Green IO #46 - Green SEO with Natalie Arney and Stuart Davies
Oct 1, 2024
58:12
🔎 Green SEO? Not the most widespread concept in the sustainability field. Still, seasoned web designers and developers know it well: folks in charge of SEO often have the final say when it comes to content, design and even sometimes technical choices. And on top of this influence, SEO practices also carry their own environmental footprint being very data hungry.
🎙️ In this episode, Gaël DUEZ invites two seasoned SEO practitioners and pillars of BrightonSEO - one of the world’s top conferences on the topic - Stuart Davies, founder of the Ethical Agency Creative Bloom, and Natalie Arney, an SEO Consultant with a knack for sustainability to explore Green SEO.
Some Takeaways:
↔️ the transversality of SEO functions,
💻 the alignment of the core web vitals with sustainability goals,
🌐 The importance of choosing sustainable hosting providers,
♻️ Practical sustainable SEO practices,
and much more.
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Learn more about our guest and connect:
- Nathalie Arney’s LinkedIn
- Stuart Davies' LinkedIn
- Green IO website
- Gaël's website
📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.
Natalie and Stuart's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:
- Search Engine Land’s interesting study among SEO folks
- GreenSEO
- Jean-Christophe Chouinard’s blog
- Core web vitals
- Green Web Foundation
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider Update – Version 20.0
- GreenSEO Meet-Up Green SEO
Transcript
Gael Duez 00:00
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I’m Gael Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.
And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform, and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.
Green SEO, I had never heard the word before last year when I started discussing the topic with Jean-Christophe Chouinard who happened to be one of the thought leaders on this concept. He reminded me something that I actually experienced many many times in my past years as a CTO: folks in charge of S E O often have the final say when it comes to content, design and even sometimes technical choices.
And on top of this influence, SEO practices also carry their own environmental footprint being very data hungry.
Hence to investigate more this angle, I invited 2 pillars of BrightonSEO, one of the top conferences worldwide on the topic, who are also actively launching a fringe event called the GreenSEO Meet-Up on October 2nd Stuart Davies and Natalie Arney. Both are seasoned practitioners in the SEO industry with a more technical angle for Stuart, who Stu founded the Ethical Agency Creative Bloom in 2014 and is also a passionate surfer. And with a focus more on content for Natalie who has been freelancing for 5 years and is also a singer in the Brighton-based community choir. And I must admit this hit a soft spot for me having spent a wonderful year in Brighton when studying at the University of Sussex in … well shall I say this … in 1998. That's quite a long time ago. Hello, Natalie. Hello Stuart. It's great to have you on the show today.
Stuart Davies 02:26
Good morning.
Natalie Arney 02:27
Thanks for having us. Morning.
Gael Duez 02:30
So, as I said, I think I've never realized the pivotal role that SEO could have in enhancing green IT practices. I just wanted maybe to kickstart our discussion with a very simple question, why should we care about Green SEO at all? And maybe, Stuart, if you could share some ideas on it.
Stuart Davies 02:54
Okay, thanks. Thanks, Gael. It's great to be here. So, Green SEO, it's two funny words to put together. In 2012, I commissioned some of my team to do some research on to the impact of websites and digital content on the Internet, and I had an itch back then, the vocabulary sustainable net digital sustainability started to permeate a little bit towards me, but it hadn't quite resonated. Obviously, I run an ethical agency. I've always worked with the green and the good and the good local businesses. So it felt that by helping them with their mission, we were helping to do something positive, but we didn't really have a good handle on the impact that we were making. And I think that research to me was a real eye opener. It was a game changer, it was a significant impact. I think there was one stats which really blew my mind. I think at the time there was a study done by a gentleman and he calculated the carbon impact of the Internet to work out that currently he thinks it's a 7th. If it was a country, the Internet was a country, it would be the 7th largest emitter of carbon emissions on the planet and it's on track to be the second of the United States. So it's quite significant what we're doing. So it felt important that SEOs, because we often, I think, as you said, SEOs sit across the divide of digital often. So we sit against digital strategy, we sit against content, we sit against technical, there are many other facets and rings that we actually kind of sit against and we can help influence a much, many factors as well as SEO itself. So it felt like there was a space for a conversation and a space for learnings to be given and a space for open resource tool sets, and here's how to do your jobs. And that's the place that Green SEO is doing. So we're at the beginning of the discovery curve in terms of SEOs and digital sustainability. But that was the point of Green SEO. It started with three of us, initially in Brighton, and those three have grown to 30, of which Natalie Arney is one of our brilliant speakers in our April BrightonSEO meetup. And we're planning to make that 100 next time. That's our plan.
Gael Duez 05:24
That's a good, healthy, sustainable growth, the one we want. And what about you, Natalie? What brought you to this concept of Green SEO?
Natalie Arney 05:35
I think I've always been into making the world at a better place in lots of different ways. And obviously, as I've kind of changed my lifestyle to better suit the way that I do things in every part of my life, obviously, work is one of those things that I haven't always been able to control. But now, as a freelancer, I'm able to do that a lot more, from client choices to things like helping them improve the impact of their websites and their marketing activity on the rest of the web, so that we're able to be good examples for other people.
Gael Duez 06:23
Your clients, Natalie, are they aware of these topics? How do you bring the topic of, hey, I'm an SEO expert and I'd also like to discuss the sustainability angle. How do you kickstart the conversation with them?
Natalie Arney 06:39
So some of them have already got it on their KPI's and things. So a lot of the brands that I do work with will have targets. So, for example, at the moment, one of my clients actually is being audited to see by a graduate. They're being audited to check every element of their business because what they don't want to do is obviously promote and preach themselves as being a sustainable business and driving all of their activity without doing it in the best way that they can. Some of them, it's part of their brand, as in, we are an e-commerce site that sells things like sells products… It's an interesting one. For example, one of my clients is an e-commerce site, and they dissuade people from buying things.
Gael Duez 07:40
Wow.
Natalie Arney 07:43
So, yeah, so obviously it's being able to be a kind of, if you need something, if you really need something, buy it from them and buy the best option. But if you don't, just don't buy it. And it's funny, you know, having worked for agencies in the past where everything's like, “We've got to sell as much as possible and we've got to hit all of these targets.” And it's actually like, well, and I've had a couple of clients that have got this Simmons, like, the same attitude now. It's like, well, actually, we only really want people who really need the product. And rather than driving this kind of high consumption, we all know of Shein and Temu and those kinds of sites, but it's not just them heavy consumers that's obviously then driving waste, driving, overconsumption, driving unsustainable working practices, child labor, so many different things that the impact is beyond the world or beyond the environment is the world rather than just the environment. And, yeah, being able to kind of work with businesses like that is great, but we don't always have the choice to do so. So it's working with people like that when I can, and then when I'm not, it's looking to see, “Okay, what can I do with my brands to help them become better in terms of, you know, accessibility, security, site speed, anything.” And then a lot of the SEO best practices do then feed into, you know, best practices on the sustainability side. But, yeah, it's kind of slowly and surely with some brands and then with others, it's from day one, as soon as you have your kind of call with them, you know exactly what you're going to be doing with them. So it is quite varied. And not everyone has the benefit of being able to say yes or no, whether they're, you know, agency leaders like Stu or freelancers like myself, we both have a lot more control over who we can work with. Whereas if you're an exec and you're just starting out in your career or you're a couple of years in, you don't always have that ability to do that. So obviously taking, getting involved in maybe company projects and things like that, or seeing what you can do internally and attending meetups like GreenSEO can really help as well because you're skilling the team up on understanding and being able to communicate it. Because if you're working with B-Corps, if you're working with businesses that's got all these big goals, you're going to have to be able to work with them anyway and understand and feed it in and it can help get things signed off as well. It's always nice to get an extra thing, an extra ticket signed off just because it's got a green impact, as well as improving keyword rankings, for example.
Gael Duez 10:41
If we go a little more concrete now, I'd like both of you to explain what are, according to you, the techniques, the SEO techniques that help reduce the environmental footprint of a website, digital services, etcetera. And maybe a bit later we will talk about what is specifically related to SEO. But I mean, we've heard about the size of a website, image management, etcetera, but I'd like you to cover the different angles, not necessarily all of them, but with this extra question, is this aligned or not aligned with what Google expects from us… because eventually they are the big moneymaker here with their ranking.
Stuart Davies 11:34
As Natalie has touched on, I think that some of the core principles or the big ticket items that you could do for sustainability to make your site cleaner do align with the principles of, say, core web vitals and site speed and performance and up to date relevant content rather than content for content's sake. And these kind of big factors which can impact the website. How much of it is Google? I mean, it's quite interesting. During the last GreenSEO, we did post a post, a tweet, no, an x, as it is now, to all of the search engines asking would they consider applying sustainable digital factors in their ranking algorithms? We're yet to have a response, but we will be reminding them of that question again in October.
So if, you know, one of probably the biggest things you could do is find an accredited renewable energy data host. Okay, so somewhere where your, your website is going to be, it's because that's the problem. It's energy use. And if you can, at least the minimum requirement I think, is if you can find, and you can find accredited green energy hosts on the greenfoundation.org website, there's some really good resources on there. You can find yourself a green energy host and you're moving, you know, from potentially a fossil fuel held data center to a potentially green energy accredited data center. I think that's one of the biggest things like the number one impact. Number one things that a lot of organizations can do. Whether or not that doesn't impact, that's not going to impact the front end of the website, the design or kind of the strategy. And this is just where the website is held. Obviously you need to be able to have the same requirements you need for your hosting and the developers will need to get around that. But that feels for me like a good win. If one thing that people would maybe take away from this, that they're not sure where to hit first, that's one of the big ticket items for me.
