Oversleeping And Canonical URLs in Wordpress with HTTPS [LNIM124]

This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we explore how Canonical URLs in WordPress interact with HTTPS. I know, that sounds a little dry, but trust me — you’re going to love it. Listener Gil has a question about what happened to his rankings for a particular page, and I think HTTPS shenanigans are to blame.

We also take a moment to celebrate six months of consistent podcasting. I break it down and try to answer the question “what’s different”? After all, I’ve been trying to get this right since 2009.

Best of all, there is an internet marketing fortune cookie about oversleeping that we need to crack open.

Show Notes

Listener Feedback: Gil’s site changed from http to https without him doing anything.

What could have triggered this? – His website host probably enabled https across their whole platform.
How did people find the https pages? – Gil was not linking to the https sites and all the backlinks to those sites are all http. Google prefers https so strongly that when they are crawling sites, they test if both versions of the webpages are available and if they are, they are preferring the https version of the page.
How do you fix this? – What does ‘fixed’ mean? If I were Gil, I would go ahead and understand why https is working and then just make sure that everything is working correctly. After that, do the work to let Google know that https is the preferred version of the website.

Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie: “Tomorrow will be a productive day, don’t oversleep.” What does this mean?

Carry around your own weather – It may be the worst day of the month but tomorrow is going to be another day. The sun is going up tomorrow so decide that it is going to be a productive day and make it happen! If you say you can or you say you can’t – you’re right. Just decide what will happen and you already have a leg up on what’s going to happen.
Don’t oversleep – don’t toss away your opportunity. Be ready to seize those opportunities every day. Every little bit that you can do counts as it adds up over time.

3. I stumbled into a great article that I think is spot on. The article is entitled SEO priorities for the New Year by David Freeman and he breaks this down into two things: Quick Wins and Large Projects. Here are some highlights:

Log into Google Search Console and read what’s there – there are all kinds of things there that will tell you how Google views your site. Find out what you can fix and make them love you more.
Content Gap Analysis – there are amazing tools for this now to show you, from a search perspective, if you need to grow content. You can use this to create an editorial calendar for the entire year. What do you want to see in your website by the end of the year? What do you need to flush out? What is missing?
Switch your site over to HTTPS.
Enable exhilarated mobile pages.Make sure your site is mobile friendly.

Links Mentioned In This Episode

Show some love for the show
Search Engine Land article on SEO Priorities
Previous episode on HTTPS
Previous episode on content creation workflows
AHrefs — my favorite SEO tool
Yoast SEO Plugin

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Transcript

I hope that you are having an absolutely fantastic day. I’m very excited to be back today because today represents six months without missing a weekly episode of the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m very excited about that. I doubled down, I recommitted to the show back in September 2016, it’s now the end of January 2017 and I’m counting on my fingers and I think that’s right at six months. That’s super cool, I’m very excited.

Thank you guys so much for being a part of this show and being part of the journey. Listenership is way up. I was joking with Cliff that it turns out that if you actually publish content people will listen sometimes if it’s halfway decent. I hope I’m at least hitting the halfway decent mark with you guys here on the podcast.

Thank you guys so much. If you’re feeling the love, like I’m feeling the love, go to LateNightIM.com/love and that will give you an opportunity to tweet out the fact that you love the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’d really appreciate that.

I’m so fired up to have been with you consistently for the last six months and I hope that has added some value for you, because you guys add a tremendous amount of value for me. I really appreciate all of the feedback and stuff. Again, LateNightIM.com/love and I would love to hear from you in that way.

(Episode 124 Transcript Continued…)