SEO
How to Comply With ADA & WCAG
As the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) go live this month, a new light is being shined on website accessibility. But in honesty, this is something almost no SEOs think about!
Ensuring your website is accessible to everyone may not be a direct ranking factor. Still, if you’re driving traffic to a website and the users with disabilities can’t access and engage with the entire site, it’s going to impact your SEO efforts negatively.
Over 61 million people have disabilities in the U.S. alone. Therefore, a vast percentage of your target audience will likely benefit from improved website accessibility.
Plus, as more countries worldwide make website accessibility a legal requirement, not meeting government-issued accessibility guidelines could mean a lawsuit that might take down your online business.
As someone whose mother is registered as legally blind, I appreciate the difference website accessibility can make to the quality of someone’s day-to-day life.
In this article, we are going to look at the importance of website accessibility, how it can boost your SEO efforts, as well as what you can do to ensure your site meets the most up-to-date accessibility regulations.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a civil rights law that came into existence in the 1990s. It aims to protect those with disabilities against any form of discrimination and ensure they have equal access to public life, services, and accommodations. These include:
- Employment
- Transportation
- Public accommodations
- Communications
- Government
In accordance with the ADA national network, a public accommodation is the:
- Retail sector.
- Restaurant industry.
- Hotel industry.
- Facilities dedicated to medical care.
- Library.
- Public park system.
- Area for public use outside the home, school, or work.
The law itself does not specifically mention website accessibility. However, in recent years, there have been a number of public lawsuits around website accessibility and confusion from businesses as to whether the law applies to both physical premises and websites.
In fact, the well-established restaurant Domino’s Pizza even petitioned the Supreme Court to confirm if it needed to “satisfy discrete accessibility requirements with respect to individuals with disabilities” after it was sued by a blind man who could not order a pizza on its website.
Since then, the U.S. government has issued specific ADA guidance for website accessibility. According to its website, any business open to the public (B2C) or government body (or those funded by the government) must meet ADA regulations as detailed in Title III of the law.
The ADA states:
A website with inaccessible features can limit the ability of people with disabilities to access a public accommodation’s goods, services, and privileges available through that website—for example, a veterans’ service organization event registration form.
For these reasons, the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.
In today’s world, ensuring a website is accessible to all should simply be good practice. Especially for large corporations with teams of developers and SEOs working together, there is no valid reason not to make website accessibility a priority.
We’re going to look at some of the top reasons to take action and ensure your website is accessible.
Allowing people to live without restrictions
If we think back to the time of COVID-19 when all of us were stuck in our homes for months on end, many of us lived our day-to-day lives online. Whether it be attending Zoom classrooms, ordering groceries, or paying bills.
Being able to easily access the things we need in a time of crisis is something many of us take for granted. However, for someone with a disability, having equal access to public services online can significantly impact their quality of life.
If you cannot leave your home or access websites that allow you to order food, pay a bill, or use a government service like voting, this can prevent you from living a normal life. Not to mention it can also cause a significant amount of stress.
Accessible websites are good for business
One benefit of improved website accessibility is that it is simply good for business. After all, more potential customers using your website can result in more leads and sales.
Web accessibility is a legal requirement in most countries
The Americans with Disabilities Act is just the accessibility law covering the U.S. Outside of the U.S., there are several international laws covering accessibility.
In 40 nations, it is necessary to ensure that your website is accessible—from Israel’s Equal Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act to Taiwan’s Web Accessibility Guidelines. There is even a proposed European Accessibility Act, currently drafted by the European Union.
Ensuring a website complies with local regulations can help you avoid facing legal action.
If a website violates the ADA, a person with a disability may file a lawsuit against the site’s owner, which is happening more frequently than ever before.
A little over 800 complaints involving inaccessible websites were filed in federal court in 2017, according to accessible technology company UsableNet. After the release of WCAG 2.1, that number rose significantly to 2,200 in 2018.
Big-name brands and even famous people are not immune to these legal repercussions.
According to reports, Beyoncé Knowles’ firm, Parkwood Entertainment, was served with a class-action complaint alleging that customers who were blind or visually impaired were denied access to beyonce.com’s services—making it in violation of Title III of the ADA.
When site users with visual impairments attempted to buy concert tickets on Beyonce’s website, they found that images had no alt text, the website did not have keyboard access, and drop-down menus were not accessible.
Several other well-known brands, corporations, and institutes have been subject to high-profile ADA compliance lawsuits, including Nike, Burger King, Fox News, and even Harvard.
