Oooo! A bonafide trick from Thomas Steiner. Chrome will soon be supporting SVG favicons (e.g. <link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg">). And you can embed CSS within an SVG with a <style> element. That CSS can use a perfers-color-sceme media query, and as a result, a favicon that supports dark mode!
You specify the color, so there is no opportunity there for a dark mode situation. A little surprising, since Apple is so all-in on this dark mode stuff. I have no idea if they plan to address that or what.
Well, hey, look at that — it's time for this year's State of JavaScript survey!
You have taken this survey last year. Or in 2017. Or in 2016. It's been going on for a little while now and it always lends interesting insights into things like the features developers are using, the popularity of specific frameworks, and general trends. And, since the survey is going into its fourth year, we may start to get some real insights into the evolution of JavaScript over time.
So go ahead and take the survey. The more people who take it, the better results we get.
In case this is new to you, the survey is brought to you by the same folks who brought us the first State of CSS survey just this year. You can listen to Sacha Greif chat with Chris and Dave about that one over on ShopTalk for little gems about the results.
If you could get one gift from your boss this holiday season, what would you want it to be? You know, other than the usual mouse pad, picture frame or, my favorite, the ol' coffee mug and Starbucks card combo.
What if you were to receive something, hmm, more substantial? Like something that keeps giving three days instead of one. Or something that levels up your front-end chops. Or something that lets you network with your peers and gain invaluable experience by learning from the brightest minds in the biz?
Yes, all of that would be awesome — nay — epic! And, yes, you can get all of that together with one ticket to An Event Apart.
There truly is no better gift for front-enders. It's a break from the desk into a three-day haven of learning about the most important movements in web development and design from the folks who are leading the way. Seriously, just check out the lineup for the Washington D.C. installment.
This is where we'd normally share a special coupon code that scores you a $100 discount and gives us credit for sending you there. You can totally do that by entering AEACP at checkout. We rely on sponsorships around here and supporting our sponsors keeps this boat moving.
But! An Event Apart are feeling extra generous this season and offering a discount of $200 off any two- or three-day pass to any of their 2020 events. That includes stops in D.C., Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis, Orlando and San Francisco!
OK, so what's that code? You're just gonna have to watch out on Twitter, Facebook or their mailing list on Friday, December 13, to get it.
Reporting fake and duplicate listings to Google sounds hard. Sometimes it can be. But very often, it’s as easy as falling off a log, takes only a modest session of spam fighting and can yield significant local ranking improvements.
If your local business/the local brands your agency markets aren’t using spam fighting as a ranking tactic because you feel you lack the time or skills, please sit down with me for a sec.
What if I told you I spent about an hour yesterday doing something that moved a Home Depot location up 3 spots in a competitive market in Google’s local rankings less than 24 hours later? What if, for you, moving up a spot or two would get you out of Google’s local finder limbo and into the actual local pack limelight?
Today I’m going to show you exactly what I did to fight spam, how fast and easy it was to sweep out junk listings, and how rewarding it can be to see results transform in favor of the legitimate businesses you market.
Who knew that shopping for window coverings would lead me into a den of spammers throwing shade all over Google?
The story of Google My Business spam is now more than a decade in the making, with scandalous examples like fake listings for locksmiths and addiction treatment centers proving how unsafe and unacceptable local business platforms can become when left unguarded.
But even in non-YMYL industries, spam listings deceive the public, waste consumers’ time, inhibit legitimate businesses from being discovered, and erode trust in the spam-hosting platform. I saw all of this in action when I was shopping to replace some broken blinds in my home, and it was such a hassle trying to find an actual vendor amid the chaff of broken, duplicate, and lead gen listings, I decided to do something about it.
I selected an SF Bay area branch of Home Depot as my hypothetical “client.” I knew they had a legitimate location in the city of Vallejo, CA — a place I don’t live but sometimes travel to, thereby excluding the influence of proximity from my study. I knew that they were only earning an 8th place ranking in Google’s Local Finder, pushed down by spam. I wanted to see how quickly I could impact Home Depot’s surprisingly bad ranking.
I took the following steps, and encourage you to take them for any local business you’re marketing, too:
Step 1: Search
While located at the place of business you’re marketing, perform a Google search (or have your client perform it) for the keyword phrase for which you most desire improved local rankings. Of course, if you’re already ranking well as you want to for the searchers nearest you, you can still follow this process for investigating somewhat more distant areas within your potential reach where you want to increase visibility.