Gael Duez 13:45
First things first, make sure you are sustainably hosted. Now once we've got this basic layout, you mentioned that most of the best practices are aligned with the core web vitals. And by core web vitals I guess you refer to the set of best practices that has been pushed by Google as the best way to get good ranking because the information will be easily accessible and as transparent as possible.
Stuart Davies 14:16
It's also how the website loads, how the website renders, how it responds to people who are coming back, how the images are served, how the layout of the pages moves around with the user or doesn't, how certain features react on desktop and mobile. So all of this is starting to go into the world of design and user experience. The core web vitals does hit into that as well. How fast your website loads, obviously, and what's behind it and how that content actually loads to the users as well. So that's some of the core principles of core web vitals and SEO 101.
Gael Duez 14:56
And SEO experts will be fully aligned with sustainably or green IT experts on most of these vitals. Could you maybe name the top three top five that are the no-brainer that as an SEO expert, as someone taking care of the SEO ranking of the website because you don't necessarily hire experts all the time in every company. What will be the top three top five things to keep in mind to make sure that you've got both a good ranking and the lowest possible environmental footprint.
Stuart Davies 15:35
So with core web vitals again, I didn't come up with this word. We use a lot of jargon in our industry and I'm not a techie jargon. Some of the people who work for me and work with me, I call this “make the website quick”. So there, as I know there are three major, three major areas. One is called LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, and that's how quickly the most important content on the page loads. Okay, so you know the banner of the image, however, so you know developers can do things to make that quick. That should occur within 2.5 seconds. That's Google's recommendation for SEO ranking factors. And then that also creates a quickly loaded, presentable website. You then have something called First Input Delay, and that measures how long it takes for a site to respond to a user's first click. Again, these should be very quick metrics and these are some of the things that designers and developers can, can focus on. And then you've got something called CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift. So that measures the page's visual stability as well. So it's about reserving space for images, videos, iframes and optimizing fonts. LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, is all about how to look, how, how you prioritize loading resources, making files smaller, the host resources on the same server and feed. First Input Delay is about reducing the amount of JavaScript and where you can use web workers.
Gael Duez 17:21
And Natalie maybe more on the content side and the philosophy of searching data, are there any things that you'd like to add on these three biggest topics that Stu just covered?
Natalie Arney 17:37
So on the content side, I think a lot of it's to do with graphics when we talk about core web vitals, but also JavaScript. So a lot of people will use JavaScript to load menus and add little fun things to navigate content. And alongside that, some people might even just use JavaScript across their whole site. Now that can be really great in some ways. However, the web is still built on HTML and CSS and that's what search engines usually crawl. They have got better at crawling and rendering JavaScript. However, it's not always as efficient as it should be. So usually they go to the HTML first. So making sure that there's fallbacks is really, really important, not just from, from a search engine point of view and a search perspective and having an impact on the core web vitals, but again, like adding in additional layers to that is good for accessibility as well. So it allows people to navigate content, whether they're, no matter what device they're using, wherever they are, they're able to access that content. So rather than having JavaScript disabled on certain browsers, or just not wanting to have things load as fast, and some people will use stripped out browsers, for example, being able to actually access that content is so, so important. And yet not using as much JavaScript or at least having a fallback is super important because yeah, as Stu's mentioned before, not only is that load time having an impact on things like core web vitals, but it frustrates the user as well and then it increases bounce rate and decreases the value of the content and then there's, there's lots of other impact from there onwards.
Gael Duez 19:33
And so if I kind of gather your point of view, there is one aspect which is basically the size, size, size, size, which is very much aligned with the sustainability angle because the bigger, the more resources, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a complex story. It's not linear, obviously. Absolutely not linear. But eventually, when we multiply by dozens more times the size of websites since a decade, as brilliantly proven in the Web Almanac Sustainably Chapter, I really encourage anyone to read this chapter because it's kind of mind blowing to see the average size of a web page just exponentially growing over just a decade. So it's really about reducing the size. But Natalie, what you'll see advocating, it's also a technical choice, like not using that much JavaScript. It's not just the question of size, but also some choices that could make this website more difficult to load or reduce user experience. And before I ask the elephant in the room question, I've got a final one which is regarding when everything is well aligned. Did you already see some website size decreasing? Like did you manage to reduce the size of web pages and websites? Or is it still very, very hard to reverse the trend that we are seeing in our industry at the moment?
Natalie Arney 21:07
Oh, from my point of view. So it's an interesting one because obviously from the content side of things, my talk when I spoke at BrightonSEO in April was all to do with how content audits can really play a massive part, not just on the SEO side, but environmentally as well because obviously there are so many sites and so many brands that are continuing to believe that the more content you have on your site, the better you're going to rank. And we see on a daily basis in the SEO world, people saying how they're going to scale the content on their website. And oh, we've seen these great exponential growth in all of these places and we've driven traffic so, so high now. Like, you know, we've ten x'ed it, we've hundred x'ed it, we've done all of this. And then it's like, well, is that, has that content got any use to the user? What is the environmental impact of that content? How much time and effort has that content made? If you've not got a team creating that content, how are you creating it? Are you using an LLM? And obviously then there's the impact of the use of LLMs from the environmental footprint side of things, but also from the ethical standpoint as well. And then we've also got the fact that you can have loads and loads of pieces of content that are just not getting any traffic or not getting any decent traffic. So although you might be driving a lot of traffic to your website, the pages might have high bounce rates, they might have, you know, really irrelevant keyword rankings, but obviously being able to use and target more detailed keywords, driving prospective customers rather than general browsers, that really is key for a lot of SEOs now. I guess it's a growing trend that people are like, well, we can make charts go up, we know how to do that, but it's going from driving traffic to driving valuable traffic from the commercial side, but also from the environmental side. And there was, I remember reading a case study a while back of a food waste company, and they basically created a new website. And by creating their new website design and kind of narrowing down the user journey and stripping back their content and ignoring those vanity metrics of increasing traffic, they were then able to save over 500 kilos of carbon emissions a year. So I think it was over two and a half thousand miles of air travel a year. Just by just giving their website a little bit of a sort out, running a content audit, really trimming down their design and making sure that it was just really fast, really simple, really impactful. And yeah, the content actually helped people rather than just driving lots of irrelevant traffic.
Gael Duez 24:07
I'd like to pause here and to share a personal anecdote. When I started my position as a CTO at Solojet, obviously I kind of self audited briefly the website just to understand what was on it. And I ended up discussing with the teams roughly, we've got between five and twelve main pages. Like the pages, like the homepage, the one describing an ad, et cetera, et cetera. But eventually I asked them the question, but how many pages do we have on the website for real? And the answer was more than 1 million and a half. Because for SEO purpose only that amount of pages was and maybe still is created because you basically have one page for every single address in France. Because it is a website based in France. But the same happened in Germany, Israel, Belgium, UK, wherever I worked with a property portal, the same drill and I was shocked like, wow, we are maintaining more than 1 million and a half page. What is the traffic on it? What is the use? I mean, we could get rid of it. Are you really sure? And the answer was always yes. But think about the long tail. It doesn't cost that much. And whenever someone will hit, you know, mostly what is the price for a property in this specific street, in this specific town, etcetera. We want our websites to be ranked super high if possible, number one. So we need to think about the long tail and we need to maintain then 1 million and a half in a highly automated way. And we were not even using LLM back in those days. So this is my personal feedback from a very wasteful behavior. But still, business wise, it makes sense. What would be both of you, your point of view on this? Do you really believe, or is it really the case that the long tail works that well and requires that amount of resources? Or is it a misconception or is it a way between, I would say.
Stuart Davies 26:16
I mean, with long tail content, I have an agreement with most of my clients, but my clients are the green and the good. These are people who are early adopters. The challenge is bringing some of these principles to the mass market. But we've got an agreement where we've got a one in, one out on the website. So it's okay, we'll put in, we'll put in a piece of content, but we're going to take some of it off. And that's how we manage our long tail content strategies. So yes, there is a place for it, because often you are answering useful information, a question that someone wants to ask about your product or service, that it is useful to have or to provide that on your website, but it can go so crazy. And what we found was it kept the size of the website lean and lo and behold, it also kept their content strategy lean and really did their rankings quite well. So that's how we've approached that particular thorny subject.
Natalie Arney 27:13
So I keep going back to it, but my bright and SEO talk, so basically the name of my talk was “Reduce, reuse, recycle your way to content success.” And basically what that involves is obviously content audits. And I really believe in having really impactful, useful content audits on a regular basis, I would say at least every year. And from that side of things, you always need to keep a grasp on which pieces of content are driving traffic and which are getting good engagements. Like I said, with a case study, having that impactful content that drives conversions, that drives kind of meaningful traffic, rather than just making the graph go up, is so, so important. I think looking at what you can consolidate and what you can improve in terms of content is so important. You might have some really useful content from years ago that just needs a refresh. That could drive a lot more traffic through better keyword rankings. It could be that you have got some outdated information, for example, on an article, and you can just go in and tweak it rather than creating a whole new article. Or it might be that you go back and you've been working on a client for a couple of years and you find some content from about five to ten years ago that could be relevant to you now. And instead of creating a whole brand new article in your content calendar, you could consolidate all of that content together and get rid of additional pages and put everything in one new piece of content. And it's making sure that your content strategy isn't just creating more content and targeting the long tail, it's being able to do it in an effective way. And that's not just from an environmental point of view, but also from an SEO point of view. Years ago, people would create pages upon pages to answer every single query. And obviously, because Google's semantic, it groups content together. Well, in theory, it groups content together by theme and by topic anyway, so you might have pieces of content that might not mention a keyword or a theme, but are related to that keyword or a theme, then ranking for those related terms. And it's like, well, they might be ranking low, but Google and Bing can see that you're trying to kind of target that. It's almost giving you hints when you look at it and go, oh, well, actually, I could work that into that article. And it's looking at that content and saying, well, actually, what have we got now? What do we need? And can we fulfill what we need with what we've already got? And then moving on to creating that new content. So you might have articles, you might have landing pages, and see what you can consolidate, what you can improve before then going on and making brand new content. If it's more kind of on an evergreen side, if it's more trend led, then obviously it's creating that content there and then being able to do that. But where you specifically got really kind of evergreen content, it is so, so important to have your regular content audits, content refreshes and it can work. I had a client last year and it's one piece of content. It was getting less than 300 visits a month and we basically went through, gave some recommendations. It was a couple of paragraphs worth of text that needed to be added and a few headings that needed to be moved around. Within six months, that content was getting over 3000 visits a month. Just for that one piece of content. It was the top piece of content on the site. So it's really, really important to refresh that content because you never know what you might be missing out on and obviously who you're missing out on as well, without then having to create lots and lots of new content, which then has the impact on the hosting, this page, speed and everything else.
Gael Duez 31:06
And if I'm following you there, what I hear is two main messages, which are first of all, chase the right metrics, get rid of vanity metrics. After all, even if you're an e-commerce website, you don't want people to spend 1 hour on your website, you want them to spend 10 seconds and then, you know, live their life after having buy your items, obviously. And the second one is the issue is more about stewardship, about caring about your content, recycling your content than just adding new one.
Stuart Davies 31:40
There's another issue here as well, Gael, and this might segue us nicely into SEO specific green SEO strategies and tactics. This applies certainly for bigger websites, those with thousands, tens of thousands, some have hundreds of thousands, some have millions of pages and it's managing the bots or managing the crawlers. So out there you've got lots of web crawlers, you've got Google, you've got Bing, you've got so many different kinds of SEO tools. You've got ChatGPT coming into websites now and all of the various permutations of AI tools coming in, there's a lot of malicious stuff coming in the spam. There's a huge amount of now that creates resources as well, that creates resource drain and energy use as well every time a crawler comes into your website. And what SEOs can do specifically is they can use the robots txt file. So it's a file where we can instruct website crawlers what to do and what part of the website to look at. So, you know, if we think at scale, we've got a huge, huge, massive website with lots of archive material. I know Will Barnes from Reed Pop. He works for a gaming company. So they have lots and lots and lots and lots of archive website material which they want to keep but not rank. So they will use their robots txt file to say, this is just our archive. We might pull out some of them. But I don't want you to come in and crawl this anymore because you're, you know, I want you to focus on the bit of the site I want you to do. Or you could have lots of FAQs sections on your site which are just for readers. It's not useful for search because you might just have one FAQ page. You can also block the search engine from using that. So on a one page basis it might not feel like much. But when you start adding this stuff at scale, it does become important and it creates less load on the servers. We can also block AI, ChatGPT. It's yet to be quantified. What the impact of that is on website loads, but I imagine it is quite significant. But what we're doing at GreenSEO is we are going to produce a file SEOs and digital marketers can use to put on their robots txt files. That's the file that controls the search engine which blocks all of the bad bots. So it's saying these are definitely ones which will come into your website that you do not want anywhere near it. And then again, sir, that's going to be open source on the greenseo.org website. And that's really going to help with the server load and the resource use on websites as well.
Gael Duez 34:30
Yeah, because obviously it drains resources. It creates data which has to be stored and analyzed sometimes, et cetera, et cetera. But it also drains resources from the owner of the website because they need to enter these bots. Okay, got it.
Stuart Davies 34:45
So it's like we're all littering and someone's coming up to your property and leaving their litter and you didn't ask them to.
Gael Duez 34:53
I think it's a great example and I love the idea of creating some sort of open source community where everyone will share. Okay, bad bots file, like the Dark Web Foundation repository, like you've got the Green Web Foundation, like not dark web, maybe gray Web, whatever. Yeah, that's definitely a great idea. And something that I didn't consider because I was more considering the robot text.
Stuart Davies 35:22
The robots that text.
Gael Duez 35:23
Yeah. As you know, something that you don't want data to be produced when it's not needed. But actually, yes, obviously it can drain a lot of resources from your own hosting solutions.
Stuart Davies 35:37
It's a good place to start, especially for big websites, websites at scale, e-commerce websites, anyone with a huge footprint, again, that can really help.
Gael Duez 35:46
And as an SEO expert, or not expert necessarily, but an SEO practitioner, do I have things to change specifically in the way I work or new tools to embrace to help me with having a more sustainable way of working?
Stuart Davies 36:02
So the GreenSEO website, greenseo.org, is a repository and a toolset and it has the playbooks of here are the things that can help you do your job, here are the tools that you can use to address speed, page weight design, here are the other people who are talking about it, such as sustainable design resources, such as pointing to whole grain, digital, Green Web Foundation and a sustainable web, all of those resources as well. And we've also put on there from our learnings some of the playbooks in terms of how you can go about introducing a sustainable web into a large organization that doesn't necessarily have it at the core of its values. And we expect that to grow. It's going to be open source and it's for anyone who's got a story, anyone who's done something to contribute to this. The whole thing about it is just getting it out and saying, “Here you go, here are tools to do your job and here are some of the learnings and here's what we've done and here's what's worked.” So that's a good place to start.
Natalie Arney 37:05
So one of the things that most SEOs have got in our toolkits is a crawler. And the two main crawlers that I use are Screaming Frog and Sitebulb. And one of the things that Stu's managed to and the GreenSEO team have managed to arrange with Screaming Frog is that in the Screaming Frog crawlers now you can get the carbon impact of certain pages and elements in the auditing tool, which is fantastic. So when you are auditing a site and if you want to add in as part of your website auditing process or a separate process altogether, it might be, say, feeding into a consultant like one of my clients has got at the moment where they're auditing everything on the site and not everything to do with the business is, yeah, you can use that and that's fantastic. And thank you to Screaming Frog for doing that because it's going to help a lot of us do our job a little bit more effectively. And then obviously when you're using your crawlers, you can switch them into dark mode as well, which is always handy too. So yeah, always switch your crawlers into dark mode.
Gael Duez 38:13
I reckoned integrated the CO2 GS library to calculate the website carbon. Am I right or is it something to check?
Stuart Davies 38:23
Yes, I believe that is correct. Yes.
Gael Duez 38:27
And actually, Natalie, you touched upon something interesting as well, which is the amount of data that is produced by each SEO practitioner. That sounds to be quite significant. When you crawl and crawl and crawl over, is there anything also that you, or Stu, you want to tell us in terms of best practices and how to reduce our own environmental footprint?
Natalie Arney 38:54
Go on, Stu, I think you're fair.
Stuart Davies 38:57
Okay. Right. So I'll go first. So yes, SEOs and digital marketers use a lot of analytics tools and we use a lot of software for SEO for conversion rate optimization, for UX, for example. Heat mapping is a very good example. So they'll get used on 1% of the website, on a project that might run over one month and they'll put scripts and recordings onto the website. And then generally tools like that are then left to run. Also all of the various kinds of plugins that are active on browsers. And so things like this, again, it's our own kind of personal imprint as well. So what digital marketers and SEOs can do is make sure that if they're using any analytics tools and crawlers as well, like setting regular crawls and all of those things is take the scripts off of the website once they've been used or make sure that you're not littering. Make sure you're only using things and switching things on when you need to use them. I think there's like so many software tools that go into people's websites and crawling because someone set off a project on a website crawler at some point and it's just sitting there doing it, it's not being used and it's just taking data and things like that. So we personally can do that. So I'd say that someone would want to check what's running on their website and also personally, what have you got running in the background on your own machine that's on all the time or not on all the time, and think very carefully about, you know, what tools you use and also maybe check out the credentials of the tools that you're using. You know, you could run their website through a carbon metric and see how that stacks up. Or you could even better write to them and ask them and introduce the conversation to them. So there's definitely things that we can do individually.
Gael Duez 40:51
Yeah, I think Holly Cummins that coined the word cloud zombie, you know, in the DevOps words that you kick start an instance or a server, et cetera, and you don't pay attention because it costs not that much money because the load is so low, et cetera. So maybe in the SEO world there is something like crawl zombies or optimizing tool zombies that we should pay attention to. But that's so true. I mean, I've audited websites and some pages where I had countless ads on that were not used anymore. And a bit of JavaScript here and a bit of JavaScript there and oh, it used to be for this media campaign that we ran like one year ago. I was like, what the hell? We don't need that anymore. But we tend to forget. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So we covered a lot of techniques and how to make SEO practices greener. Maybe one of you could share a practical example. I mean, do you have a client, even if you cannot name it, who actively embraced a GreenSEO approach and where you could share what worked well, what didn't work that well, what are the main pain points? Like if someone wants to kickstart a conversation in his or her company or clients, what should be the best first steps based on these use cases that one of you could share?
