Google News and SEO Update July 2021

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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