Hi there! 👋

In this week's issue, I am sharing a note on why limiting sitemaps to 10,000 entries is a good idea for bigger websites.

Also, Google announced an important change in the PageSpeed Insights where the tool will now use HTTP/2 protocol for connecting to a web page.

HTTP/2 is an advanced network that allows faster transmission of data, resulting in better PageSpeed Insights scores. 📈

Last week, Semrush filed for an initial public offering (IPO) to raise up to $100 million.

It's interesting to see how they've increased their user base from just 1,000 customers in 2010 to 404,000+ active free users and 67,000+ paying users in 2020. Find out more on Semrush IPO below...

Hope you enjoy this letter. 💥

Today I am sharing a tip on why it can be better not to include more than 10,000 URLs in one sitemap.

Currently, Google accepts a sitemap file of up to 50 MB (uncompressed) and 50,000 URLs. For more URLs, multiple sitemaps are required (which can be linked to a sitemap index file).

For smaller sites (with less than 10,000 URLs), you don't have to worry about this. But for larger websites with thousands and millions of pages, it can be difficult to make sure every page is crawled and indexed by Google.

So while larger websites can put up to 50,000 URLs per sitemap, it's recommended to put only 10,000 URLs per sitemap — which can lead to effective crawling and indexing.

According to data observed by many SEOs, smaller sitemaps are easier for Google to process and crawl. They are also lighter and so faster to download.

Also, some sites take this too far by having 1,000 URLs per sitemap — which can also complicate things.

So 10,000 URLs per sitemap for larger websites is a good combination of URLs and file size.

You can read these excellent articles by Barry Adams and Oliver (ohgm) to learn more on this.

• In a recent video hangout, Google's John Mueller said that if you're having site wide rich results issues, then most likely Google does not trust the site enough (on the site level) for Google quality algorithms to display the site snippets in rich results.
• The other reasons can be technical issues; either the structured data is invalid, or the page's content does not reflect what the structured data shows.

• Semrush is planning on going through an IPO (Initial Public Offering) on the New York Stock Exchange.
• The Form S-1 statement shows that in 2020, Semrush had almost $125 million in revenues, up from $92 million in 2019.
• Semrush marketing spends are huge, from $41.7 million in 2019 to $54.5 million in 2020.
• One of the risk factors highlighted by Semrush is the dependence on publicly available and paid third-party data sources — the loss of which can easily make the business suffer.

• A content audit is a structured process for evaluating the totality of your content marketing. It’s an answer to the crucial question: Is my content marketing strategy actually working?
• A content audit's basic premise is simple: you collect data — like traffic, keyword rankings, conversions, and links — from all of your articles in a big spreadsheet.
• Now for the content audit: the first step is to identify the main area of focus (like plateauing organic traffic), then select your data points (traffic, conversions, rankings, etc.), choose your tools (analytics, search console, Ahrefs/Semrush, etc.), and finally, use the data to make a strategic interpretation.
• After a content audit, some of the most common recommendations are: content refresh, content pruning, site structure optimization (content hubs), and identifying high-leverage keyword opportunities.

• Within Google, quality algorithms are seen as 'filters' that aim at resurfacing good content and look for quality signals all over Google's index.
• These signals are often sourced at the page level for all websites.
• In order to understand and maximize the potential for a website to stand out, you should look at a website from two different perspectives — first, 'Service' perspective (like all the technical aspects of a site, from code to infrastructure), and second, a 'Product' perspective (about the experience users have on your site).
• Google often states that algorithms are made to chase users. So, if you chase users instead of algorithms, you'll be on par with where Google is heading.

• Broken links negatively affect the SEO of a site. While Google can cope with broken links, ultimately, they provide a bad user experience, which can lead to loss of organic rankings.
• Some things which can cause broken links are typos in URLs, deleted pages, renaming pages, site restructuring, and change of domain names.
• To find broken links, you can use tools like Sitebulb, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Semrush.
• To fix them, you can delete the broken link, set up a redirect, or make the page live again by fixing the issue.

If you like this, please consider forwarding this to a friend, or share on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Until next week! :)

Saksham

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