with Dan Shappir. If you're talking about Wix's improvements around Core Web Vitals, Dan was a major part of that, and he's got his own podcast, that's the JavaScript Jabber, putting that in the show notes as well so make sure you check out his podcast. And you check out his Twitter profile over at Dan Shappir, D-A-N S-H-A-P-P-I-R, where he's their tech lead perf... Tech lead rather, over at Next Insurance.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Dan Shappir's a great dude. He's not only incredibly smart, but he's very personable and funny and nice-

Mordy Oberstein:

Super funny.

Crystal Carter:

He's brilliant. We have on the SEO Hub, we have a webinar recording from back in the day, when he was talking about Core Web Vitals, when it was peak Core Web Vitals back in the day. He gets into a lot of the information there, and it's great to see him speak in the way that he thinks about performance and the way that he thinks about making sure that sites are performing well. He's very methodical, and again, like I said, and also very personable, and with a great sense of humor. So, shout out to Dan. Can't recommend him enough.

Mordy Oberstein:

An absolute great follow. You're absolutely right. If you ask Dan something, you go on Twitter, you follow Dan, you ask him a question, he will give you an answer. He will engage with you. He'll take the time for you. He's a really great guy. So, absolutely give Dan a follow. Cannot recommend him any higher.

Crystal Carter:

And he'll give you an answer in plain English.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. This is the thing.

Crystal Carter:

It can get very technical and stuff, but Dan's really great at explaining it in a way that makes sense, even if you're not in the weeds. So, yeah. Great.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let me also tell you something else in plain English, that now that we've done the Follow of The Week, that means that this is the end of the show.

Crystal Carter:

This is the end. The end is near.

Mordy Oberstein:

The end. Well, that went morbid real quick.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, gosh.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I'll tell you what's not morbid is that we'll be back next week. So, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into niche sites and the web. Look for us wherever you consume your podcasts, or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, over at wix.com/seo/learn. Link to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO.