What do the age of your site, your headline H1/H2 preference, bounce rate, and shared hosting all have in common? You might've gotten a hint from the title: not a single one of them directly affects your Google rankings. In this rather comforting Whiteboard Friday, Rand lists out ten factors commonly thought to influence your rankings that Google simply doesn't care about.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about things that do not affect your Google rankings.
So it turns out lots of people have this idea that anything and everything that you do with your website or on the web could have an impact. Well, some things have an indirect impact and maybe even a few of these do. I'll talk through those. But tons and tons of things that you do don't directly affect your Google rankings. So I'll try and walk through some of these that I've heard or seen questions about, especially in the recent past.
1. The age of your website.
First one, longstanding debate: the age of your website. Does Google care if you registered your site in 1998 or 2008 or 2016? No, they don't care at all. They only care the degree to which your content actually helps people and that you have links and authority signals and those kinds of things. Granted, it is true there's correlation going in this direction. If you started a site in 1998 and it's still going strong today, chances are good that you've built up lots of links and authority and equity and all these kinds of signals that Google does care about.
But maybe you've just had a very successful first two years, and you only registered your site in 2015, and you've built up all those same signals. Google is actually probably going to reward that site even more, because it's built up the same authority and influence in a very small period of time versus a much longer one.
2. Whether you do or don't use Google apps and services.
So people worry that, "Oh, wait a minute. Can't Google sort of monitor what's going on with my Google Analytics account and see all my data there and AdSense? What if they can look inside Gmail or Google Docs?"
Google, first off, the engineers who work on these products and the engineers who work on search, most of them would quit right that day if they discovered that Google was peering into your Gmail account to discover that you had been buying shady links or that you didn't look as authoritative as you really were on the web or these kinds of things. So don't fear the use of these or the decision not to use them will hurt or harm your rankings in Google web search in any way. It won't.
3. Likes, shares, plus-ones, tweet counts of your web pages.
So you have a Facebook counter on there, and it shows that you have 17,000 shares on that page. Wow, that's a lot of shares. Does Google care? No, they don't care at all. In fact, they're not even looking at that or using it. But what if it turns out that many of those people who shared it on Facebook also did other activities that resulted in lots of browser activity and search activity, click-through activity, increased branding, lower pogo-sticking rates, brand preference for you in the search results, and links? Well, Google does care about a lot of those things. So indirectly, this can have an impact. Directly, no. Should you buy 10,000 Facebook shares? No, you should not.
4. What about raw bounce rate or time on site?
Well, this is sort of an interesting one. Let's say you have a time on site of two minutes, and you look at your industry averages, your benchmarks, maybe via Google Analytics if you've opted in to sharing there, and you see that your industry benchmarks are actually lower than average. Is that going to hurt you in Google web search? Not necessarily. It could be the case that those visitors are coming from elsewhere. It could be the case that you are actually serving up a faster-loading site and you're getting people to the information that they need more quickly, and so their time on site is slightly lower or maybe even their bounce rate is higher.
But so long as pogo-sticking type of activity, people bouncing back to the search results and choosing a different result because you didn't actually answer their query, so long as that remains fine, you're not in trouble here. So raw bounce rate, raw time on site, I wouldn't worry too much about that.
5. The tech under your site's hood.
Are you using certain JavaScript libraries like Node or React, one is Facebook, one is Google. If you use Facebook's, does Google give you a hard time about it? No. Facebook might, due to patent issues, but anyway we won't worry about that. .NET or what if you're coding up things in raw HTML still? Just fine. It doesn't matter. If Google can crawl each of these URLs and see the unique content on there and the content that Google sees and the content visitors see is the same, they don't care what's being used under the hood to deliver that to the browser.
6. Having or not having a knowledge panel on the right-hand side of the search results.
Sometimes you get that knowledge panel, and it shows around the web and some information sometimes from Wikipedia. What about site links, where you search for your brand name and you get branded site links? The first few sets of results are all from your own website, and they're sort of indented. Does that impact your rankings? No, it does not. It doesn't impact your rankings for any other search query anyway.
