This week on Lumar’s Human-First Digital Podcast, we’re discussing how to use custom extractions (and XPath) — an often overlooked tool in SEOs’ arsenal — to turbo-charge your website crawls, SEO projects, and provide support for broader marketing efforts. Our guest this week is David Gossage, an e-commerce technical SEO expert and SEO manager at Click Consult.
– – –
“I’ve found that knowing how to extract things is a very good way of making friends with a lot of people,” says Chris Spann, host of the Human-First Digital podcast.
“A simple example of where it will benefit non-tech teams: Say you’ve got a list of other websites that you want to target for backlinks. You can crawl a site and go, ‘Well, actually, all of the outbound links of this site are ‘nofollow’ — you can do that using XPath,” explains Gossage.
Explore how custom extractions can benefit SEO, content, paid search teams, and broader digital marketing efforts in the full episode.
Listen & subscribe to Lumar’s Human-First Digital Podcast
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Human-First Digital podcast on Spotify — or your podcast player of choice — to stay up-to-date with the latest insights and news from the world of SEO and website optimization and be the first to know when a new episode is released.
Episode Timestamps
- 00:00:11 — Welcome to Human-First Digital, a Lumar Podcast
- 00:00:29 — Meet David Gossage, Technical SEO Manager for E-Commerce Websites
- 00:05:20 — Understanding XPath Basics
- 00:07:27 — Overcoming XPath Challenges
- 00:11:36 — How Custom Extractions Enable Collaboration Across Web Teams
- 00:14:12 — Key Takeaways
Episode links
Follow guest David Gossage on LinkedIn.
Follow host Chris Spann on LinkedIn.
Follow Lumar on LinkedIn.
Explore Lumar’s technical SEO and website optimization platform.
Further learning on Custom Extractions & Xpath for SEO
- How to create XPaths for almost any Custom Extraction (by David Gossage)
- Watch David Gossage’s BrightonSEO talk on using XPath for custom extractions
- Lumar Webinar On-Demand: Advanced SEO Crawling Techniques – How to Use Custom Extractions
- Getting the Most Out of Lumar with Custom Extractions
- Custom Extraction Use Cases
- Explore Lumar’s Technical SEO Analytics
About Human-First Digital (HFD)
In this SEO podcast series, website optimization expert Chris Spann (Senior Technical SEO at Lumar) speaks to the brightest minds in SEO and digital optimization. The HFD podcast is brought to you by Lumar.
Ready to take your website to the next level? Explore Lumar’s full website optimization platform and our suite of enterprise-scale SEO, web accessibility, and site speed tools.
