Algorithm updates
23/06/20 There has been a Google update which looks to have mainly affected government websites.
6/07/20 There also looks to have been an update around this time, but only a small one.
23/07/20 Another Google update was seen around this date.
GoogleBot
The website robot from Google that crawls our sites to help rank them can now add products to your shopping cart.
This is quite a hard thing for them to do and an important update.
Why would they want to do this?
Maybe they would like to know the full buying experience a person has?
Maybe they want to check that the site is really a shopping site?
But more than likely they want to compare the price you are advertising matches the price you actually pay.
How to better your image search results
Google has said this month that if you use a stock photo on your site the chances are it will not rank for that image. This is because there will more than likely be many copies of the same stock photo.
If however, you create your own images then they will have a better chance of ranking in image search.
Stop The Press!
Link building is aloud again!
For the past several years – maybe longer – Google has said all link building is bad.
This month they have said, “not all link building is bad and there are plenty of ways to build links safely”.
Two things to take from this:
- Google doesn’t always tell you the whole truth.
- You should be link building. 🙂
404 Pages
Some webmasters are blocking search engines from access/finding any 404 pages. Google this month recommended that you don’t do this and just let them handle what is crawled.
Are Links from sites that are lower quality harming your site?
Quick answer: No.
Longer answer: No they are not, don’t worry.
That said, it won’t look good if you get 10,000’s of links from very low-quality sites.
WordPress Now Has Sitemaps
From the latest version of WordPress – version 5.5 – it will have automatic sitemaps built into the platform.
You will now not need a plugin to do this.
Talking about WordPress, Bing has released a plugin that automatically indexes new content into their search engine, worth installing!
Does having a keyword in the domain name help?
Short answer: Yes
Longer answer: Yes but not for too much longer as Google is looking to address the weight given to domain names. This might only be in local searches, we will see.
Will negative reviews harm my ranking positions?
Google this month confirmed that negative reviews will NOT harm your websites ranking positions.
Links are NOT the most important ranking factor!
There, I said it.
Content and quality of content are probably the most important ranking factor now.
That’s it for this month, please share with family and friends if you think they need some SEO news in their lives!