It could be that showing up here and it probably is that showing up here means you're going to get a lot more of these clicks, a higher share of those clicks, and it's a good thing. But does this impact your rankings for some other totally unbranded query to your site? No, it doesn't at all. I wouldn't stress too much. Over time, sites tend to build up site links and knowledge panels as their brands become bigger and as they become better known and as they get more coverage around the web and online and offline. So this is not something to stress about.
7. What about using shared hosting or some of the inexpensive hosting options out there?
Well, directly, this is not going to affect you unless it hurts load speed or up time. If it doesn't hurt either of those things and they're just as good as they were before or as they would be if you were paying more or using solo hosting, you're just fine. Don't worry about it.
8. Use of defaults that Google already assumes.
So when Google crawls a site, when they come to a site, if you don't have a robots.txt file, or you have a robots.txt file but it doesn't include any exclusions, any disallows, or they reach a page and it has no meta robots tag, they're just going to assume that they get to crawl everything and that they should follow all the links.
Using things like the meta robots "index, follow" or using, on an individual link, a rel=follow inside the href tag, or in your robots.txt file specifying that Google can crawl everything, doesn't boost anything. They just assume all those things by default. Using them in these places, saying yes, you can do the default thing, doesn't give you any special benefit. It doesn't hurt you, but it gives you no benefit. Google just doesn't care.
9. Characters that you use as separators in your title element.
So the page title element sits in the header of a document, and it could be something like your brand name and then a separator and some words and phrases after it, or the other way around, words and phrases, separator, the brand name. Does it matter if that separator is the pipe bar or a hyphen or a colon or any other special character that you would like to use? No, Google does not care. You don't need to worry about it. This is a personal preference issue.
Now, maybe you've found that one of these characters has a slightly better click-through rate and preference than another one. If you've found that, great. We have not seen one broadly on the web. Some people will say they particularly like the pipe over the hyphen. I don't think it matters too much. I think it's up to you.
10. What about using headlines and the H1, H2, H3 tags?
Well, I've heard this said: If you put your headline inside an H2 rather than an H1, Google will consider it a little less important. No, that is definitely not true. In fact, I'm not even sure the degree to which Google cares at all whether you use H1s or H2s or H3s, or whether they just look at the content and they say, "Well, this one is big and at the top and bold. That must be the headline, and that's how we're going to treat it. This one is lower down and smaller. We're going to say that's probably a sub-header."
Whether you use an H5 or an H2 or an H3, that is your CSS on your site and up to you and your designers. It is still best practices in HTML to make sure that the headline, the biggest one is the H1. I would do that for design purposes and for having nice clean HTML and CSS, but I wouldn't stress about it from Google's perspective. If your designers tell you, "Hey, we can't get that headline in H1. We've got to use the H2 because of how our style sheets are formatted." Fine. No big deal. Don't stress.
Normally on Whiteboard Friday, we would end right here. But today, I'd like to ask. These 10 are only the tip of the iceberg. So if you have others that you've seen people say, "Oh, wait a minute, is this a Google ranking factor?" and you think to yourself, "Ah, jeez, no, that's not a ranking factor," go ahead and leave them in the comments. We'd love to see them there and chat through and list all the different non-Google ranking factors.
Thanks, everyone. See you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Hey Rand,
I would add this to the list - "Particular Length Size of the Textual Content on a Page".
No, there is no fixed length of the content you should write on a web page for better rankings. As long as you are answering your user's query, you are good to go with any length.
Thanks
I'm not sure how this comment got a thumbs down...
Someone probably spent years writing content that's exactly xxx words long and got pissed :D
My understanding is that Google prefers more text to less text, more content to less content. Is this still true? Or are you saying that extremely long vs. extremely thin content makes no difference to Google, as long as visitors behave in such a way as to indicate they are satisfied by the content (perhaps indicated by clicking through to an interior page)?
See: "As long as you are answering your user's query, you are good to go with any length."
