College Board - Portfolio

College Board started out as a 3 month contract, but transformed into a full time opportunity 3 years later.

For over 100 years, College Board has connected students with college success and opportunities, most notably through their AP and SAT programs.

Getting the opportunity to work in the education space and work on multiple large enterprise web properties was very exciting. While consulting for College Board, I helped with providing SEO strategies and content on the launching of over 70+ microsites, mostly on the subdomain of collegeboard.org as well as migrated from collegeboard.com to collegeboard.org.

One of the most interesting opportunities with search while working with College Board was BigFuture. So much of the design and technical architecture was built around client side JavaScript. Although I was not part of the project initially, it was a major red flag when I learned about how the site was being built as so much of the site would not be indexable by search engines. Reminder this was back in 2012 when client side render was first gaining traction. Since I had a technical background I quickly suggested and got everyone up to speed on using escaped_fragment as this was the recommended way get client side content indexed in Google. (Google has now since deprecated this)

Although traffic dipped post launch as expected, the ability to get content cralwed and indexed because of the escaped_fragment solution was a major help in get back on track. This renderting solution was also used for College Board's internal site search as even Adobe's own tool could not render client side JavaScript. This project really highlights why technical SEO is important and how technical action was used to help improve search results. Search Engine bots have come a long way with rendering client side JavaScript, just take a peak at Puppeteer and you can see and and even test how changes to the DOM could have a dramatic impact to search.