Google News and SEO Update June 2021

Google Says Quality is a Site-wide Ranking Signal

In a video on YouTube, Google’s John Mueller said that Google needs to understand the overall website. Google ranks single web pages but they also consider the quality of the website.

“We would probably see a mix. So on the one hand we do index things page by page, we rank things page by page but there’s some signals that we can’t reliably collect on a per page basis where we do need to have a bit of a better understanding of the overall site. And quality kind of falls into that category.

So in a case where you’re significantly improving the quality of one page of a website then that does help that one page to improve a bit in ranking but kind of the overall effect of the whole website’s quality that’s something that takes a bit of time and where we really have to see that okay overall all of these things have changed. So kind of like more than just that one page. And then we can kind of see that website as a whole as being a little bit better with regards to quality.”

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Google: you should check 5xx errors on your website

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that you should check the 5xx errors on your website. Most website audit tools can help you to find 5xx errors on your website quickly and easily.

5xx errors are based on what your server returned at the time. Maybe there were temporary issues, if you don't see them now. I'd try to find out more from your host, to make sure it's not a regular occurrence.
(Also, those URLs are a bit excessive – there's no SEO value in that)

— ?? John ?? (@JohnMu) May 28, 2021

How to find 5xx errors on your website

Regular technical audits of your website are important. Servers can have problems, links can change, and there can be many other things that can have a negative impact on the search engine rankings of your website. Finding 5xx errors (and other errors) is very easy with website audit tools.

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Two Google core updates (one in June, another in July)

Google has announced two core updates for this summer. As not all planned improvements for the June 2021 update are quite ready, there will be another core update in July.

What you should know about the core update

The June 2021 Core Update is rolling out since June, 2nd. As is typical with these updates, it will typically take about one to two weeks to fully roll out.

The June 2021 Core update will be followed by the July 2021 Core update. Some of Google’s planned improvements for the June 2021 update aren’t quite ready, so we’re moving ahead with the parts that are, then we will follow with the rest with the July 2021 update.

Most sites won’t notice either of these updates, as is typical with any core updates. Of course, any core update can produce drops or gains for some content. Because of the two-part nature of this release, it’s possible a very small slice of content might see changes in June that reverse in July.

Nothing in a core update is site-specific.

What you should do now

Google’s advice for core updates remains the same. Core updates do not penalize websites. For example, cleaning your links won’t help if your rankings drop after a core update. Instead, it’s likely that other websites do something better than your website.

If you want to get high rankings with Google’s new ranking algorithm, just do the usual things that are needed to get high rankings:

1. Create web pages with good content

Your website should contain many pages that are related to the topic of your website. If the content of your website is unique, it will be much easier to get high rankings on Google (and other search engines).

Optimize the pages of your website for your keywords and make sure that your web pages are error-free.

2. Get good links from other websites

If your web pages have good links from related websites, they will rank higher than other pages that do not have these links. Analyze the links that point to your site and improve the links that point to your web pages.

If there are unnatural links to your web pages, you should remove these bad links.

3. Make sure that your website is mobile-ready

Most people visit websites on smartphones. For that reason, it is very important that your website works with mobile phones.

4. Use structured data markup code

Although structured data markup code is not necessary to get high rankings, rich results help to improve the look of your website on Google’s search results pages.

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