I would add that you can sometimes go above and beyond and answer similar and related queries as well (10x content). For instance, if someone is wondering "Is guacamole safe to eat after it turns brown?", you could include the answer as well as a video or instructions on the best ways to keep it from turning brown.
Yes, I understand that point. I understand that it's absurd to aim for some one particular ideal length. My question is from a different perspective. It is: if all else is equal, are more words better than less? It would seem so, on logical grounds.
For example, for the sake of argument (this is not a realistic example, but it's simple enough to make the distinction clear): Say a particular page has only one word on it, "cat." Say another page has two words, "cat" and "dog." Which page is more likely to rank for the keywords, "animal," "pet," "domesticated" (not to mention "dog")? I would think the second, because more words give Google more raw data and more context.
So, in principle, it would seem: if all else is equal, more words (assuming they are relevant) = more raw data / more context for Google. Is there something I'm missing here?
I believe that in reality longer content doesn't equal higher rankings. It's the inner structure of the content, the proper way you serve the information, the way you answer the query, the words you pick - these are, in my opinion, some of the essentials, which tackle the pure length of the content.
Chuck, I think you are on the right track, but you also have to realize that Google can understand some basic context for certain queries. Take featured snippets. Google knows that some questions are really asking for very simple answers.
If you have a page that wants to rank for "how to make a bird house" you probably need enough content to cover what making a birdhouse on your own from scratch would need, and the steps required. What you would not need is a one million word article that listed every type of bird living in every type of climate, which types of birds migrate south for the winter, which types of materials provide varying degrees of protection from every element, which color feathers each bird is likely to leave behind in your new birdhouse, how to chase away certain types of birds that you don't want, and, and, and ... you get the idea. The sheer idea of "more content" can certainly be taken to the extreme. Will expanding a 200 word birdhouse guide to 500 words (if they are all very helpful in the actual building of the birdhouse) help Google's understanding and probably lead to better user metrics? Very likely. Will taking that 500 word guide and expanding it to 10,000 words do the same? Doubtful.
A good way to go is reverse engineering for your content length! If you see another page ranking well for the term you want, consider organizing your content in a similar fashion and with similar word count. For example, I find that higher word count is often associated with articles that rank well for "reviews" queries.
Thank you Justin, Ethan and Liz. So integrating your points with my own, I'm concluding that the ideal number of words needed to answer a query so as to rank on Google is contextual, and that more words are better only if the additional words are relevant to the topic of the search as determined by the contextual needs of the searcher. And, as Liz suggested, it would seem that there are also particular instances where more is essentially better because the page must fulfill the needs of a variety of searchers, each with somewhat unique contexts. To expand on her example, if a variety of people are searching for reviews of plumbers with a variety of specialized criteria for each search (i.e., specialities or the servicing of a particular town), the more specialities and towns referenced in the reviews (i.e., the more reviews, the more words), the better.
Right on! Dovetails nicely with the WBF from last month: https://moz.com/blog/blog-post-length-frequency
Absolutely. The same goes for keyword density, while we're at it
Wow, I did not know that. thanks for the info
Hi Rand,
Thanks for the entertaining WBF.
Here are a few contributions for your list:
Cheers,
Eric
Hello Eric, so CTR is not an importan part of SEO neither a ranking factor (if it´s not manipulated)? Greetings
I'm not sure about the meta descriptions. I had a large, well established site that auto-generated meta descriptions from the first x characters of body text.
I manually updated the descriptions and saw the page rank increase 10 positions on average, 60 positions at most. No other changes were made at that time. I've seen this happen several times now. It seems especially effective in non-English content.
I think this could also help if the content on the pages is very thin. If the pages are image heavy or have no dedicated content section to optimize on the page, the meta description can add keyword targeted content to an otherwise unspecified (in Google's eyes) page.
Thanks Eric! A few followups on those:
Appreciate the contributions :-)
Hi Rand sir,
That mean meta description does not affect on google ranking.but i think if you have a most promising meta description that satisfy searcher's query than it affects on google ranking.
