Google Updates & SEO Takeaways.

Signs of Rollback of Google May update in the third week of Jun 2020

SEO Community has claimed that core changes happened on their ranking results!

Premium SEO tools like SEMrush have claimed that there is a sign of rollback of Google May 2020 update.

A screenshot to SEMrush Sensor graph, shows clearly the big chunk of ranking changes that have happened on the 23rd of June 2020

SEO Takeaways

1.
“Guest posts are an Unnatural way of earning backlinks?”

Google has been making so many updates towards dealing with backlinks and when it comes to fighting “Unnatural Backlinks “the rules are pretty aggressive!

That’s why you need to pay more attention to the link attribute values which you define for each link and be aware of the signals inside the content.

To be on the safe side and follow the rules of Google you need to always verify the relationship with each of the outbound links!

When you have any external link make sure to mark your link with the right value that defines it:

• To mark “Sponsored links” that are advertisements or paid placements use the value rel=”Sponsored”:

• To mark links in the comments for user-generated content use the value rel=”ugc”.

• If you don’t wish to pass SEO authority for certain links use the value rel=”nofollow ”

• And finally, the “Do-follow” link, which will be the case if none of the above values are defined, which means to pass SEO authority to the external links.

Following the right value to define your links will always save you from dealing with unnatural links. As Google bots would only define a link unnatural if the value was not correct. For example if you have a promotional article and you did not use rel=sponsored.Another example is to use DO follow links while the article content is promotional etc.

“That’s why defining the goal of your article is very important and critical ”

TIPS

“When your goal is to pass SEO value for a specific website”

▪ Don’t mention “sponsored” or “guest post” in the content of it

▪ Add (1-2) internal links for each article

▪ Try to add/ask to add citations or references for the published article

▪ Content should be not less than 500 unique words

▪ You can add Author bio but the link of the author should not be followed

Note: use rel=noopener” in all cases for external links

2.
“Do Author Pages help in Ranking?”

“Author pages make it trustworthy, but it’s not a ranking factor.”

This is how John Mueller answered the question.

WHAT DOES DID JOHN MUELLER MEANT BY “TRUSTWORTHY”?

Trustworthy here is referring to the QRG (Quality Rater Guidelines) and E-A-T T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) and both of them are recommended by Google and are important for you to be following up on.

So, Author pages indirectly help in Ranking.

What about BIO?

“Are Authors Bio important?”

Again, Authors Bio is also following the QRG and building trust with users but they are not a ranking factor.

TIP FORM Chain Reaction SEO TEAM,

“We believe adding BIO will enhance the user engagement in some cases, for example if a news or niche targeting website opened the comments section and people have read the authors bio, it might encourage them to leave a comment and/or ask a question. This engagement will lead to better content and better UX signals, thus better ranking!”

3.
Google Explains Which Pages Should be Removed

“Which low traffic pages to no-index and which ones to not worry about?”

Google analyses web pages by both page level and overall website level. This means you need to look after every webpage you publish, at the same time you need to know that Google has an overview for the website pages quality and quantity, where Google treat news websites differently from a services website, etc…

And here you need to pay attention when you define your website pages as low quality or high quality. For example, having pages with low traffic coming to them is not enough to define them as low quality and no-index them!

There is a whole metric you need to consider before defining these pages and take actions on them;

• The page content is thin

• The page receives low traffic

• The page has outdated information

• The page overall design, font, and content

• The page is SEO optimized using primary and secondary keywords

Considering the above will give you the chance to work on updating your pages, adding more valuable content and enhance the design and the overall experience instead of no-indexing them which is something you better avoid.

4
Google: Rankings for New Sites Could Fluctuate Up to a Year

IF you have a new fresh website, then it’s normal to Google that the ranking is Fluctuating.

Why?

New sites are fresh ones, which Google still try to test and let the users test them and based on that ranking will boost sometimes and drop some other times.

More reasons why new website rankings could fluctuate!

New websites usually have poor backlinks profiles, unclear UX signals to Google and bugs that happens in the first couple of months or year, so until it gets stabilized in the eyes of Google, it will still bounce.

5
Your website is hit with thousands of spam links via a negative black Hat SEO campaign?

“Don’t worry!”

This is what Google’s John Mueller advised, that Google Algorithm is smart enough to recognize this activity, so there is no action needed from your end on this.

But my tip here to you is to do the disavow exercise anyway to make sure that you will not get penalized if the algorithm didn’t work well!

6
“Google shares how to optimize for mobile first index”

Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically.

TIPS FROM Chain Reaction

How to make sure you are optimizing your website for mobile first index!

1. Make sure that content is the same on desktop and mobile

2. Use the same clear and meaningful headings on the mobile site as we have on the desktop site.

3. Make sure both mobile and desktop sites have the same structured data, such as Breadcrumb, Product, and VideoObject structured data.

4. Use the same meta robots’ tags on the mobile and desktop site. If we use a different meta robots tag on the mobile site (especially noindex or nofollow), Google may fail to crawl and index your page when your site is enabled for mobile-first indexing.

5. Don’t lazy-load primary content upon user interaction: Googlebot won’t load content that requires user interactions (for example, swiping, clicking, or typing) to load.