The number of accessibility lawsuits is increasing yearly. With the publication of WCAG 2.2 in April 2023, we’ll probably observe a sizable increase yet again.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are regulations that offer guidance to ensure all aspects of website features and web applications are accessible.
Currently, WCAG 2.1 guidelines released in June 2018 are in use and are intended for:
- Web content developers (page authors, site designers, etc.).
- Web authoring tool developers.
- Web accessibility evaluation tool developers.
- Others who want or need a standard for web accessibility, including mobile accessibility.
WCAG 2.2 standards are still in the development stage and won’t be complete until April 2023. However, despite this, WCAG 3.0 has already been drafted, albeit it won’t be made public for a while.
But keeping up with the most recent drafts of the WCAG rules and keeping track of any planned modifications or additions can assist you in ensuring your website continues to adhere to accessibility requirements.
The WCAG is divided into three levels of conformance. Each level is based on how they impact the design or appearance of the pages to meet the needs of different individuals and situations.
Let’s look at the basics of the three levels of compliance and what they include. We’ll look at the aspects that are important for SEOs in detail later.
Level A
This is the lowest and least complicated level of conformance to obtain. Level A does not provide a broad level of accessibility and sets an absolute minimum level of accessibility.
The following are some notable WCAG 2.0 Level A requirements:
Level AA
Regulations or legal settlements usually adopt or negotiate this level as a target conformance level. It sets a level of accessibility for all users, including those using assistive technology.
Level AA requirements of WCAG 2.0 include these:
- A minimum contrast of 4.5:1 (3.1 in the case of large text)
- For images that convey meaning, alt text must be used
- No or low background audio
- Site navigation consistent throughout
- Clearly labeled form fields
- Headings arranged logically
Level AAA
All three success criteria are met at this conformance level, which is the highest level achievable. If some content cannot satisfy all Level AAA Success Criteria, full AAA compliance is not achievable.
Below are a few noteworthy requirements for WCAG 2.0 AAA:
Although Level AA compliance criteria are thought to be reasonable, ensuring your website complies with level AAA will help you maintain accessibility standards going forward and make your website accessible to everyone.
WCAG compliance is the best way that digital marketers can ensure they are complying with local accessibility laws and avoid legal repercussions. Generally, WCAG-compliant websites should have a clear goal, speedy loading times, simple navigation, and user-friendly language.
These are all essential elements of UX design, which aids users of search engines in finding the information they want. You should improve the UX of your website to provide consumers with the greatest experience possible.
Every company, from large corporations to startups, ought to strive to be compliant with the law and have websites that are WCAG-compliant.
The United Nations states: “Access to information and communications technologies, including the Web, is defined as a basic human right in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.”
The negative impact of inaccessible websites means that many disabled people lose the ability to perform actions that many people may take for granted, such as handling their accounts, obtaining work, or accessing the internet in general.
As mentioned, website accessibility is not a direct ranking factor. However, accessibility issues affect user experience. From the Page Experience Update in March 2022, we know this is of the utmost importance to Google.
John Mueller also previously commented that poor web accessibility might negatively impact other signals, which could result in a site being less visible in search:
In general though, when sites are hard to use, people steer away from them anyway, so over time things like recommendations and other signals tend to drop away, resulting in the site being less visible in search too.
Plus, considering many of the elements that cause accessibility issues also happen to be aspects we look at to improve technical SEO health, there is a significant amount of crossover between the two.
Navigation
Effective navigation is beneficial for both accessibility and SEO. People with disabilities can utilize websites more easily when the navigation is simple and straightforward.
Well-organized navigation can also facilitate crawlers’ understanding of a website’s content and structure and, thus, may improve a website’s position on the SERPs.
Links and breadcrumbs are examples of navigational components that can be included, depending on the page’s content.
Consistent navigation is a level AA requirement for the WCAG. That means, using the same elements repeatedly throughout the site.
This can include a “skip to content” button at the beginning of each page (like a “skip to recipe” button on a food blog) and ensuring menus and submenus are in the same positions on each page.
A navigation element with the label “breadcrumb” defines the structure as a breadcrumb trail and designates it as a navigation landmark to make it simple to find.
It helps users to navigate where they are on a website, as well as how far away from the homepage. It looks something like this:
Home > Blog > Technical SEO > How to Do a Technical SEO Audit
Breadcrumbs also help search engines navigate a website and categorize its pages. Google also displays breadcrumbs in search results.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps help both users and search engines navigate your website. Especially for users with disabilities, sitemaps help them find the pages they need to access more easily.