Stuart Davies 42:28
I'm happy to share one. I can't name the company. What I can do is say that one of the Co-Founders of GreenSEO is involved with this company and it is an extremely large international global tech firm with an extremely large footprint and extremely complex change management IT barriers, getting things done. So this was very example, so this is an example of a super huge company, super huge corporation, and then somebody trying to introduce some of the principles of GreenSEO digital web and what we call this is planting seeds, I think, and this is the right lot, people can take this away is this is a big subject, but what you can do is plant a seed and watch it grow. And so what the person did is he decided to go after dark mode. Okay, so wanted to do something. Dark mode reduces the energy use of the person, browsing the screen on the load, et cetera, et cetera. And so you wanted to introduce dark mode on the sustainability section of the website. Okay, got there. So what he had to do initially was get buy-in. So he went and tapped on the shoulder of the sustainability person and he also got user polls. He did user polls internal and external to get some stats behind the change as well. So he was starting to push out. But what is really important is you've got to contextualize the argument. So what this person did was measure the carbon weight of the pages and then say, measure it what it would be like in dark mode and say, well, this could be the impact. And wouldn't this be great as part of our CSR reporting that we've actually done something to actually clean our own pages? Okay. So the sustainability team got really interested. Okay. He then actually, then spoke to some of the developers, got buy-in from his management. He had to do a presentation, internal presentation. He had to get find some friends and they all went for it. And so he had the development team in there, he had the change team, the branding team. Everybody loved it. That was kind of the key learning here. Everybody loved it and nobody put in a barrier of obstacles. The only thing they asked for is that the dark mode would be a toggle that users could switch on and off just to satisfy any kind of jittery stuff. And then the DevOps team just put it through. They just went, oh yeah, we've just put it, we've just done it. So they didn't have to go through the big change stack as well. So this was like immediately there was one page and then suddenly a week or so later, the sustainability team from one of the other countries got in touch saying, what have you done there? Can we get that as well? And then suddenly other sections from the website, because it's quite siloed, start getting in touch saying, what have you done there? Can we do this? And then as a result of that, one of the sub-sites of this massive technology firm, which has a footprint of say, 100,000 pages, it's going to do the entire subdomain on dark mode toggle. So that's, that's how and that's extremely impactful. So that's going to save a huge amount of carbon. I haven't quantified it, but that just shows you how you plant one seed and you can start small, can suddenly grow off and take mode and, you know, it's what we call marginal gains. You know, there is a marginal gains strategy to SEO and there is a lot of… can't talk about it, but also marginal gains to sustainability because it is such a big subject and it can be quite scary for large organizations to do something which is going to impact their strategies. But these kinds of small seeds that can be planted seem to sprout. So I think that was a really good, really good case.
Gael Duez 46:12
At least on my island, you can see quite often that a plant will break a rock after just a few years. So at the pore of seed, definitely. Maybe, Natalie, from your perspective, going the absolute opposite direction with a very small company, if you had to advertise like a small or medium sized company running a basic website, maybe a small e-commerce activity, or, I don't know, a small media activity like greenio.tech, which is not optimized for SEO as well. I know I need to pay attention to it, but I didn't have time. So anyway, what will be the main steps? Knowing that it's less a question of seeds that I guess budget and having the time to start something?
Natalie Arney 47:04
Yeah, I think as you mentioned earlier, I think it's really important to think about your hosting, first of all, because it has so much of an impact. Obviously, my talk at GreenSEO is about greenwashing and there are hosts that do greenwash. So it's really, really important not just for the environment, but also for your brand reputation, is to work with partners that don't greenwash and that actually, you know, that work really well. And there are some really great companies out there that do some great, great things on top of having a greener hosting and legitimately greener hosting. So I would say start there. Always think about from an SEO point of view, but also from a sustainability point of view, think about the value and the use of the content that you're creating. Really, really important. And do you always need that extra bit of JavaScript or is it just to make the user or the client and not even impress the user? Is it there to impress your boss or the client, or is it there to be actually helpful for the user? Because obviously at the end of the day, everything that we're doing is for the user, whether that's to make their web experience better or to make sure that their children and grandchildren have got a nice place to live in a few years time. So it's kind of encompassing all of that together, I would say, yeah, if you've got a small website, think about the hosting, double check kind of sense check what you're doing to the site. And yeah, see if you can get, if you're say, on WordPress, it's pretty easy to get your core web vitals scores as close to 100% as possible. Obviously using different technologies is a little more difficult, especially out of the box. And obviously a lot of SMEs use things out of the box like Wix and Squarespace and things like that. But yeah, and then I think, yeah, I think about hosting, think about platform, think about content, think about load speed, and they're there. The fundamentals, not just from the environmental point of view, but it's SEO best practices as well.
Gael Duez 49:20
And maybe before we close the session, is there a situation where what Google expects from us is not aligned with a more sustainable approach?
Natalie Arney 49:36
I guess it depends on what your position is about SEO tactics, because there's a lot of different types of people in the SEO world. There are people who will flood the Internet with garbage and obviously that floods the environment with garbage and they don't care about that. And then there are people who care about good quality content that actually serves the user's needs. And without going into too much detail and discussion about Google and the changes that have happened in the last few years in particular, at the end of the day, Google wants to be able to serve the best results for the user and to keep people on their platform as much as possible. So it's thinking about what is going to be useful for you and your users, because depending on what happens with all kinds of monopoly, breakups and business related corporation things to do with the search engines and to do with potential competition on the horizon from other companies that may or may not be just doing it to inflate their stock prices and investments, it's really, really important to think that obviously we don't just get traffic from search or we don't just get traffic from Google. People are moving away slightly, maybe using alternatives for lots of different reasons. But yeah, I think it depends on what… I hate being as SEO and saying it depends, but it does depend on what kind of SEO you are, whether you're one that kind of cares and does kind of as best practice as possible, whether that's against Google's conditions or not. It's what impacts you and your site and your users, or whether you just don't care and you're just going to continue to flood the Internet. We've got absolute, and I mean garbage. There are other terms that I did use in my brain, SEO talk about that. And you know, Ed Zitron and Co will talk about that a lot more in their kind of publications and podcasts about the changes that have been made, particularly at Google. But I think, yes, it's important to kind of consider what kind of SEOs people are first and then go from there.
Gael Duez 52:07
Got it about the garbage. I think we've all experienced this kind of website or content.
Stuart Davies 52:13
I mean, I thoroughly believe that the principles of GreenSEO are aligned to good SEO. So there's nothing in there at all that I would see that is going to impact your rankings. It might upset some brand designers when it's kind of, you're starting to sort of move into the design things when you talk about fonts and images and videos and sort of things like this. But there's nothing I have seen so far in terms of tactics for GreenSEO or green web that I think would significantly impact rankings. In fact, I think it really complements it in most cases.
Gael Duez 52:53
Okay, so not such a hard sell to do with clients or executives.
Stuart Davies 53:00
The hard sell is around behavior. It's ingrained behavior. It's ingrained behavior that this is how our website needs to look. It's ingrained behavior that this is how the marketing team creates content and churns it out. It's those ingrained behaviors like, oh, this is how we know this weird digital environment works. You know, we have our big glossy websites with lots of resources on and we know that works. And we know if we produce lots of content, we know that worked. And what we're saying is we're starting to see case studies where that's not the case, but it's those behaviors and that's the cell and because the data is still coming out, which is why it's very important to contextualize the debate and maybe to start small. So we go actually, well, we're going to tackle one section of the website. Let me try this one section of the website and we'll see what happens with it. So that's how I think people can start to make inroads into that ingrained behavior.
Gael Duez 53:58
Okay, thanks a lot, both of you. Before we close the podcast, you mentioned it several times, but do you want to pitch one last time the GreenSEO Meetup in Brighton? Why should people attend and what kind of people should attend?
Stuart Davies 54:20
Well, you should attend because it's hosted by us and we're really lovely people. And it's a community starting to come together of digital marketers and SEOs who care about the environment and have either a story to tell or have done something or have found some way to help clean up the environment or help them do their job. And it's part of BrightonSEO, which is one of the world's biggest search marketing conferences, I think. And they're really, really great and they've given us the platform as part of their conference to be able to have this fringe side event really focused on sustainability. We've got Screaming Frog as our sponsor. They are demonstrable impact in helping SEOs do their job to be able to do carbon audits. And we've got three great speakers lined up as well, which Nat was one of ours in the last time. It's free. There's going to be drinks, soft and other types of drinks as well. Just 2 hours. So if anyone is in Brighton and you're there as part of the BrightonSEO conference, just pop in the GreenSEO BrightonSEO event and you can just sign up for a ticket and come straight along. It's just a couple of hours and we will most probably go to a pub afterwards. There we go. Sold it.
Stuart Davies 55:46
We like a good pub called Gael.
Stuart Davies 55:57
Now we're going to the pub.
