Technical SEO is hard and it is so easy to get things wrong. In this video, I want to talk through three technical SEO misperceptions I regularly see in the work we do with clients.
Misperception #1: Redirects
The first of these is that redirects prevent traffic loss after URL changes and therefore URL changes are just fine because you can add redirects. Now, let’s talk about what’s really going on here. Redirects are important and redirects can help when you do need to change URLs.
However, redirects should be used only as a last resort. These should not be a default option and you should be careful with URL changes. And that’s because when URLs change, Google has to reprocess the page and update how it maps the content from that old URL to the new URL and all the other signals associated with that old URL to the new URL. And sometimes that happens pretty quickly. Other times, especially when many URLs change at once or are changing alongside something else, like you’re doing a redesign and then also changing URLs at the same time, traffic can drop while Google works through all of these changes. And sometimes traffic doesn’t always come back as Google processes those changes. That’s the Google side of things, but we have other tools to think about these days.
We’re also seeing tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude continue citing older URLs that redirect and that suggests that these systems may update references very slowly. They may not update these references at all. So all of that together, both Google’s view and the view from all these new AI tools, is that we probably should do our best to not change URLs at all because all of these systems are really relying on our URLs being in a certain state and being a bit more fixed and static and not changing all the time. And that means that we only want to change URLs when absolutely necessary. And when we do have to change URLs, absolutely use redirects. But we do not want to use redirects as a default option and assume it’s fine to change URLs frequently.
Misperception #2: JavaScript
Second misperception is that JavaScript is fine for SEO and you shouldn’t worry about using JavaScript at all.
While Google can execute some JavaScript, the JavaScript that they can execute is pretty limited. It is JavaScript that only runs when the page loads. They do not click on things. They don’t interact with things. And they really only can execute JavaScript as part of a second pass. They’re not loading JavaScript on their first pass to a page. And not every page goes back through that second pass.
Problems do start to happen when a lot of the page depends on JavaScript. With the clients we’ve worked with, I’ve seen a lot of sites that rely on JavaScript for 100% of the page get stuck in Crawled, currently not indexed. And that means those pages are not ranking in search results. As well, like I mentioned, Google does not interact with the page, right? They don’t click, they don’t scroll, they don’t fill out forms, they don’t do any of those other things. So if content only loads after some type of interaction, for example, JavaScript loads content into an accordion after you click on that accordion, then Google’s never going to see that content. And here again, that’s Google’s view, but we have other tools now as well.
And AI bots from OpenAI, from Perplexity, they’re not executing JavaScript at all. And as a result, they’re not going to see any of that content, even if it’s loaded on onload of the page in that more limited fashion where Google might be able to see something. And keep in mind here, it took Google years and years and years of hard work to be able to execute any JavaScript at all, even the limited JavaScript they do execute right now during a crawl. So, I wouldn’t expect the AI tools to change how they’re interacting with JavaScript anytime soon. It’s really hard to be able to interact with JavaScript.
So, the bottom line here is that you want to be really careful with how you use JavaScript, how much JavaScript you are using on the page. Anything that’s critical that you need to make sure Google or other AI bots see should be in the server-side code. Things like SEO meta tags, the title tag, the primary page content, schema, key images, all of that should be in the server-side HTML.
Misperception 3: Core Web Vitals
Misperception three: Core Web Vitals are the most important factor. Now, look, speed does matter. It affects users, it affects crawling, it affects performance, and there’s a lot that you need to think about with speed, but it’s not the most important factor. And technical SEO is definitely about way more than website speed. Once a site is reasonably fast, other issues start to matter more.
Fixing automated thin content, improving internal links, resolving duplicate URLs created by the CMS, finding the right canonical tag structure for filter pages, and on and on and on, right? There are all these other things that we have to think about from a technical SEO standpoint. All of those are going to have, in a lot of cases, a bigger impact than improving a pretty decent LCP by another 0.2 seconds. Right? Many high-performing websites rank very well with mediocre core web vitals. Once performance is within a reasonable range, once it’s pretty good, especially pretty good compared to your competitors, other technical SEO issues start to matter a lot more. And those other technical factors is where you’re going to see a bigger difference in how much traffic you’re going to get, how well you rank, how well you show up in AI responses. The main takeaway here behind all of these misperceptions is that technical SEO is nuanced.
It requires understanding how a site is constructed and prioritizing the right types of fixes. Redirects are useful when used carefully, and URL changes can make sense in very narrow and specific contexts. JavaScript can be helpful when implemented thoughtfully, and you’re mindful of what content is and is not part of JavaScript. Speed matters certainly quite a lot for SEO, but also for conversion optimization, for user experience more broadly, but it’s only important relative to all the other things that are happening on a website that you might want to improve.
There are other videos on Elementives’s YouTube channel about all of these different topics. Here are some links to other videos if you’d like to learn more about any of these topics in more detail.
Website Speed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF2P84kgXog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41Zwg7bEeZc
Redirects
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEHJ-ENBEtE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTn6WyfUKhA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj-kDMkzbIU
Rendering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=147YgaGESL8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V28S3zYrUdg
Technical SEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZqBAI9tCYQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkHVYEmBWJc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiIYrMOk1UE
Or if you need help reviewing and improving your website’s technical SEO factors, please let me know. We help clients with technical SEO audits, reviews, optimization projects, general consultation, lots of different things. If you want help with technical SEO, you can email me at matthewelementive.com. If you liked this video and would like to see more from Elementive, please subscribe. Thank you for watching.