We Don’t Have 200+ Ranking Factors
“… we’ve kind of moved away from the over 200 ranking signals number, because it feels like even having a number like that is kind of misleading in the sense that, Oh Google has a spreadsheet with all of the ranking signals and they can just sort them by importance and tell me which ones they are. And that’s definitely not the case.”
Quantity Of Backlinks Doesn’t Matter
“… you could go off and create millions of links across millions of websites if you wanted to, and we could just ignore them all.
Or there could be one really good link from one website out there that is, for us, a really important sign that we should treat this website as something that is relevant because it has that one link… So the total number essentially is completely irrelevant.”
Dates Changing Wouldn't Improve Rankings
“I don’t think it would change anything with regards to search, and we definitely wouldn’t rank those pages differently in search just because you’re changing the date and time on a page.”
Customer Reviews Are Not A Ranking Factor
“As far as I know we don’t use the number of customers or reviews when it comes to web search, with regards to ranking. Sometimes we do pull that information out and we might show it as kind of a rich result in the search results.”
Might Take A Month To See Ranking Changes
“How long that takes… yeah… it’s hard to say… it’s really hard to say… to re-crawl that across a larger site that can take a bit of time, especially if you make bigger changes like across everything if you change the structure of your website.
I would assume something like that, just purely from a technical point of view would take… I don’t know… maybe a month.”
Removing Blog Comments May Impact Rankings
“I think it’s ultimately up to you. From our point of view we do see comments as a part of the content. We do also, in many cases, recognize that this is actually the comment section so we need to treat it slightly differently. But ultimately if people are finding your pages based on the comments there then, if you delete those comments, then obviously we wouldn’t be able to find your pages based on that.”
Core Web Vitals Is More Than A Tiebreaker
“It is a ranking factor, and it’s more than a tie-breaker, but it also doesn’t replace relevance. Depending on the sites you work on, you might notice it more, or you might notice it less…
The other thing to keep in mind with core web vitals is that it’s more than a random ranking factor, it’s also something that affects your site’s usability after it ranks (when people actually visit).”
Traffic Doesn’t Impact Core Web Vitals
“It doesn’t matter if millions of users are seeing that or just… I don’t know… thousands of users are seeing it… the pure number of visitors to your site is not a factor when it comes to core web vitals and generally not a factor for ranking either.”
Google My Business Is Essential For Local Search Rankings
“… it sounds like what you’re looking at is a local service or local business, essentially. And for that I would make sure that you really have a really strong Google My Business entry set up. Because that’s something that can be shown a little bit easier in the search results for queries like this.
And in particular, queries that include something like “near me,” it’s not that you need to rank for “near me” because near me is essentially, like… global. It’s not something specific on your website.
But rather what you need to do t here is just make sure that you have your location very clearly defined on your pages, so that we can recognize this location is associated with your website or with this page and the user is in that location.”
Word Count is Not a Ranking Factor
“We don’t use word count for ranking. It’s fine to use word counts for *yourself* as a guideline for your content, if it encourages better content from your writers.”
Original Page Titles Are Still Used For Rankings
“You never know how these things evolve over time, but at least at the moment it is the case that we continue to use what you have in your title tag, in your title element, as something that we can use for ranking.
It’s not like something that replaces everything for the website, but it is a factor that we use in there. Even if when we display the title for your page we swap out maybe that one keyword that you care about, we would still use that for ranking.”
E-A-T Is Not A Ranking Factor
“… it’s not something where I would say Google has an E-A-T score and it’s based on five links plus this plus that.
It’s more something that, our algorithms over time …we try to improve them, our quality raters try to review our algorithms and they do look at these things.
So there might be some overlap here but it’s not that there’s a technical factor that’s involved which would kind of take specific elements and use them as an SEO factor.”
Heading Tags Are A Strong Signal
“And when it comes to text on a page, a heading is a really strong signal telling us this part of the page is about this topic.
…whether you put that into an H1 tag or an H2 tag or H5 or whatever, that doesn’t matter so much.
But rather kind of this general signal that you give us that says… this part of the page is about this topic. And this other part of the page is maybe about a different topic.”
Keywords In The Domain Name Do Not Impact Rankings
“Just because a website has a keyword in its domain name doesn’t mean that it’s more relevant than others for that keyword.
In short, you don’t need to put keywords in the domain name.”
Put Unique Content Above The Fold
“The important part for us is really that there is some amount of unique content in the above the fold area. So if you have a banner on top, and you have a generic hero image on top, that’s totally fine. But some of the above the fold content should be unique for that page.”
Spelling And Grammar Are High Priority
“With regard to spelling errors, grammatical errors, I think that’s something that’s a bit more of almost like a gray zone in that on the one hand we have to be able to recognize what a page is about.