Stuart Davies 56:03
I know, I know, I know.
Gael Duez 56:14
Okay, great. It was really great to have both of you on the podcast. Best wishes for GreenSEO Brighton and hope to see you maybe in Green IO London as well. Thanks again for joining. Have a nice day.
Natalie Arney 56:27
Thank you.
Stuart Davies 56:28
Thank you very much.
Gael Duez 56:30
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode! If you enjoyed it, share it, and give us 5 stars on Apple or Spotify. It will make a lot of difference to help us find new responsible technologists.
In our next episode, we will welcome the Bonnie and Clyde of Azure to talk about Microsoft Cloud Solution, its carbon footprint and the dilemma cloud providers face when it comes to sustainability choices. Holy and William Alpine will tell us more about their past experiences as Azure employees and the quite harsh articles they recently wrote about it.
Stay tuned.
Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in Paris on December 4th and 5th. And you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP, just make sure to have one before they’re all gone. I’m looking forward to meeting you there, to help you - fellow responsible technologists - build a greener digital world.
Roxane
One byte at a time
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I’m Gael Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.
And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform, and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.
Green SEO, I had never heard the word before last year when I started discussing the topic with Jean-Christophe Chouinard who happened to be one of the thought leaders on this concept. He reminded me something that I actually experienced many many times in my past years as a CTO: folks in charge of S E O often have the final say when it comes to content, design and even sometimes technical choices.
And on top of this influence, SEO practices also carry their own environmental footprint being very data hungry.
Hence to investigate more this angle, I invited 2 pillars of BrightonSEO, one of the top conferences worldwide on the topic, who are also actively launching a fringe event called the GreenSEO Meet-Up on October 2nd Stuart Davies and Natalie Arney. Both are seasoned practitioners in the SEO industry with a more technical angle for Stuart, who Stu founded the Ethical Agency Creative Bloom in 2014 and is also a passionate surfer. And with a focus more on content for Natalie who has been freelancing for 5 years and is also a singer in the Brighton-based community choir. And I must admit this hit a soft spot for me having spent a wonderful year in Brighton when studying at the University of Sussex in … well shall I say this … in 1998. That's quite a long time ago. Hello, Natalie. Hello Stuart. It's great to have you on the show today.
Stuart Davies 02:26
Good morning.
Natalie Arney 02:27
Thanks for having us. Morning.
Gael Duez 02:30
So, as I said, I think I've never realized the pivotal role that SEO could have in enhancing green IT practices. I just wanted maybe to kickstart our discussion with a very simple question, why should we care about Green SEO at all? And maybe, Stuart, if you could share some ideas on it.
Stuart Davies 02:54
Okay, thanks. Thanks, Gael. It's great to be here. So, Green SEO, it's two funny words to put together. In 2012, I commissioned some of my team to do some research on to the impact of websites and digital content on the Internet, and I had an itch back then, the vocabulary sustainable net digital sustainability started to permeate a little bit towards me, but it hadn't quite resonated. Obviously, I run an ethical agency. I've always worked with the green and the good and the good local businesses. So it felt that by helping them with their mission, we were helping to do something positive, but we didn't really have a good handle on the impact that we were making. And I think that research to me was a real eye opener. It was a game changer, it was a significant impact. I think there was one stats which really blew my mind. I think at the time there was a study done by a gentleman and he calculated the carbon impact of the Internet to work out that currently he thinks it's a 7th. If it was a country, the Internet was a country, it would be the 7th largest emitter of carbon emissions on the planet and it's on track to be the second of the United States. So it's quite significant what we're doing. So it felt important that SEOs, because we often, I think, as you said, SEOs sit across the divide of digital often. So we sit against digital strategy, we sit against content, we sit against technical, there are many other facets and rings that we actually kind of sit against and we can help influence a much, many factors as well as SEO itself. So it felt like there was a space for a conversation and a space for learnings to be given and a space for open resource tool sets, and here's how to do your jobs. And that's the place that Green SEO is doing. So we're at the beginning of the discovery curve in terms of SEOs and digital sustainability. But that was the point of Green SEO. It started with three of us, initially in Brighton, and those three have grown to 30, of which Natalie Arney is one of our brilliant speakers in our April BrightonSEO meetup. And we're planning to make that 100 next time. That's our plan.
Gael Duez 05:24
That's a good, healthy, sustainable growth, the one we want. And what about you, Natalie? What brought you to this concept of Green SEO?
Natalie Arney 05:35
I think I've always been into making the world at a better place in lots of different ways. And obviously, as I've kind of changed my lifestyle to better suit the way that I do things in every part of my life, obviously, work is one of those things that I haven't always been able to control. But now, as a freelancer, I'm able to do that a lot more, from client choices to things like helping them improve the impact of their websites and their marketing activity on the rest of the web, so that we're able to be good examples for other people.
Gael Duez 06:23
Your clients, Natalie, are they aware of these topics? How do you bring the topic of, hey, I'm an SEO expert and I'd also like to discuss the sustainability angle. How do you kickstart the conversation with them?
Natalie Arney 06:39
So some of them have already got it on their KPI's and things. So a lot of the brands that I do work with will have targets. So, for example, at the moment, one of my clients actually is being audited to see by a graduate. They're being audited to check every element of their business because what they don't want to do is obviously promote and preach themselves as being a sustainable business and driving all of their activity without doing it in the best way that they can. Some of them, it's part of their brand, as in, we are an e-commerce site that sells things like sells products… It's an interesting one. For example, one of my clients is an e-commerce site, and they dissuade people from buying things.
Gael Duez 07:40
Wow.
Natalie Arney 07:43
So, yeah, so obviously it's being able to be a kind of, if you need something, if you really need something, buy it from them and buy the best option. But if you don't, just don't buy it. And it's funny, you know, having worked for agencies in the past where everything's like, “We've got to sell as much as possible and we've got to hit all of these targets.” And it's actually like, well, and I've had a couple of clients that have got this Simmons, like, the same attitude now. It's like, well, actually, we only really want people who really need the product. And rather than driving this kind of high consumption, we all know of Shein and Temu and those kinds of sites, but it's not just them heavy consumers that's obviously then driving waste, driving, overconsumption, driving unsustainable working practices, child labor, so many different things that the impact is beyond the world or beyond the environment is the world rather than just the environment. And, yeah, being able to kind of work with businesses like that is great, but we don't always have the choice to do so. So it's working with people like that when I can, and then when I'm not, it's looking to see, “Okay, what can I do with my brands to help them become better in terms of, you know, accessibility, security, site speed, anything.” And then a lot of the SEO best practices do then feed into, you know, best practices on the sustainability side. But, yeah, it's kind of slowly and surely with some brands and then with others, it's from day one, as soon as you have your kind of call with them, you know exactly what you're going to be doing with them. So it is quite varied. And not everyone has the benefit of being able to say yes or no, whether they're, you know, agency leaders like Stu or freelancers like myself, we both have a lot more control over who we can work with. Whereas if you're an exec and you're just starting out in your career or you're a couple of years in, you don't always have that ability to do that. So obviously taking, getting involved in maybe company projects and things like that, or seeing what you can do internally and attending meetups like GreenSEO can really help as well because you're skilling the team up on understanding and being able to communicate it. Because if you're working with B-Corps, if you're working with businesses that's got all these big goals, you're going to have to be able to work with them anyway and understand and feed it in and it can help get things signed off as well. It's always nice to get an extra thing, an extra ticket signed off just because it's got a green impact, as well as improving keyword rankings, for example.
Gael Duez 10:41
If we go a little more concrete now, I'd like both of you to explain what are, according to you, the techniques, the SEO techniques that help reduce the environmental footprint of a website, digital services, etcetera. And maybe a bit later we will talk about what is specifically related to SEO. But I mean, we've heard about the size of a website, image management, etcetera, but I'd like you to cover the different angles, not necessarily all of them, but with this extra question, is this aligned or not aligned with what Google expects from us… because eventually they are the big moneymaker here with their ranking.
Stuart Davies 11:34
As Natalie has touched on, I think that some of the core principles or the big ticket items that you could do for sustainability to make your site cleaner do align with the principles of, say, core web vitals and site speed and performance and up to date relevant content rather than content for content's sake. And these kind of big factors which can impact the website. How much of it is Google? I mean, it's quite interesting. During the last GreenSEO, we did post a post, a tweet, no, an x, as it is now, to all of the search engines asking would they consider applying sustainable digital factors in their ranking algorithms? We're yet to have a response, but we will be reminding them of that question again in October.
So if, you know, one of probably the biggest things you could do is find an accredited renewable energy data host. Okay, so somewhere where your, your website is going to be, it's because that's the problem. It's energy use. And if you can, at least the minimum requirement I think, is if you can find, and you can find accredited green energy hosts on the greenfoundation.org website, there's some really good resources on there. You can find yourself a green energy host and you're moving, you know, from potentially a fossil fuel held data center to a potentially green energy accredited data center. I think that's one of the biggest things like the number one impact. Number one things that a lot of organizations can do. Whether or not that doesn't impact, that's not going to impact the front end of the website, the design or kind of the strategy. And this is just where the website is held. Obviously you need to be able to have the same requirements you need for your hosting and the developers will need to get around that. But that feels for me like a good win. If one thing that people would maybe take away from this, that they're not sure where to hit first, that's one of the big ticket items for me.