I'm curious about article length. An example of a place I see this repeatedly conflicting with the common agreement in this discussion that length does not matter is with recipes. Food bloggers are now writing long posts about their days and preferences with maybe a little about the dish thrown in that all shows up before recipes - because the recipe itself is too short to rank. This leads to all of the highly ranked recipes containing a lot of useless commentary that needs to be scrolled through because it is successful for SEO. In this case answering the query is not what gets you ranking, filling a page with words does.
Rand are you sure about hosting. If yes, can you release some whitepaper on your research. I can see some special success for few projects. Hope it works for me. Even a six month old domain.
So, we should just remove meta-tags from all pages now, if they're of no use?
Does any other system use them?
Well meta descriptions do help in rankings.. i have seen ranking jumps from 2nd to 1st page just after after updating meta description.
They do help you in improving CTR as well as relevancy to your On-Page Content.
Hi Rand,
I have a feeling this post will get a lot of links from the Q&A forum because it answers a lot of recurring questions!
Another one that seems to come up weekly in Moz Q&A is people panicking about small decreases in their DA as if it will negatively impact their organic traffic. G doesn't care about your DA!
Although there may be correlations with higher DA and higher rankings, it needs to be understood that the way DA is measured, fluctuations have to be expected and it does not directly impact your rankings or organic traffic.
Cheers,
David
100% agree! I did a whiteboard back in June on DA/PA and how they don't affect rankings and should be treated as competitive comparison metrics: https://moz.com/blog/link-count-metrics
Hey Rand,
about the header tags: Some publishers have already switched to using the H1 / H2 elements for SEO purposes exclusively, so that not the headline, but, for instance, the breadcrumb or the last portion of it, is marked as H1, and in turn, the big bold headline (which is written for the user and not for the search engine) gets an H2 tag instead. Google must have found out about that "misuse" 'cause it sometimes (but not always!) really takes the big bold headline (despite the fact that it's an H2 or just a P or even DIV element) for the SERP snippet title instead of the H1 or TITLE element. Probably, Google renders at least a handful of pages of some website to find out which portion of it is really THE header, and then takes its content as the main caption of the page.
So guys /* and girls */: Even if the H1 is not exactly a ranking factor, please really use it for the big bold header your user gets presented. Failure to do so maybe won't get you penalized, but may impact CTRs from the Google SERPs negatively. :)
Thanks for the addition! Good points on why the best practice should be followed, even if Google isn't directly caring about it as a ranking input.
Hi Rand! I love the way how you debunked the ranking myths. Buying shares doesn’t going to count as a ranking factor and even not going to build reputation until not going to share something valuable.
Some facts to add in the list about which even I am not 100% sure:
Me too, I am not sure about the differences they two contribute to SEO.
Why I like using Main Heading elements. I want to make sure a search engine understand what my page is about. I consider "Aboutness" helpful and essential in these days of Hummingbird and Rankbrain. Headings have a semantic element to them, where there is a semantic connectivity between them and the content that they head, and I want to capture that connection. If you've ever seen the Frame Net project, you can see how Semantics can connect the aboutness of a topic, and if you haven't, it's worth looking at and spending some time with:
Welcome to Framehnet
I'm with you Bill. Still best practice, and I'd still do it if it's easy. But I don't think Google is specifically giving a rank boost to pages that use a headline in the H1 vs. those that do it in the H2 or that just have a larger font and bold. There may be other, non-Google impacts that are positive and useful (e.g. some web crawlers that pull in content like Pocket, sometimes benefit from this markup) and might have an indirect impact on SEO.
Another benefit of proper markup is that software for the visually impaired uses them to identify the sections of a site. Proper H1 tags and paragraph tagging makes the experience much easier on the end user with those programs.
Also helpful for when you have many people working on a site/creating content that there is an easy-to-remember standard for how to format content instead of being "H2 is for the title, but we use h3 for the first subhead and h1 for sub-subheads."