In the results from your search, click on the “more businesses” link at the bottom of the local pack, and you’ll be taken to the interface commonly called the “Local Finder.”
The Local Finder isn’t typically 100% identical to the local pack in exact ranking order, but it’s the best place I know of to see how things stand beyond the first 3 results that make up Google’s local packs, telling a business which companies they need to surpass to move up towards local pack inclusion.
Find yourself in the local finder. In my case, the Home Depot location was at position 8. I hope you’re somewhere within the first set of 20 results Google typically gives, but if you’re not, keep paging through until you locate your listing. If you don’t find yourself at all, you may need to troubleshoot whether an eligibility issue, suspension, or filter is at play. But, hopefully that’s not you today.
Next, create a custom spreadsheet to record your findings. Or, much easier, just make a copy of mine!
Populate the spreadsheet by cutting and pasting the basic NAP (name, address, phone) for every competitor ranking above you, and include your own listing, too, of course! If you work for an agency, you’ll need to get the client to help you with this step by filling the spreadsheet out based on their search from their place of business.
In my case, I recorded everything in the first 20 results of the Local Finder, because I saw spam both above and below my “client,” and wanted to see the total movement resulting from my work in that result set.
Step 3: Identify obvious spam
We want to catch the easy fish today. You can go down rabbit holes another day, trying to ferret out weirdly woven webs of lead gen sites spanning the nation, but today, we’re just looking to weed out listings that clearly, blatantly don’t belong in the Local Finder.
Go through these five easy steps:
Look at the Google Streetview image for each business outranking you.
Do you see a business with signage that matches the name on the listing? Move on. But if you see a house, an empty parking lot, or Google is marking the listing as “location approximate”, jot that down in the Notes section of your spreadsheet. For example, I saw a supposed window coverings showroom that Streetview was locating in an empty lot on a military base. Big red flag there.
Make note of any businesses that share an address, phone number, or very similar name.
Make note of anything with an overly long name that seems more like a string of keywords than a brand. For example, a listing in my set was called: Custom Window Treatments in Fairfield, CA Hunter Douglas Dealer.
For every business you noted down in steps one and two, get on the phone.
Is the number a working number? If someone answers, do they answer with the name of the business? Note it down. Say, “Hi, where is your shop located?” If the answer is that it’s not a shop, it’s a mobile business, note that down. Finally, If anything seems off, check the Guidelines for representing your business on Google to see what’s allowed in the industry you’re investigating. For example, it’s perfectly okay for a window blinds dealer to operate out of their home, but if they’re operating out of 5 homes in the same city, it’s likely a violation. In my case, just a couple of minutes on the phone identified multiple listings with phone numbers that were no longer in service.
Visit the iffy websites.
Now that you’re narrowing your spreadsheet down to a set of businesses that are either obviously legitimate or “iffy,” visit the websites of the iffy ones. Does the name on the listing match the name on the website? Does anything else look odd? Note it down.
Highlight businesses that are clearly spammy.
Your dive hasn’t been deep, but by now, it may have identified one or more listings that you strongly believe don’t belong because they have spammy names, fake addresses, or out-of-service phone numbers. My lightning-quick pass through my data set showed that six of the twenty listings were clearly junk. That’s 30% of Google’s info being worthless! I suggest marking these in red text in your spreadsheet to make the next step fast and easy.
Step 4: Report it!
If you want to become a spam-fighting ace later, you’ll need to become familiar with Google’s Business Redressal Complaint Form which gives you lots of room for sharing your documentation of why a listing should be removed. In fact, if an aggravating spammer remains in the Local Finder despite what we’re doing in this session, this form is where you’d head next for a more concerted effort.
But, today, I promised the easiness of falling off a log, so our first effort at impacting the results will simply focus on the “suggest an edit” function you’ll see on each listing you’re trying to get rid of. This is how you do it:
After you click the “suggest an edit” button on the listing, a popup will appear. If you’re reporting something like a spammy name, click the “change name or other details” option and fill out the form. If you’ve determined a listing represents a non-existent, closed, unreachable, or duplicate entity, choose the “remove this place” option and then select the dropdown entry that most closely matches the problem. You can add a screenshot or other image if you like, but in my quick pass through the data, I didn’t bother.
Record the exact action you took for each spam listing in the “Actions” column of the spreadsheet. In my case, I was reporting a mixture or non-existent buildings, out-of-service phone numbers, and one duplicate listing with a spammy name.
Finally, hit the “send” button and you’re done.