Gael Duez 13:45
First things first, make sure you are sustainably hosted. Now once we've got this basic layout, you mentioned that most of the best practices are aligned with the core web vitals. And by core web vitals I guess you refer to the set of best practices that has been pushed by Google as the best way to get good ranking because the information will be easily accessible and as transparent as possible.
Stuart Davies 14:16
It's also how the website loads, how the website renders, how it responds to people who are coming back, how the images are served, how the layout of the pages moves around with the user or doesn't, how certain features react on desktop and mobile. So all of this is starting to go into the world of design and user experience. The core web vitals does hit into that as well. How fast your website loads, obviously, and what's behind it and how that content actually loads to the users as well. So that's some of the core principles of core web vitals and SEO 101.
Gael Duez 14:56
And SEO experts will be fully aligned with sustainably or green IT experts on most of these vitals. Could you maybe name the top three top five that are the no-brainer that as an SEO expert, as someone taking care of the SEO ranking of the website because you don't necessarily hire experts all the time in every company. What will be the top three top five things to keep in mind to make sure that you've got both a good ranking and the lowest possible environmental footprint.
Stuart Davies 15:35
So with core web vitals again, I didn't come up with this word. We use a lot of jargon in our industry and I'm not a techie jargon. Some of the people who work for me and work with me, I call this “make the website quick”. So there, as I know there are three major, three major areas. One is called LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, and that's how quickly the most important content on the page loads. Okay, so you know the banner of the image, however, so you know developers can do things to make that quick. That should occur within 2.5 seconds. That's Google's recommendation for SEO ranking factors. And then that also creates a quickly loaded, presentable website. You then have something called First Input Delay, and that measures how long it takes for a site to respond to a user's first click. Again, these should be very quick metrics and these are some of the things that designers and developers can, can focus on. And then you've got something called CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift. So that measures the page's visual stability as well. So it's about reserving space for images, videos, iframes and optimizing fonts. LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, is all about how to look, how, how you prioritize loading resources, making files smaller, the host resources on the same server and feed. First Input Delay is about reducing the amount of JavaScript and where you can use web workers.
Gael Duez 17:21
And Natalie maybe more on the content side and the philosophy of searching data, are there any things that you'd like to add on these three biggest topics that Stu just covered?
Natalie Arney 17:37
So on the content side, I think a lot of it's to do with graphics when we talk about core web vitals, but also JavaScript. So a lot of people will use JavaScript to load menus and add little fun things to navigate content. And alongside that, some people might even just use JavaScript across their whole site. Now that can be really great in some ways. However, the web is still built on HTML and CSS and that's what search engines usually crawl. They have got better at crawling and rendering JavaScript. However, it's not always as efficient as it should be. So usually they go to the HTML first. So making sure that there's fallbacks is really, really important, not just from, from a search engine point of view and a search perspective and having an impact on the core web vitals, but again, like adding in additional layers to that is good for accessibility as well. So it allows people to navigate content, whether they're, no matter what device they're using, wherever they are, they're able to access that content. So rather than having JavaScript disabled on certain browsers, or just not wanting to have things load as fast, and some people will use stripped out browsers, for example, being able to actually access that content is so, so important. And yet not using as much JavaScript or at least having a fallback is super important because yeah, as Stu's mentioned before, not only is that load time having an impact on things like core web vitals, but it frustrates the user as well and then it increases bounce rate and decreases the value of the content and then there's, there's lots of other impact from there onwards.
Gael Duez 19:33
And so if I kind of gather your point of view, there is one aspect which is basically the size, size, size, size, which is very much aligned with the sustainability angle because the bigger, the more resources, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a complex story. It's not linear, obviously. Absolutely not linear. But eventually, when we multiply by dozens more times the size of websites since a decade, as brilliantly proven in the Web Almanac Sustainably Chapter, I really encourage anyone to read this chapter because it's kind of mind blowing to see the average size of a web page just exponentially growing over just a decade. So it's really about reducing the size. But Natalie, what you'll see advocating, it's also a technical choice, like not using that much JavaScript. It's not just the question of size, but also some choices that could make this website more difficult to load or reduce user experience. And before I ask the elephant in the room question, I've got a final one which is regarding when everything is well aligned. Did you already see some website size decreasing? Like did you manage to reduce the size of web pages and websites? Or is it still very, very hard to reverse the trend that we are seeing in our industry at the moment?
Natalie Arney 21:07
Oh, from my point of view. So it's an interesting one because obviously from the content side of things, my talk when I spoke at BrightonSEO in April was all to do with how content audits can really play a massive part, not just on the SEO side, but environmentally as well because obviously there are so many sites and so many brands that are continuing to believe that the more content you have on your site, the better you're going to rank. And we see on a daily basis in the SEO world, people saying how they're going to scale the content on their website. And oh, we've seen these great exponential growth in all of these places and we've driven traffic so, so high now. Like, you know, we've ten x'ed it, we've hundred x'ed it, we've done all of this. And then it's like, well, is that, has that content got any use to the user? What is the environmental impact of that content? How much time and effort has that content made? If you've not got a team creating that content, how are you creating it? Are you using an LLM? And obviously then there's the impact of the use of LLMs from the environmental footprint side of things, but also from the ethical standpoint as well. And then we've also got the fact that you can have loads and loads of pieces of content that are just not getting any traffic or not getting any decent traffic. So although you might be driving a lot of traffic to your website, the pages might have high bounce rates, they might have, you know, really irrelevant keyword rankings, but obviously being able to use and target more detailed keywords, driving prospective customers rather than general browsers, that really is key for a lot of SEOs now. I guess it's a growing trend that people are like, well, we can make charts go up, we know how to do that, but it's going from driving traffic to driving valuable traffic from the commercial side, but also from the environmental side. And there was, I remember reading a case study a while back of a food waste company, and they basically created a new website. And by creating their new website design and kind of narrowing down the user journey and stripping back their content and ignoring those vanity metrics of increasing traffic, they were then able to save over 500 kilos of carbon emissions a year. So I think it was over two and a half thousand miles of air travel a year. Just by just giving their website a little bit of a sort out, running a content audit, really trimming down their design and making sure that it was just really fast, really simple, really impactful. And yeah, the content actually helped people rather than just driving lots of irrelevant traffic.
Gael Duez 24:07
I'd like to pause here and to share a personal anecdote. When I started my position as a CTO at Solojet, obviously I kind of self audited briefly the website just to understand what was on it. And I ended up discussing with the teams roughly, we've got between five and twelve main pages. Like the pages, like the homepage, the one describing an ad, et cetera, et cetera. But eventually I asked them the question, but how many pages do we have on the website for real? And the answer was more than 1 million and a half. Because for SEO purpose only that amount of pages was and maybe still is created because you basically have one page for every single address in France. Because it is a website based in France. But the same happened in Germany, Israel, Belgium, UK, wherever I worked with a property portal, the same drill and I was shocked like, wow, we are maintaining more than 1 million and a half page. What is the traffic on it? What is the use? I mean, we could get rid of it. Are you really sure? And the answer was always yes. But think about the long tail. It doesn't cost that much. And whenever someone will hit, you know, mostly what is the price for a property in this specific street, in this specific town, etcetera. We want our websites to be ranked super high if possible, number one. So we need to think about the long tail and we need to maintain then 1 million and a half in a highly automated way. And we were not even using LLM back in those days. So this is my personal feedback from a very wasteful behavior. But still, business wise, it makes sense. What would be both of you, your point of view on this? Do you really believe, or is it really the case that the long tail works that well and requires that amount of resources? Or is it a misconception or is it a way between, I would say.
Stuart Davies 26:16
I mean, with long tail content, I have an agreement with most of my clients, but my clients are the green and the good. These are people who are early adopters. The challenge is bringing some of these principles to the mass market. But we've got an agreement where we've got a one in, one out on the website. So it's okay, we'll put in, we'll put in a piece of content, but we're going to take some of it off. And that's how we manage our long tail content strategies. So yes, there is a place for it, because often you are answering useful information, a question that someone wants to ask about your product or service, that it is useful to have or to provide that on your website, but it can go so crazy. And what we found was it kept the size of the website lean and lo and behold, it also kept their content strategy lean and really did their rankings quite well. So that's how we've approached that particular thorny subject.
