Google has long said they don’t use CTR as a ranking factor, although they sometimes use it when doing experiments in the search results to judge quality of the serps. The question came up (again) in today’s webmaster hangout, and John Mueller went into detail about what he sees as indirect benefits from CTR in […]
Archives for January 2016
Why Google Doesn’t Use Google Analytics for Ranking Purposes
Multiple Googlers have said many times that Google doesn’t use Google Analytics data for ranking purposes, but have never really gone into detail about why this is. In today’s hangout, when John Mueller was commenting about CTR not being a ranking factor (again, something they have said multiple times) he got into specifics about why […]
Submit Reconsideration Requests in Same Language as Website
If you work on international sites, Gary Illyes from Google made an interesting comment about filing reconsideration requests – make sure you are filing the request in the same language as your website. TIL: Writing a reconsideration request in English if the site is not English is a brilliant way to shoot yourself in the […]
Links from Forms Don’t Pass PageRank
This was an interesting question in today’s hangout with John Mueller. Someone asked about the potential impact of an affiliate/advertising link that was placed inside of a form tag as a user action, and whether this could be a problem from a link perspective. Now links inside forms cannot have a nofollow attribute attached to […]
Valid HTML Not a Ranking Factor But Invalid Can Cause These Issues
In the changes yesterday that Google made to their webmaster guidelines, Google changed the phrasing of “clear HTML” to “valid HTML.” So as expected, that phrase got a lot of attention, especially from those who advocate for compliant W3C validation, which Google links to. But is valid HTML a ranking factor? In today’s webmaster hangout, […]
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: Breakdown of All Changes Made
As part of Google’s redesign of Google Search Console, they have released a brand new version of their Webmaster Guidelines. Here is a line-by-line of every change, addition and removal from the previous version. So let’s get started! Introduction The first change is the ommission of a single phrase within their opening paragraph. Previously, it […]
Tips from Google on Structuring a Disavow File
While most SEOs who do disavows for clients have their own ways of making sense of their files, whether adding comments or making multiple files and combining them later into one before uploading to Google, John Mueller from Google was asked about advice on structuring disavows files to submit to Google. While some of the […]
Google Penguin & Spammy Links from Competitors
Negative SEO is always a hot topic, since the idea that a competitor can merely point a ton of crappy backlinks at a site to see it penalized is always a scary one to site owners. John Mueller was asked about spammy backlinks from a negative SEO perspective, specifically as it relates to Penguin. Since […]
Should you Disavow Links from Hacked Sites?
In yesterday’s webmaster hangout, the question was brought up about whether site owners need to disavow links from hacked sites. If a website identified as hacked by google (such as example.com) shows as linking to a site in webmaster tools, do we need to/should we disavow it? Or is google automatically not counting this? If […]
When Google Favors Shorter URLs Over Longer Ones in Ranking
URLs were a popular topic in yesterday’s Google hangout with John Mueller. Along with how important keywords in URLs are, he was also asked about the overall length of a URL and if shorter versus longer URLs played a part in ranking. What definitely plays a role here is when we have two URLs that […]