And if we can’t recognize that because there’s so many errors on the page in the text, then that makes it harder.
The other aspect is also that we try to find really high quality content on the web and sometimes it can appear that a page is lower quality content because it has a lot of grammatical and technical mistakes in the text.
I would almost say spelling and grammar is probably for most websites a higher priority than broken HTML.”
Many Internal Links Can Lower Their Value
“Yes and no. I think, in the sense that we do use the internal links to better understand the structure of a page, and you can imagine the situation where if we’re trying to understand the structure of a website, with the different pages that are out there, if all pages are linked to all other pages on the website, where you essentially have like a complete internal linking across every single page, then there’s no real structure there.
So regardless of what PageRank, and authority, and passing things like that, you’re essentially not providing a clear structure of the website. And that makes it harder for search engines to understand the context of the individual pages within your website. So that’s the way that I would look at it there.”
Anchor Text Should Provide Context
“With regards to internal links you’re giving us a signal of context. So basically you’re saying, in this part of my website you’ll find information about this topic. And that’s what you would use as the anchor text for those internal links…
With regards to external links, if you’re linking out to other people’s websites, the same things. Like, supply some context why people should go and click on this link, what kind of extra information it gives.”
Long Anchor Text Gives Google More Context
“I don’t think we do anything special to the length of words in the anchor text. But rather, we use this anchor text as a way to provide extra context for the individual pages.
Sometimes if you have a longer anchor text that gives us a little bit more information. Sometimes it’s kind of like just a collection of different keywords.”
404 Errors Are Normal
“I don’t think that would look unusual to us. It’s not like we would see that as a quality signal or anything. The only time where I think 404s would start to look like something problematic for us is when the home page starts returning 404s. Then that might be a situation where we go: “oh, I don’t know if this site is actually still up.”
But if parts of the site are 404, like, whatever. It’s like a technical thing, like, it doesn’t matter.”
Keep URLs The Same When Revamping A Site
“For revamps there’s sometimes a few things that come together and it’s sometimes tricky to figure out exactly what all is happening.
But the main thing that I would watch out for when you’re doing a revamp is to make sure:
That the URLs stay the same as much as possible so that you don’t change the URL structure.
That the internal linking stays the same as much as possible.
That the content and the layout on the pages stays the same as much as possible.”
Multiple H1 Tags On The Same Page Is Fine
“You can use H1 tags as often as you want on a page. There’s no limit, neither upper or lower bound.
Your site is going to rank perfectly fine with no H1 tags or with five H1 tags.”
Nofollow Links In Guest Posts
“The part that’s problematic is the links — if you’re providing the content/the links, then those links shouldn’t be passing signals & should have the rel-sponsored / rel-nofollow attached. It’s fine to see it as a way of reaching a broader audience.
Essentially if the link is within the guest post, it should be nofollow, even if it’s a “natural” link you’re adding there.
FWIW none of this is new, and I’m not aware of any plans to ramp up manual reviews of this. We catch most of these algorithmically anyway.”
Google Prefers JSON-LD Structured Data
“We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new structured data that are kind of come out for JSON-LD first. So that’s what we prefer.”
Keyword-Rich Meta Titles Not Against Google’s Guidelines
“It’s not against our webmaster guidelines. It’s not something that we would say is problematic. I think, at most, it’s something where you could improve things if you had a better fitting title because we understand the relevance a little bit better.
And I suspect the biggest improvement with a title in that regard there is if you can create a title that matches what the user is actually looking for then it’s a little bit easier for them to actually click on a search result because they think “oh this really matches what I was looking for.”
Google Indexes Mobile Versions Of Pages By Default
“The change with mobile first indexing is that we’ll use the mobile version (m-dot) as the version for indexing, instead of the www (desktop) version. For most sites, this change has already happened. If your site is already indexed with mobile, nothing will change.”
Google Doesn’t Index All Pages
“The other thing to keep in mind with regards to indexing, is it’s completely normal that we don’t index everything off of the website.
So if you look at any larger website or any even midsize or smaller website, you’ll see fluctuations in indexing.
It’ll go up and down and it’s never going to be the case that we index 100% of everything that’s on a website.
So if you have a hundred pages and (I don’t know) 80 of them are being indexed, then I wouldn’t see that as being a problem that you need to fix.”
Low Traffic Does Not Mean Low Quality
“On some websites, pages that get low traffic are often almost like correlated with low quality as well but that doesn’t have to be the case.
On other websites it might must just be that a lot of traffic goes to the head pages and the tail pages are just as useful but they’re useful for a much smaller audience.
So they get barely any traffic.
From our point of view, those websites are still useful and it’s still high quality.
I wouldn’t remove it just because it doesn’t get traffic.”