Natalie Arney 27:13
So I keep going back to it, but my bright and SEO talk, so basically the name of my talk was “Reduce, reuse, recycle your way to content success.” And basically what that involves is obviously content audits. And I really believe in having really impactful, useful content audits on a regular basis, I would say at least every year. And from that side of things, you always need to keep a grasp on which pieces of content are driving traffic and which are getting good engagements. Like I said, with a case study, having that impactful content that drives conversions, that drives kind of meaningful traffic, rather than just making the graph go up, is so, so important. I think looking at what you can consolidate and what you can improve in terms of content is so important. You might have some really useful content from years ago that just needs a refresh. That could drive a lot more traffic through better keyword rankings. It could be that you have got some outdated information, for example, on an article, and you can just go in and tweak it rather than creating a whole new article. Or it might be that you go back and you've been working on a client for a couple of years and you find some content from about five to ten years ago that could be relevant to you now. And instead of creating a whole brand new article in your content calendar, you could consolidate all of that content together and get rid of additional pages and put everything in one new piece of content. And it's making sure that your content strategy isn't just creating more content and targeting the long tail, it's being able to do it in an effective way. And that's not just from an environmental point of view, but also from an SEO point of view. Years ago, people would create pages upon pages to answer every single query. And obviously, because Google's semantic, it groups content together. Well, in theory, it groups content together by theme and by topic anyway, so you might have pieces of content that might not mention a keyword or a theme, but are related to that keyword or a theme, then ranking for those related terms. And it's like, well, they might be ranking low, but Google and Bing can see that you're trying to kind of target that. It's almost giving you hints when you look at it and go, oh, well, actually, I could work that into that article. And it's looking at that content and saying, well, actually, what have we got now? What do we need? And can we fulfill what we need with what we've already got? And then moving on to creating that new content. So you might have articles, you might have landing pages, and see what you can consolidate, what you can improve before then going on and making brand new content. If it's more kind of on an evergreen side, if it's more trend led, then obviously it's creating that content there and then being able to do that. But where you specifically got really kind of evergreen content, it is so, so important to have your regular content audits, content refreshes and it can work. I had a client last year and it's one piece of content. It was getting less than 300 visits a month and we basically went through, gave some recommendations. It was a couple of paragraphs worth of text that needed to be added and a few headings that needed to be moved around. Within six months, that content was getting over 3000 visits a month. Just for that one piece of content. It was the top piece of content on the site. So it's really, really important to refresh that content because you never know what you might be missing out on and obviously who you're missing out on as well, without then having to create lots and lots of new content, which then has the impact on the hosting, this page, speed and everything else.
Gael Duez 31:06
And if I'm following you there, what I hear is two main messages, which are first of all, chase the right metrics, get rid of vanity metrics. After all, even if you're an e-commerce website, you don't want people to spend 1 hour on your website, you want them to spend 10 seconds and then, you know, live their life after having buy your items, obviously. And the second one is the issue is more about stewardship, about caring about your content, recycling your content than just adding new one.
Stuart Davies 31:40
There's another issue here as well, Gael, and this might segue us nicely into SEO specific green SEO strategies and tactics. This applies certainly for bigger websites, those with thousands, tens of thousands, some have hundreds of thousands, some have millions of pages and it's managing the bots or managing the crawlers. So out there you've got lots of web crawlers, you've got Google, you've got Bing, you've got so many different kinds of SEO tools. You've got ChatGPT coming into websites now and all of the various permutations of AI tools coming in, there's a lot of malicious stuff coming in the spam. There's a huge amount of now that creates resources as well, that creates resource drain and energy use as well every time a crawler comes into your website. And what SEOs can do specifically is they can use the robots txt file. So it's a file where we can instruct website crawlers what to do and what part of the website to look at. So, you know, if we think at scale, we've got a huge, huge, massive website with lots of archive material. I know Will Barnes from Reed Pop. He works for a gaming company. So they have lots and lots and lots and lots of archive website material which they want to keep but not rank. So they will use their robots txt file to say, this is just our archive. We might pull out some of them. But I don't want you to come in and crawl this anymore because you're, you know, I want you to focus on the bit of the site I want you to do. Or you could have lots of FAQs sections on your site which are just for readers. It's not useful for search because you might just have one FAQ page. You can also block the search engine from using that. So on a one page basis it might not feel like much. But when you start adding this stuff at scale, it does become important and it creates less load on the servers. We can also block AI, ChatGPT. It's yet to be quantified. What the impact of that is on website loads, but I imagine it is quite significant. But what we're doing at GreenSEO is we are going to produce a file SEOs and digital marketers can use to put on their robots txt files. That's the file that controls the search engine which blocks all of the bad bots. So it's saying these are definitely ones which will come into your website that you do not want anywhere near it. And then again, sir, that's going to be open source on the greenseo.org website. And that's really going to help with the server load and the resource use on websites as well.
Gael Duez 34:30
Yeah, because obviously it drains resources. It creates data which has to be stored and analyzed sometimes, et cetera, et cetera. But it also drains resources from the owner of the website because they need to enter these bots. Okay, got it.
Stuart Davies 34:45
So it's like we're all littering and someone's coming up to your property and leaving their litter and you didn't ask them to.
Gael Duez 34:53
I think it's a great example and I love the idea of creating some sort of open source community where everyone will share. Okay, bad bots file, like the Dark Web Foundation repository, like you've got the Green Web Foundation, like not dark web, maybe gray Web, whatever. Yeah, that's definitely a great idea. And something that I didn't consider because I was more considering the robot text.
Stuart Davies 35:22
The robots that text.
Gael Duez 35:23
Yeah. As you know, something that you don't want data to be produced when it's not needed. But actually, yes, obviously it can drain a lot of resources from your own hosting solutions.
Stuart Davies 35:37
It's a good place to start, especially for big websites, websites at scale, e-commerce websites, anyone with a huge footprint, again, that can really help.
Gael Duez 35:46
And as an SEO expert, or not expert necessarily, but an SEO practitioner, do I have things to change specifically in the way I work or new tools to embrace to help me with having a more sustainable way of working?
Stuart Davies 36:02
So the GreenSEO website, greenseo.org, is a repository and a toolset and it has the playbooks of here are the things that can help you do your job, here are the tools that you can use to address speed, page weight design, here are the other people who are talking about it, such as sustainable design resources, such as pointing to whole grain, digital, Green Web Foundation and a sustainable web, all of those resources as well. And we've also put on there from our learnings some of the playbooks in terms of how you can go about introducing a sustainable web into a large organization that doesn't necessarily have it at the core of its values. And we expect that to grow. It's going to be open source and it's for anyone who's got a story, anyone who's done something to contribute to this. The whole thing about it is just getting it out and saying, “Here you go, here are tools to do your job and here are some of the learnings and here's what we've done and here's what's worked.” So that's a good place to start.
Natalie Arney 37:05
So one of the things that most SEOs have got in our toolkits is a crawler. And the two main crawlers that I use are Screaming Frog and Sitebulb. And one of the things that Stu's managed to and the GreenSEO team have managed to arrange with Screaming Frog is that in the Screaming Frog crawlers now you can get the carbon impact of certain pages and elements in the auditing tool, which is fantastic. So when you are auditing a site and if you want to add in as part of your website auditing process or a separate process altogether, it might be, say, feeding into a consultant like one of my clients has got at the moment where they're auditing everything on the site and not everything to do with the business is, yeah, you can use that and that's fantastic. And thank you to Screaming Frog for doing that because it's going to help a lot of us do our job a little bit more effectively. And then obviously when you're using your crawlers, you can switch them into dark mode as well, which is always handy too. So yeah, always switch your crawlers into dark mode.
Gael Duez 38:13
I reckoned integrated the CO2 GS library to calculate the website carbon. Am I right or is it something to check?
Stuart Davies 38:23
Yes, I believe that is correct. Yes.
Gael Duez 38:27
And actually, Natalie, you touched upon something interesting as well, which is the amount of data that is produced by each SEO practitioner. That sounds to be quite significant. When you crawl and crawl and crawl over, is there anything also that you, or Stu, you want to tell us in terms of best practices and how to reduce our own environmental footprint?
Natalie Arney 38:54
Go on, Stu, I think you're fair.
Stuart Davies 38:57
Okay. Right. So I'll go first. So yes, SEOs and digital marketers use a lot of analytics tools and we use a lot of software for SEO for conversion rate optimization, for UX, for example. Heat mapping is a very good example. So they'll get used on 1% of the website, on a project that might run over one month and they'll put scripts and recordings onto the website. And then generally tools like that are then left to run. Also all of the various kinds of plugins that are active on browsers. And so things like this, again, it's our own kind of personal imprint as well. So what digital marketers and SEOs can do is make sure that if they're using any analytics tools and crawlers as well, like setting regular crawls and all of those things is take the scripts off of the website once they've been used or make sure that you're not littering. Make sure you're only using things and switching things on when you need to use them. I think there's like so many software tools that go into people's websites and crawling because someone set off a project on a website crawler at some point and it's just sitting there doing it, it's not being used and it's just taking data and things like that. So we personally can do that. So I'd say that someone would want to check what's running on their website and also personally, what have you got running in the background on your own machine that's on all the time or not on all the time, and think very carefully about, you know, what tools you use and also maybe check out the credentials of the tools that you're using. You know, you could run their website through a carbon metric and see how that stacks up. Or you could even better write to them and ask them and introduce the conversation to them. So there's definitely things that we can do individually.
Gael Duez 40:51
Yeah, I think Holly Cummins that coined the word cloud zombie, you know, in the DevOps words that you kick start an instance or a server, et cetera, and you don't pay attention because it costs not that much money because the load is so low, et cetera. So maybe in the SEO world there is something like crawl zombies or optimizing tool zombies that we should pay attention to. But that's so true. I mean, I've audited websites and some pages where I had countless ads on that were not used anymore. And a bit of JavaScript here and a bit of JavaScript there and oh, it used to be for this media campaign that we ran like one year ago. I was like, what the hell? We don't need that anymore. But we tend to forget. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So we covered a lot of techniques and how to make SEO practices greener. Maybe one of you could share a practical example. I mean, do you have a client, even if you cannot name it, who actively embraced a GreenSEO approach and where you could share what worked well, what didn't work that well, what are the main pain points? Like if someone wants to kickstart a conversation in his or her company or clients, what should be the best first steps based on these use cases that one of you could share?
