Someone I know hired an SEO consulting firm to help them improve their rankings. They've done everything the firm told them to, with the exception of changing their backend layer. The firm says it's their app engine (which happens to be Lucee) that's causing the issue. However, their website goes through CloudFlare and they actually cache all the pages on the edge, so the site is essentially static. I know slow speed can affect SEO, but their content generally all returns in < 350ms. When I look at their PageSpeed results, performance gets a 100%. They do get some warnings about "excessive DOM size" and needing a more effective cache policy for static assets, but those are things that are not related to the app engine. Has anyone seen an issue with the app engine (when speed wasn't the factor) hampered SEO?

been working with seo firms for years and providing seo services for a portion of that

A quick guess might be you have some strange loading issues for JS etc...

Yea thats a lump of crap, they are in SEO, they likely dont have a clue about true backend server tech and its not applicable to the situation. Likely the firm failing and trying to deflect. Are they giving you very specific proof/results/reports?

a firm suggesting the backend is the problem is kinda embarrassing, honestly. Like a real red flag regarding their knowledge/ability.

If you watch the network request in dev tools are you seeing things get double loaded etc ...

I could see php/wordpress being their wheelhouse, so they prefer that it's used, but not as a factor in rankings itself.

or non-minimized assets ...

Thanks everyone for confirming.

You really oughtn't be bleeding anything back to the client that identifies the underlying platform anyhow. But that's an infosec issue, not SEO. They're taking horseshit. As someone else indicated, I'd consider calling them on it. I'd also consider ditching them.

Yea now days everyone thinks they are SEO experts and sell snake oil for sure.

Unless they're saying "your document is a mess, the spider can't read it, and no-one wants to read content written like that". Which, admittedly, is a good observation to make and it's generally correct.

@dswitzer just request specific technical reports from legitimate systems, not just their opinion reports

What I've been told is the SEO consultanting firm is basically saying "Everything looks right, but you're not getting the results we'd expect. So it must be the app engine."

So massive bullshit assumption/deflection.

I'm not the one working on the stuff, but I was asked and just trying to give some feedback.

That's hubris for you. Maybe their expectations are off. Just sayin'.

My recommendation to them was that if they felt they really needed SEO help, to go get a second opinion before converting everything.

Sure. Not shitpiling on you Dan.

image.png

I would dig further into what this means

you're not getting the results we'd expect

It's hard to even know what you're up against with a target as blurry as that

"..excessive DOM size" and needing a more effective cache policy for static assets, " could be a real issue to some degree as if you are pulling down massive JS libs, this is an issue

Some of the stuff the SEO guys have told them to do, was good advice. But I also think they're trying to promise results they can't really guarantee. So instead of going "Well, everything looks right from our perspective and we do not have additional feedback on changes", they're trying to keep the client hanging on

@spills they are providing zero proof; proof is what you need @dswitzer

20 years working with SEOs and I've never heard anyone suggest that. Never seen it mentioned on a blog post or article. It's just so far off from reality.

@spills That's what I told them. I said I would work on those things and see if it helps.

If they're in a competitive space, the folks who outrank them are likely doing the same things they are.

@Patrick I'm not directly involved, just trying to help out so this client doesn't go doing a bunch of unnecessary things.

Age of the domain, age of backlinks, quality of backlinks, actual quality of the content.

Sounds good, I am moving to just a text file. All this fancy stuff is too complicated, I just let ChatGPT handle that stuff ;)

They are in a very competivite industry and the companies that are ranking higher, I suspect are spending a lot of $$$ on placement ads, and I suspect that is affecting the listings.

Well advise them that the engine/server has nothing to do with it; advise them to stop their payment/agreements with that agency; or simple factual reports/truth to their "assumptions"

@mjclemente They are working hard to try to get good backlinks and have for a decade plus.

I guess the question is where that stacks up against their competitors.

I think "quality" backlinks are pretty rare ... I've seen a lot of suggested backlinks I wouldn't want my stuff on ...

Essentially the firm has basically run out of ideas.

Right, I get that. My position is simply that you have to know what's broke before you can fix it!

quality typically means real - like, your site is actually valuable so someone has linked to it. While the web doesn't quite work the way it used to, those things still do exist.

@bdw429s They've already fixed all the stuff that they said was broken, their just not getting the boost in rankings they expected.

Additionally, a quality SEO group would work with them to find out which terms are actually worth ranking for, and which are vanity terms... Because most terms are vanity terms that real people don't search for. An honest assessment might find that organic seo isn't actually driving leads that convert.

I see 3 distinct steps here • page ranks are not high enough • determine cause of why page rankings are not high enough • fix cause What appears to have happened here is bullet #2 has been skipped entirely, which caused bullet #3 to turn into "guess randomly" 🙂

hopefully the first step is to determine 1) what we want to rank for, and to provide a strong reason for why we want to rank for it.

@bdw429s No, they've been working on the Page Rank stuff a ton. My understanding is that is not a problem.

You said "_their just not getting the boost in rankings they expected._" Is that not page rank?

I've worked with tons of people who say: I want to rank for "bla bla bla", and it takes a while to explain to them that "bla bla bla" isn't going to get you anymore leads - the only people who search for it are CEOs and not real users

But really, it doesn't matter. Whatever the core issue still is, that issue needs troubleshooting to determine the cause of it before any fixes are suggested.

Are they’re doing shady shit like cloaked pages and link farms. Have you searched google to see what kind of back links the site is getting. We had a client fall for some snake oil a long time ago and they got almost instant results in the beginning then ended up getting delisted from google within a few months. Same client fell for Domain Registry of America renewal ,so they kind of had it coming I guess.

No, there's no signs of them doing shady things (they've actually recommended to the client that they avoid using link farms and have been working on getting them good quality linkbacks from respected sites).