The World Wide Web Consortium states:
The sitemap serves several purposes.
- It provides an overview of the entire site.
- It helps users understand what the site contains and how the content is organized.
- It offers an alternative to complex navigation bars that may be different at different parts of the site.
Titles and headings
Screen readers use title tags to offer users an overview of a page’s content when it first loads. Additionally, they provide page summaries and nudge visitors to click through tabs and search engine results.
Make your information easier to read for users with screen readers by using headers appropriately. Make use of the right header tags (e.g., H2, not just bigger or bolder text).
A logical hierarchy should be observed while using cascading headers, with H1s coming before H2s, H3s after H2s, and so on. Both visitors and search engines can then easily comprehend the content’s structure.
A great tool to help with this is Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar, which allows you to see the page title, content length, and headings (as well as the hierarchy) directly on any page.
Internal links
Anchor text is clickable text used to build links to other webpages. Users must understand what to anticipate when they click a link. For accessibility, a precise description is essential.
Search engines may evaluate the content of a linked website with the help of the anchor text. Anchor text aids in your understanding of the website’s structure, page layout, and keywords.
Alt text
Alt text allows screen readers to comprehend what a picture implies. Additionally, alt text helps search engines understand the content of photos, improving a page’s SEO and enabling images to appear in image results pages, which can increase traffic to your website.
To make your website accessible, you need to be able to run an accessibility audit.
Many of the key elements for SEOs that we have discussed can be assessed using Ahrefs’ Site Audit. The tool will show issues for:
- Sitemaps
- Robots.txt
- Internal linking
- Headings
- Titles
- Alt text
Of course, if you want to perform a detailed accessibility audit so you can forward accessibility-specific issues to a developer, there are several tools that identify which SEO elements can be improved to make your site more accessible.
Audit your accessibility with the Accessibility Checker
Start by heading over to the Accessibility Checker. Enter the website you want to audit and select the country you want to comply with.
Once you’ve done that, it will take about 30 seconds to run the audit and bring up your results.
Below this, it will give you a breakdown of any critical issues and how to fix them. You can also download the report to work on later or forward to a developer.
Check accessibility with Google Lighthouse
Along with security and SEO, Google Lighthouse examines a site’s accessibility and Core Web Vitals.
Page titles and the color contrast between the background and the foreground are two accessibility criteria. The title tags, link names, and scalability of the viewport are also included.
Some Lighthouse Accessibility standards that aren’t accessible for automatic assessment can also be checked manually. Lighthouse may be used in various ways, including as a free Google Chrome plugin so that both technical and non-technical people can utilize it.
You can easily access a Google Lighthouse – accessibility audit directly in Google Chrome by either right-clicking the page and selecting “Inspect” or pressing F12 on your keyboard.
Then, in the developer tools window, navigate to the “Lighthouse” tab.
Adjust your Lighthouse settings and choose to audit only “Accessibility” and then “Analyze page load.”
Lighthouse will then analyze the page and give you a score out of 100, as well as a list of issues.
Use WAVE’s accessibility evaluation tool
Wave’s accessibility evaluation tool gives you a detailed breakdown of the accessibility issues your website faces and is great to use in addition to the Accessibility Checker and Lighthouse.
Start by heading over to the WAVE website and entering the website address of the site you want to audit.
When the audit is complete, the audit overview will open in a docked window.
You can expand the different issues to give a detailed breakdown. The nice thing about Wave is if you click on an issue in the report, it will highlight it directly on the page. For example, highlighting exactly which images are missing alt text or links without descriptive text.
Plugins and widgets that test and improve accessibility
It may take considerable time and effort to make your website accessible. But you’re in luck if you use WordPress as your content management system.
At the very least, WordPress accessibility plugins can point you in the right direction when it comes to making your site accessible. Some can even help you make changes without the assistance of a developer.
I’ve listed three of my top choices below (you only need one).
WP Accessibility
Many common accessibility problems in WordPress themes can be resolved using the WP Accessibility plugin. The accessibility-enhancing features of the free plugin may be enabled or disabled by administrators without writing any code.
Color Contrast Tester allows you to compare the contrast between two colors. Using the plugin, you can also distinguish between photos without alt text.
One Click Accessibility
WordPress site administrators can set up and maintain accessibility settings with One Click Accessibility. The plugin brings up an accessibility menu at the side of the screen that website users can utilize for different accessibility functions.
ARIA (Accessible, Rich, Internet Applications) landmarks, outline emphasis, target characteristics for links, and skip links are a few of its helpful features. It also enables you to create sitemaps, underline links, use negative contrast, and scale fonts.