Step 5: Record the results
Within an hour of filing my reports with Google, I received an email like this for 5 of the 6 entries I had flagged:
The only entry I received no email for was the duplicate listing with the spammy name. But I didn’t let this worry me. I went about the rest of my day and checked back in the morning.
I’m not fond of calling out businesses in public. Sometimes, there are good folks who are honestly confused about what’s allowed and what isn’t. Also, I sometimes find screenshots of the local finder overwhelmingly cluttered and endlessly long to look at. Instead, I created a bare-bones representational schematic of the total outcome of my hour of spam-fighting work.
The red markers are legit businesses. The grey ones are spam. The green one is the Home Depot I was trying to positively impact. I attributed a letter of the alphabet to each listing, to better help me see how the order changed from day one to day two. The lines show the movement over the course of the 24 hours.
The results were that:
A stayed the same, and B and C swapping positions was unlikely due to my work; local rankings can fluctuate like this from hour to hour.
Five out of six spam listings I reported disappeared. The keyword-stuffed duplicate listing which was initially at position K was replaced by the brand’s legitimate listing one spot lower than it had been.
The majority of the legitimate businesses enjoyed upward movement, with the exception of position I which went down, and M and R which disappeared. Perhaps new businesses moving into the Local Finder triggered a filter, or perhaps it was just the endless tide of position changes and they’ll be back tomorrow.
Seven new listings made it into the top 20. Unfortunately, at a glance, it looked to me like 3 of these new listings were new spam. Dang, Google!
Most rewardingly, my hypothetical client, Home Depot, moved up 3 spots. What a super easy win!
Fill out the final column in your spreadsheet with your results.
What we’ve learned
You battle upstream every day for your business or clients. You twist yourself like a paperclip complying with Google’s guidelines, seeking new link and unstructured citation opportunities, straining your brain to shake out new content, monitoring reviews like a chef trying to keep a cream sauce from separating. You do all this in the struggle for better, broader visibility, hoping that each effort will incrementally improve reputation, rankings, traffic, and conversions.
Catch your breath. Not everything in life has to be so hard. The river of work ahead is always wide, but don’t overlook the simplest stepping stones. Saunter past the spam listings without breaking a sweat and enjoy the easy upward progress!
I’d like to close today with three meditations:
1. Google is in over their heads with spam
Google is in over their heads with spam. My single local search for a single keyword phrase yielded 30% worthless data in their top local results. Google says they process 63,000 searches per second and that as much as 50% of mobile queries have a local intent. I don’t know any other way to look at Google than as having become an under-regulated public utility at this point.
Expert local SEOs can spot spam listings in query after query, industry after industry, but Google has yet to staff a workforce or design an algorithm sufficient to address bad data that has direct, real-world impacts on businesses and customers. I don’t know if they lack the skills or the will to take responsibility for this enormous problem they’ve created, but the problem is plain. Until Google steps up, my best advice is to do the smart and civic work of watchdogging the results that most affect the local community you serve. It’s a positive not just for your brand, but for every legitimate business and every neighbor near you.
2. You may get in over your head with spam
You may get in over your head with spam. Today’s session was as simple as possible, but GMB spam can stem from complex, global networks. The Home Depot location I randomly rewarded with a 3-place jump in Local Finder rankings clearly isn’t dedicating sufficient resources to spam fighting or they would’ve done this work themselves.
But the extent of spam is severe. If your market is one that’s heavily spammed, you can quickly become overwhelmed by the problem. In such cases, I recommend that you:
Read this excellent recent article by Jessie Low on the many forms spam can take, plus some great tips for more strenuous fighting than we’ve covered today.
Follow Joy Hawkins, Mike Blumenthal, and Jason Brown, all of whom publish ongoing information on this subject. If you wade into a spam network, I recommend reporting it to one or more of these experts on Twitter, and, if you wish to become a skilled spam fighter yourself, you will learn a lot from what these three have published.
If you don’t want to fight spam yourself, hire an agency that has the smarts to be offering this as a service.
You can also report listing spam to the Google My Business Community Forum, but it’s a crowded place and it can sometimes be hard to get your issue seen.
What if you built a local movement? What if you and your friendlier competitors joined forces to knock spam out of Google together? Imagine all of the florists, hair salons, or medical practitioners in a town coming together to watch the local SERPs in shifts so that everyone in their market could benefit from bad actors being reported.
Maybe you’re already in a local business association with many hands that could lighten the work of protecting a whole community from unethical business practices. Maybe your town could then join up with the nearest major city, and that city could begin putting pressure on legislators. Maybe legislators would begin to realize the extent of the impacts when legitimate businesses face competition from fake entities and illegal practices. Maybe new anti-trust and communications regulations would ensue.
