Vanessa Fox

I dug into all the ways that AI bots crawl sites & can be blocked. And I built a tool so you can test your own site! You can find links to two guides (one on crawlers, one on hosts and CDNs), a spreadsheet reference of everything, and the checker here: www.vanessafox.com/tools/

Sigh.

I asked Claude about some particular functionality in Google Search Console and this was the response - haha!

Fair catch!

I asked Claude if there was anything redundant or obsolete to clean up in the claude.md file and now I feel sorta bad.

Past me would never have predicted this as the future of coding, although in retrospect, it sort of does make sense.

Question @johnmu - My understanding of GSC search appearance > product snippets is that organic shopping is not included (those are in merchant listings?) - that it's traditional listings with rich results. True/false? Also, thoughts on individual product/offer schema marking on PLPs/collections?

heya @johnmu.com - support.google.com/webmasters/a... says that to make URLs removals permanent, one option is to return a 404/410. Does 403 work the same just not explicitly listed? Also, is it not recommended (in that doc) to use robots.txt because of potential partial indexing?

Do I know any devs or anyone working on SEO analytics software who might be interested in collabing? (Sorry for the vagueness - I don't have a specific idea in mind - just that the software I have might work well as part of a larger metric set.)

@yoast.com - with the yoast wordpress plugin, is there a way to create or upload a custom xml sitemap (example, a list of URLs that redirect that you want to track with GSC indexing reports)? Thx!

Possibly my favorite ChatGPT interaction yet

@lilyray.nyc - hello! I'm trying to get a good gauge of LLM reporting options & I'm having trouble understanding how prompts are being generated (to in turn use for tracking). Have you see anyone doing this well or in the process?

@johnmu.com - a throwback question about interstitials (specifically a 10% off newsletter signup type popup). developers.google.com/search/docs/.... Are popups on a delay/user interaction considered best practice? Or only small popups? Thank you!

ChatGPT is forever hopeful...

Without AI, I would never have been able to find this luxurious, minimalist, warm wood headboard and footboard from Serfinity Medical for my bedroom.

The reports of Google's death have been greatly exaggerated, as searches for "google" are trending on Google. In this think piece, I will posit that the artifice of LLMs are breeding nostalgia for the simpler times of 10 blue links... ;)

"No affiliate stuff!" It's fortunate, ChatGPT, that your revenue model is not affiliate links since mostly they are broken anyway.

@johnmu.com - developers.google.com/search/blog/... says "In cases of multiple declarations of rel=canonical, Google will likely ignore all the rel=canonical". I have a page with 2 (I know!) and GSC live URL test shows user-declared canonical: None. Is that related? (I didn't initially think so.)

@taylorlorenz.bsky.social - have you been tracking the odd changes with TikTok's content moderation behavior? I dug in just a little in this post but I haven't seen anyone talking about it outside of TikTok. (Other than this sort of related article: www.newsweek.com/tiktok-block...

I dug a little bit into why TikTok is changing the search for "the smallest man who ever lived" to "the smallest woman". Maybe TikTok's downtime was to implement new code that's a little wonky: www.vanessafox.com/did-the-us-t...

I wrote about the end of TikTok: www.whilewemay.com/posts/what-w...

If you want to download all of the recipe videos you've saved on TikTok, this tutorial works great: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_efG...