WP Accessibility Helper
By addressing issues with font size, contrast, and alt text, the WP Accessibility Helper can help to make your website more accessible. You can simply use the toggle buttons to turn on the options you want.
You can customize your front-end accessibility sidebar by using WP Accessibility Helper’s pro edition. It’s simple to adjust the font size, color, and other features.
ADA Okay!
ADA Okay is a premium tool that uses an onsite widget that site users can control to make your website accessible.
I’ve personally added ADA Okay to dozens of small business sites, and it has always worked perfectly simply by copying and pasting a short piece of code into the website’s footer.
By presenting an accessibility menu in a tiny pop-up (similar to a chat widget), ADA Okay works to increase accessibility and guarantee that your website complies with ADA standards.
A website user can alter the text’s size and color, expand the cursor, and highlight links using the menu. You can also disable functions like autoplay and other animations that may trigger seizures.
Final thoughts
Website accessibility is not only a legal requirement, but it is also an extremely important aspect in ensuring people with disabilities can live a normal day-to-day life.
As SEOs, we can contribute to improved accessibility by ensuring the technical and on-page aspects that promote accessibility are properly implemented and maintained.
By doing so, you can improve the ROI for your clients by ensuring their website is accessible to every potential customer and prevent them from being subjected to an accessibility lawsuit.
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
SEO
All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024
Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.
What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?”
Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.
Let’s go!
OUR HUGE SCREEN
The largest presentation screen I’ve ever seen! #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/oboiMFW1TN
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is the biggest presentation screen I ever seen in my life. It’s like iMax for SEO presentations. #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/sAfZ1rtePx
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF
It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.
The Ahrefs conference venue feels like being in inception. #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/18Yjai1Cej
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
I’m in Singapore for @ahrefs Evolve this week. Keen to connect with people doing interesting work on the future of search / AI #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/s00UkIbxpf
— Alex Denning (@AlexDenning) October 23, 2024
OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
“would I even do this if Google didn’t exist?” – what a great question to assess if you actually have the right focus when creating content amazing presentation from @amandaecking at #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/a6OKbKxwiS
— Aleyda Solis ️ (@aleyda) October 24, 2024
Attending @CyrusShepard ‘s talk on WTF is Helpful Content in Google’s algorithm at #AhrefsEvolve
“Focus on people first content”
Super relevant for content creators who want to stay ahead of the ever evolving Google search curve! #SEOTalk #SEO pic.twitter.com/KRTL13SB0g
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
— Parth Suba (@parthsuba77) October 24, 2024
@thinking_slows thoughts on AI content – “it’s very good if you want to be average”.
We can do a lot better and Ryan explains how. Love it @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/qFqWs6QBH5
— Andy Chadwick (@digitalquokka) October 24, 2024
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
GREAT MUSIC
First time I’ve ever Shazam’d a track during SEO conference ambience…. and the track wasn’t even Shazamable! #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs pic.twitter.com/ZDzJOZMILt
— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 24, 2024
AMAZING GOODIES
Ahrefs Evolveきました!@ahrefs @AhrefsJP #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/33EiejQPdX
— さくらぎ (@sakuragi_ksy) October 24, 2024
Aside from the very interesting topics, what makes this conference even cooler are the ton of awesome freebies
Kudos for making all of these happen for #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs team pic.twitter.com/DGzk5FSTN8
— Krista Melgarejo (@kimelgarejo) October 24, 2024
Content Goblin and SEO alligator party stickers are definitely going on my laptop. @ahrefs #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/QBsBuY5Yix
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is one of the best swag bags I’ve received at any conference!
Either @ahrefs actually cares or the other conference swag bags aren’t up to par w Ahrefs!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/Yc9e6wZPHn— Moses Sanchez (@SanchezMoses) October 25, 2024
SELFIE BATTLE
Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!
Got the rare selfie with both @timsoulo and @samsgoh #AhrefsEvolve
— Bernard Huang (@bernardjhuang) October 24, 2024
THAT BELL
Everybody’s just waiting for this one.
@timsoulo @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/6ypWaTGDDP
— Jinbo Liang (@JinboLiang) October 24, 2024
STICKER WALL
Viva la vida, viva Seo!
Awante Argentina loco!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/sfhbI2kWSH
— Gaston Riera. (@GastonRiera) October 24, 2024
AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!
#AhrefsEvolve let’s goooooooooooo!!! pic.twitter.com/THtdvdtUyB
— Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) October 24, 2024
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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!