Hi Rand
I have a few to add:
1. Rankings based upon a website's database, and its ability to answer queries
2. An effectiveness measure indicating which results are the ones that might require the least amount of steps for a person to see to perform a task, such as listening to a particular song (do they have an app on their searching device?), or making a restaurant reservation (Is the restaurant nearer than others?), or booking a flight somewhere (do they have an app related to the airlines, or a history of booking flights with a particular airline or are they connected to a particular one in Google+?)
3. A social network affinity, such as being connected in Google+ (Not quite authorship, but what seems to be a second bite at it.)
I will be publishing a post on Monday on the GFD blog about the last two, and the first one I wrote about in:
How Google May Rank Websites Based Upon Their Databases Answering Queries
It doesn't look like Google has added this capability to its search engine yet, but it looks like a possibility, and the idea of the search engine understanding "service requirements" for an online database is interesting. I could see it become something that Google might offer.
As for having a knowledge panel, I consider that as an indication that Google is aware of a business or a person or a thing/product as an entity, and as Paul Haar stated last year at SMX West 2016 (in his "How Google Works " presentation), Google does check queries to see if they refer to entities as a standard step, so it may not be a direct ranking signal, but seems to be an indication that Google may be aware of what something is as an entity, and may track it as one in places such as Google Trends.
Bill
Thanks for the additions Bill! Agree with you on Knowledge Panel / Sitelinks -- as I said in the video, they're often indications that you've received some recognition with Google of authority/brand/entity-status, but they won't directly positively or negatively impact rankings on other queries.
On a humorous note : Sacrificing a goat at the alter of Google and other black magic will not affect page rank.
Thank you for that! You just saved a goat :)
Surprised to learn about h1 being not important! Just few weeks ago I have been exhausting a programmer to change h2 default headline at the top of the page to h1 (it was problematic to do because of the CMS theme limitation). I will know better next time, thanks, Rand))
Same ... Mainly because my Moz Pro Site Crawl Content Issues specifically says that my pages are missing H1s
No problem! And apologies that some of Moz's own onpage recommendation systems harp on that. It's generally best practice to have headlines in an H1, but as I noted in the video, I don't think Google cares at all if you happen to use H2 or H3 or just big and bold for headlines.
Do you think there's any difference between wrapping your main logo in an h1 or not having an h1 whatsoever? I'm guessing it's a wash, but I've never tested it in isolation.
Hi Rand,
When can we expect the similar guidelines to be followed by MOZ pro tracker tool because it is painful to see these H1 issues in tool error report and while we put so much efforts to follow the same, we understand that Google even doesn't care about the same.
Ok. Then, I was so confused...
Some of the wrong concepts:
- Must have important words italic
- Must have a certain word density
- Must have 100% valid html
These are false concepts
I was waiting for you to discuss sitemap.xml importance score. You kind of missed it. I've seen people getting obsessed with the sitemap priority and setting them to 1.0 and 0.8. I personally believe Google doesn't care, may be helps with the crawl frequency but no impact on the search engine ranking.
What's your take on this?
If you have time to worry about a 1.0 vs a 0.8 vs a 0.5 priority score in your sitemap.xml, you better have a huge site with only top 3 rankings for all of your targeted keywords. This could have an impact on a massive site with content that is changing daily (or more frequently) I suppose, but I can't think of any other reason this would be a major concern.
+1 Joseph. It's one of the last things I'd worry about in my SEO efforts.
About point 10: What about using headlines and the H1, H2, H3 tags?
Guess a designer must have told Rand that he couldn't add an H1 since there is none on this page :)
Ha! Look at that :-) And yet we still rank pretty well
...but Rand if you did add a h1 for the heading would you rank better than pretty well? It might be worth testing that out to know for sure ;-)
I suspect google will just move to the h2 from a missing h1 and treat it the same like you think, but it would be interesting to find out for sure if changing your first h2 to a h1 so it matches the sequence that Googles guidelines state does make a difference or not, since you guys have so much content that can be tested.
When I read articles like these, I see that Google is more and more interested in the indicators of how the user acts within the web:
We can say that more and more the user is the king, not the content?
