Google releases link spam update

Google has released the link spam update. How does this affect your website and what do you have to do now to improve your rankings?

 

Google's Recommended Best practices

Google prescribes some ways to handle different links to avoid any violations that could hurt website rankings:

Links are one of the ways Google understands what content may be helpful to searchers, and they can be good for sites to receive, as long as they're well deserved. A best practice is to avoid methods of acquiring links that violate our guidelines against link schemes. In particular, if you're linking out to other sites, make sure to qualify those links appropriately. Here are some more specific guidelines to help site owners manage links that involve payment, sponsorship, or are otherwise commercial in nature.

Why links are important

Links are one of the ways Google understands what content may be helpful to searchers, and they can be good for sites to receive, as long as they’re well deserved. If your website contains links that are paid for (affiliate links, guest posts, sponsored posts), then these should be marked with the rel=”sponsored” attribute.

 

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How Google tackles link spam

The effectiveness of link spam has been greatly reduced over the past two decades. According to Google, the new link spam update is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages. Sites taking part in link spam will see changes in Search as those links are re-assessed by Google’s algorithms.

There is no penalty for the spam links but the spam links won’t be used in Google’s ranking algorithm.

 

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Official: How Google ranks web pages

Google has added a new feature to the US search results: When you visit an ‘About This Result’ panel — the three dots next to most results — you’ll get even more information about your results to help you make sense of the information and figure out which result will be most useful.

What exactly does Google show?

The ‘About This Result’ feature shows searchers information about some of these most important factors used by Google Search to connect results to their queries. Because just as these factors help Google decide if a result may be relevant, they may also help people decide what result is useful for them.

 

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Google Says: Don’t confuse search engines

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the job of an SEO is not to confuse search engines. If you want something to happen, ensure that Google can understand your web pages. Fortunately, the website audit tool helps you to do that as efficiently as possible.

How to remove errors and confusing elements

Eliminating website errors leads to higher rankings in search engines. An improved UX (user experience) leads to more sales.

  • Remove technical errors that keep search engines away.
  • Improve web page elements that can perform better.
  • Eliminate spelling mistakes.
  • Discover technical problems that only search engines see.

 

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How Google ranks search results and prevents spam

In a podcast that is also available on YouTube, Google’s John Mueller, Gary Illyes, Martin Splitt and Duy Nguyen spoke about how Google ranks search results and prevent spam.

How does Google rank web pages?

Google starts with a shortlist that contains around thousand results. For that list, Google uses pages that have relevant and topical content for the query. Google then applies many ranking signals to the shorter list. Each document in the list gets scores and numbers. The search results page is the result of that calculation.

Gary Illyes also said that the HTTPS ranking signal would never rearrange the search results. It is only makes a difference if two pages have the same score in the other factors.

How does Google prevent spam?

Google uses machine learning models to deal with obvious spam. That allows the Google search quality team to focus on more important work such as hacked spam, scams and other things the machine learning model cannot detect.

As Google’s machine learning models have a lot of years of data, Google is very confident that it works well.

 

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Google has released the July 2021 core update

Google has announced the release of the July 2021 core update on Twitter: “The July 2021 Core Update, previously announced, is now rolling out […] These typically take 1-2 weeks to finish.” Many webmasters reported a recovery from the ranking drops that happened after Google’s previous core update.

 

What you should do now

The July 2021 core update is the second part of the June 2021 core 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. Nothing in a core update is site-specific.

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.



Friday, August 6, 2021





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