Now, I promised you “simple,” and this isn’t it, is it? But every time I see a fake listing, I know I’m looking at a single pebble and I’m beginning to think it may take an avalanche to bring about change great enough to protect both local brands and consumers. Google is now 15 years into this dynamic with no serious commitment in sight to resolve it.
At least in your own backyard, in your own community, you can be one small part of the solution with the easy tactics I’ve shared today, but maybe it’s time for local commerce to begin both doing more and expecting more in the way of protections.
I’m ready for that. And you?
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Every front-end developer has dealt or will deal with this scenario: your boss, client or designer thinks the outline applied by browsers on focused elements does not match the UI, and asks you to remove it. Or you might even be looking to remove it yourself.
So you do a little research and find out that this is strongly discouraged, because the focus outline is there for a reason: it provides visual feedback for keyboard navigation (using the Tab key), letting users who can't use a mouse or have a visual impairment know where they are on the screen.
This button shows a focus state with Chrome's default outline style.
That doesn't mean you're stuck with this outline, though. Instead of removing it, you can simply replace it with something else. That way, you’ll keep your interface accessible and get more flexibility on how it looks, so you can better match your UI.
You can start by removing the default browser outline by selecting the focused state of the element and applying outline: none. Then, you may choose from each of the options ahead to replace it:
Change the background color
This works best for elements that can be filled, such as buttons. Select the focused state of the element and apply a contrasting background color to it. The higher the contrast the better because subtle changes may not be strong enough visual cues, particularly in cases where with color blindness and low-vision.
In the example below, both background and border color change; you may pick either or both.
Click or focus with the Tab key to view how this state looks.
If the element has any text, you can select the focused state and change its color. This also works for icons applied with mask-image; you can select the icon as a descendant of the focused element and change its background color, like the example button below.
Again, contrast is key. You may also consider using an underline on text links and making it part of the changed state because, as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines state:
Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element. (Level A) Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.1
Apply a box shadow
The box-shadow property can do exactly the same job as the outline, except it's much more powerful — you can now control its color, opacity, offset, blur radius and spread radius. And if a border-radius is specified, the box shadow follows the same rounded corners.
The key here is subtlety. Extreme size changes may cause content reflow, not to mention a poor experience for those who prefer reduced motion.
Replicate existing hover styles
If the element already has a contrasting hover style, you can simply take that style and apply it for the focused state as well. This is a rather elegant solution, as you don't have to add any new colors or outlines to the interface.
Here’s an example where both the focus and hover states adopt a high contrast to the background of an element’s default style:
Everything we’ve looked at so far takes the assumption that we want to remove the focus outline altogether. We don’t have to! In fact, it’s a border that we can customize.
button:focus {
outline: 3px dashed orange;
}
That’s shorthand and could have been written this way if we want to fine-tune the styles:
One additional superpower we have is the outline-offset property, which is separate from the outline shorthand property but can be used alongside it to change the position of the focus ring:
You can mix and match all of these options to get custom styles that look appropriate for each component type within your interface.
And it’s worth repeating: Don't forget to use stark color contrasts and other visual cues in addition to color when adopting custom focus states. Sure, we all want an experience that aligns with our designs, but we can adhere to good accessibility practices in the process. The W3C recommends this tool to test the contrast of colors values against the WCAG guidelines.
A couple of months ago, we invited Marc Anton Dahmen to show off his database-less content management system (CMS) Automad. His post is an interesting inside look at templating engines, including how they work, how CMSs use them, and how they impact the way we write things, such as loops.
And what the heck is a "headless" CMS? I always find that name to be a little weird, but the idea is that the engine for content creation is fully separated from the front-end display and instead stitched together by APIs. This means we're able to get all the wonderful benefits of creating content in a CMS without being locked into its templating requirements. Chris has a more thorough explanation of the concept from a few years back.
A good example is WordPress and its REST API. We still enjoy the easy UI and extensible administrative features of WordPress, but can send the data anywhere via API to create the front end. Rather write your templates in JavaScript instead of PHP? Go for it!
If the CMS is a body and the front-end view is the head, then the body can unscrew its head and replace it with another. Weird, right?
In any case, whether it's Automad, WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Ghost, Netlify CMS, or any others in the growing number of API-first options out there, the move toward headless is a space to watch. HeadlessCMS.org is a good place to do that. We could see vast changes that lead to both better content and developer experiences, which is what all of this is trying to accomplish.