Stuart Davies 42:28
I'm happy to share one. I can't name the company. What I can do is say that one of the Co-Founders of GreenSEO is involved with this company and it is an extremely large international global tech firm with an extremely large footprint and extremely complex change management IT barriers, getting things done. So this was very example, so this is an example of a super huge company, super huge corporation, and then somebody trying to introduce some of the principles of GreenSEO digital web and what we call this is planting seeds, I think, and this is the right lot, people can take this away is this is a big subject, but what you can do is plant a seed and watch it grow. And so what the person did is he decided to go after dark mode. Okay, so wanted to do something. Dark mode reduces the energy use of the person, browsing the screen on the load, et cetera, et cetera. And so you wanted to introduce dark mode on the sustainability section of the website. Okay, got there. So what he had to do initially was get buy-in. So he went and tapped on the shoulder of the sustainability person and he also got user polls. He did user polls internal and external to get some stats behind the change as well. So he was starting to push out. But what is really important is you've got to contextualize the argument. So what this person did was measure the carbon weight of the pages and then say, measure it what it would be like in dark mode and say, well, this could be the impact. And wouldn't this be great as part of our CSR reporting that we've actually done something to actually clean our own pages? Okay. So the sustainability team got really interested. Okay. He then actually, then spoke to some of the developers, got buy-in from his management. He had to do a presentation, internal presentation. He had to get find some friends and they all went for it. And so he had the development team in there, he had the change team, the branding team. Everybody loved it. That was kind of the key learning here. Everybody loved it and nobody put in a barrier of obstacles. The only thing they asked for is that the dark mode would be a toggle that users could switch on and off just to satisfy any kind of jittery stuff. And then the DevOps team just put it through. They just went, oh yeah, we've just put it, we've just done it. So they didn't have to go through the big change stack as well. So this was like immediately there was one page and then suddenly a week or so later, the sustainability team from one of the other countries got in touch saying, what have you done there? Can we get that as well? And then suddenly other sections from the website, because it's quite siloed, start getting in touch saying, what have you done there? Can we do this? And then as a result of that, one of the sub-sites of this massive technology firm, which has a footprint of say, 100,000 pages, it's going to do the entire subdomain on dark mode toggle. So that's, that's how and that's extremely impactful. So that's going to save a huge amount of carbon. I haven't quantified it, but that just shows you how you plant one seed and you can start small, can suddenly grow off and take mode and, you know, it's what we call marginal gains. You know, there is a marginal gains strategy to SEO and there is a lot of… can't talk about it, but also marginal gains to sustainability because it is such a big subject and it can be quite scary for large organizations to do something which is going to impact their strategies. But these kinds of small seeds that can be planted seem to sprout. So I think that was a really good, really good case.
Gael Duez 46:12
At least on my island, you can see quite often that a plant will break a rock after just a few years. So at the pore of seed, definitely. Maybe, Natalie, from your perspective, going the absolute opposite direction with a very small company, if you had to advertise like a small or medium sized company running a basic website, maybe a small e-commerce activity, or, I don't know, a small media activity like greenio.tech, which is not optimized for SEO as well. I know I need to pay attention to it, but I didn't have time. So anyway, what will be the main steps? Knowing that it's less a question of seeds that I guess budget and having the time to start something?
Natalie Arney 47:04
Yeah, I think as you mentioned earlier, I think it's really important to think about your hosting, first of all, because it has so much of an impact. Obviously, my talk at GreenSEO is about greenwashing and there are hosts that do greenwash. So it's really, really important not just for the environment, but also for your brand reputation, is to work with partners that don't greenwash and that actually, you know, that work really well. And there are some really great companies out there that do some great, great things on top of having a greener hosting and legitimately greener hosting. So I would say start there. Always think about from an SEO point of view, but also from a sustainability point of view, think about the value and the use of the content that you're creating. Really, really important. And do you always need that extra bit of JavaScript or is it just to make the user or the client and not even impress the user? Is it there to impress your boss or the client, or is it there to be actually helpful for the user? Because obviously at the end of the day, everything that we're doing is for the user, whether that's to make their web experience better or to make sure that their children and grandchildren have got a nice place to live in a few years time. So it's kind of encompassing all of that together, I would say, yeah, if you've got a small website, think about the hosting, double check kind of sense check what you're doing to the site. And yeah, see if you can get, if you're say, on WordPress, it's pretty easy to get your core web vitals scores as close to 100% as possible. Obviously using different technologies is a little more difficult, especially out of the box. And obviously a lot of SMEs use things out of the box like Wix and Squarespace and things like that. But yeah, and then I think, yeah, I think about hosting, think about platform, think about content, think about load speed, and they're there. The fundamentals, not just from the environmental point of view, but it's SEO best practices as well.
Gael Duez 49:20
And maybe before we close the session, is there a situation where what Google expects from us is not aligned with a more sustainable approach?
Natalie Arney 49:36
I guess it depends on what your position is about SEO tactics, because there's a lot of different types of people in the SEO world. There are people who will flood the Internet with garbage and obviously that floods the environment with garbage and they don't care about that. And then there are people who care about good quality content that actually serves the user's needs. And without going into too much detail and discussion about Google and the changes that have happened in the last few years in particular, at the end of the day, Google wants to be able to serve the best results for the user and to keep people on their platform as much as possible. So it's thinking about what is going to be useful for you and your users, because depending on what happens with all kinds of monopoly, breakups and business related corporation things to do with the search engines and to do with potential competition on the horizon from other companies that may or may not be just doing it to inflate their stock prices and investments, it's really, really important to think that obviously we don't just get traffic from search or we don't just get traffic from Google. People are moving away slightly, maybe using alternatives for lots of different reasons. But yeah, I think it depends on what… I hate being as SEO and saying it depends, but it does depend on what kind of SEO you are, whether you're one that kind of cares and does kind of as best practice as possible, whether that's against Google's conditions or not. It's what impacts you and your site and your users, or whether you just don't care and you're just going to continue to flood the Internet. We've got absolute, and I mean garbage. There are other terms that I did use in my brain, SEO talk about that. And you know, Ed Zitron and Co will talk about that a lot more in their kind of publications and podcasts about the changes that have been made, particularly at Google. But I think, yes, it's important to kind of consider what kind of SEOs people are first and then go from there.
Gael Duez 52:07
Got it about the garbage. I think we've all experienced this kind of website or content.
Stuart Davies 52:13
I mean, I thoroughly believe that the principles of GreenSEO are aligned to good SEO. So there's nothing in there at all that I would see that is going to impact your rankings. It might upset some brand designers when it's kind of, you're starting to sort of move into the design things when you talk about fonts and images and videos and sort of things like this. But there's nothing I have seen so far in terms of tactics for GreenSEO or green web that I think would significantly impact rankings. In fact, I think it really complements it in most cases.
Gael Duez 52:53
Okay, so not such a hard sell to do with clients or executives.
Stuart Davies 53:00
The hard sell is around behavior. It's ingrained behavior. It's ingrained behavior that this is how our website needs to look. It's ingrained behavior that this is how the marketing team creates content and churns it out. It's those ingrained behaviors like, oh, this is how we know this weird digital environment works. You know, we have our big glossy websites with lots of resources on and we know that works. And we know if we produce lots of content, we know that worked. And what we're saying is we're starting to see case studies where that's not the case, but it's those behaviors and that's the cell and because the data is still coming out, which is why it's very important to contextualize the debate and maybe to start small. So we go actually, well, we're going to tackle one section of the website. Let me try this one section of the website and we'll see what happens with it. So that's how I think people can start to make inroads into that ingrained behavior.
Gael Duez 53:58
Okay, thanks a lot, both of you. Before we close the podcast, you mentioned it several times, but do you want to pitch one last time the GreenSEO Meetup in Brighton? Why should people attend and what kind of people should attend?
Stuart Davies 54:20
Well, you should attend because it's hosted by us and we're really lovely people. And it's a community starting to come together of digital marketers and SEOs who care about the environment and have either a story to tell or have done something or have found some way to help clean up the environment or help them do their job. And it's part of BrightonSEO, which is one of the world's biggest search marketing conferences, I think. And they're really, really great and they've given us the platform as part of their conference to be able to have this fringe side event really focused on sustainability. We've got Screaming Frog as our sponsor. They are demonstrable impact in helping SEOs do their job to be able to do carbon audits. And we've got three great speakers lined up as well, which Nat was one of ours in the last time. It's free. There's going to be drinks, soft and other types of drinks as well. Just 2 hours. So if anyone is in Brighton and you're there as part of the BrightonSEO conference, just pop in the GreenSEO BrightonSEO event and you can just sign up for a ticket and come straight along. It's just a couple of hours and we will most probably go to a pub afterwards. There we go. Sold it.
Stuart Davies 55:46
We like a good pub called Gael.
Stuart Davies 55:57
Now we're going to the pub.
Stuart Davies 56:03
I know, I know, I know.
Gael Duez 56:14
Okay, great. It was really great to have both of you on the podcast. Best wishes for GreenSEO Brighton and hope to see you maybe in Green IO London as well. Thanks again for joining. Have a nice day.
Natalie Arney 56:27
Thank you.
Stuart Davies 56:28
Thank you very much.
Gael Duez 56:30
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