SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: July 27, 2021
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Google launched a new link spam algorithm update, reminded us about the nofollow attributes and warned us to use them. So far, I am not seeing too much around this update outside of what rolled out over the weekend, which may be unrelated to this link spam update. Google’s John Mueller said the old speed updates were likely replaced by the page experience update. Bing is testing an image button in the snippet to load images in a carousel format from that site. Google has AR based olympics athletes in Search and Discover. Google published its timeline for the Privacy Sandbox.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Google Link Spam Update Is Here
Google said it began rolling out a new algorithm update for Google Search named the link spam update. This update “is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages,” Google wrote. It will roll out from yesterday, July 26th, over a two week period or so. - Assume The Google Page Experience Update Replaced The Old Google Speed Update
Google has launched numerous search algorithms around speed in the past. The question some folks have is does Google still use those old ones or does the new Page Experience Update replace those. John Mueller of Google said he would assume the Page Experience Update replaced the old ones. - Bing Search With Images From This Search Result Button
Bing has a search feature that lets searchers see relevant images from a search result for a specific query. There is an “images” button next to the search result snippet, that when you click on it, it pops up a carousel of relevant images from that site. - Olympic Athletes In 3D & AR In Google Search
Google now has some of the more well known Olympic athletes in 3D and AR (augmented reality) in Google Search. You can easily access it by going to Google.com on mobile or in the Google App and scrolling down until you find the “athletes in 3d” section. - Google Publishes The Privacy Sandbox Timeline
On Friday, Google published a detailed timeline for the rollout of its Privacy Sandbox. Google said this “timeline reflects when we expect new technologies will be ready to support key use cases, so that Chrome can responsibly phase out third-party cookies.” - GooglePlex Back To Work Signage
When I showed you that Peter the Greeter was back at Google, some of you may have noticed the big Google logo signage on the GooglePlex was different. It might be a custom back to work Google Doodle f
SEO
- 6 Timeless SEO Tips Content Marketers Can Do Now, Online Marketing Blog
- How to Use SERP Features to Inform Your Content Strategy, Moz
- Offense vs. defense SEO, Kevin Indig
- Should Marketers Examine Server-Side Rendering?, OnCrawl
- We saw bonkers search traffic – where’s it from (and why)?, WTF is SEO?
- What Are Sitelinks?, BruceClay
- Why Now is a Great Time to Begin (or Pivot) in Your SEO Career, Matt Tutt
- How To Compare Crawls, Screaming Frog
- Thoughts on Google’s Algorithmic News Inclusion Process, SEO for Google News
- YouTube SEO Study, Semrush
SEARCHENGINES
Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages
I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.
In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”
John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”
Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.
Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.
Here are those new posts in context:
I’d say add both. Lol
— Jeremy Rivera (@JeremyRiveraSEO) April 11, 2024
Sure. But also, save yourself the work completely :-).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
Re-reading your initial post – if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped. They do nothing. If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link. I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
… but still… is this a dumb idea?
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) April 11, 2024
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:
I would just ignore them, Google ignores them too. Sometimes they’re just more visible in tools, but that doesn’t mean they’re a problem.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 18, 2024
And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”
Forum discussion at X.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Needs Very Few Links To Rank Pages; Links Are Less Important
Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search “needs very few links to rank pages.”
Gary reportedly said, “We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”
I am quoting Patrick Stox who is quoting what he heard Gary say on stage at the event. Here is Patrick’s post where Gary did a rare reply:
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Gary said this a year ago, also in 2022 and other times as well. We previously covered that Google said links would likely become even less important in the future. And even Matt Cutts, the former Googler, said something similar about eight years ago and the truth is, links are weighted a lot less than it was eight years ago and that trend continues. A couple of years ago, Google said links are not the most important Google search ranking factor.
Of course, many SEOs think Google lies about this.
Judith Lewis interviewed Gary Illyes at the SERP Conf this past Friday.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Core Update Flux, AdSense Ad Intent, California Link Tax & More
For the original iTunes version, click here.
The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out, almost 6 weeks now, and we saw two shifts of ranking volatility, both mid-week and the weekend before. Google’s Danny Sullivan went on the defensive on search quality and forum listings in the search results. Google’s site reputation abuse spam policy will be fought both algorithmically and through manual actions. Google responded to The Verge mocking its search rankings over best printer. Google Search Console has a new unused ownership tokens page. Some sites may see the Google Indexing API work for a limited time on unsupported content types. And having two sites won’t result in your sites search ranking decline. BingBot now fully supports Brotli compression and will test Zstd compression soon. Google Search is testing thumbs-up and down buttons for product carousels. Google is testing new sitelinks designs. Google Notes on Search may not go away in May. Google Maps no longer supports draft reviews. Google Maps released a bunch of new maps, directions, travel and EV features. Google Ads Demand Gen campaigns now support AI image generation. Google Ads is testing a similar product carousel. Google Ads reminds advertisers that ad customizers are going away. Google Ads is testing a new horizontal ad card format. Google AdSense has these new ad intent formats. Google AdSense publishers are reporting lower RPM earnings since mid-February. Google threatens to drop links to California news publishers amongst link tax bill. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
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