Yeah, sort of a combo of the two. If the content serves the user, and the user shows appreciation through engagement/sharing/linking, then Google's going to give a ranking boost.
More or less, yes. It's just like how Google can approximate a brand's offline prominence by looking at the branded search volume.
A little confused about the H1, H2, H3 issue. Google states specifically on page 20 of their SEO Starter Guide that "There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with H1, the most important, and ending with H6, the least important (1)." It seems like Google is contradicting point #10 in this article.
Yeap, I remember this guide too. There's a huge section about using them properly. I would make sure there's H1 and H2. I use them to target terms like plural term. It seems to take Google forever, even still (esp for new sites) to figure out singular and plural. In that instance I say for terms like backpack, backpacks you gotta have an H1, H2, used in both in the Title etc. However, I would not take these lightly.
Hey Rand. Another great Whiteboard Friday, I appreciate it.
I recently read that Google does not use click data directly for search rankings. The source of this came from John Mueller, the head of Google Brain, during a Webmaster hangout.
"(Q) To be 100% clear, Google is not using click data, behavioral data, pogosticking, that type of stuff directly in their search ranking algorithm for ranking websites in their search results?
(A) As far as I know, we don’t use that."
If there is any truth in this, then it is an interesting addition to "things Google doesn't directly use to affect rankings", and a big misconception among specialists in SEO.
Wow, if that´s true what about reasonable surfer model, it would be an urban legend.
There were some tests, even here on MOZ, proving that some pogosticking signals influence the ranking, at least for a certain period of time.
Yup - we've repeated tests over and over showing that query, click, and pogosticking can influence rankings.
It's in Google's best interest not to admit that click data is a ranking factor because wide scale manipulation would have some nasty side effects, like ad click fraud, more incentive to hijack computers for botnets, etc.
Hi Rand,
What's your opinion on shared hosting if your website is sharing a server with several other sites which are spammy or have been flagged as spammy by Google. I have seen people suggest that being hosted with a bad neighborhood of websites can adversely effect your website rankings. I opinion is that might have been true in the past, but Google is advanced enough to not associate legitimate websites with spammy ones when they are hosted on the same server.
Years ago, I saw this problem more often, but it's been a long time since I've even heard of it popping up. My suspicion is that Google has generally found workarounds to rank good stuff, even if it's in a bad hosting neighborhood.
Well I have to say many of these are on-point and inline for the most part. Having a huge impact on rankings will probably be tough because not all sites have the same comp. Also I found that I had the most trouble with #10. I have some instances with both local-seo and national-seo projects that I've seen an impact on organic growth.
Whether as to use one over the other is a tough argument from the start. In my experience, I've seen sites that were using Wordpress Templates that just used H2s for all of their headings in the design intent and be limiting themselves. I've seen sites use the H1 tags for every heading and hurt themselves; meaning they were limited in organic growth and ranking position.
After I reset the on-page-seo dom structure in proportion to keyword seeds for that particular page have increases in ranking position and picking up lexical terms by having secondary, third and even fourth keyword seeds on the page and in high density heading tags like H3 tags. As a result, I've witnessed a jump in organic traffic and ranking positions. This is both local and keywords that are really difficult to rank for.
In fact, I've seen newer sites, sites underperforming too that had really poor on-page-seo structures. In the last three jobs I've had, I demanded they used one H1, one H2, and supplement on page with H3 tags to pickup or "train" Google for lexical terms.
Many of those sites pulled their weight in a KPI of volume of keywords uptick. So in the context of "enhancing rankings" on just one term...........I'm not sure. But I had sites that did not use an H1, but use a title (poorly optimized) and even abused the times an H1 was used and they were not first page or in an ideal ranking position.
After correcting the lack of or overuse, I saw a increase in organic search and search rank. You can really see this in underperforming sites that have not good html structure to their pages or using what I thought to be incorrect HTML DOM hierarchy.
Great post! A lot of these factors also directly effect the UX of the site as well . With that being said since UX is becoming a ranking factor, wouldn't that directly effect the rankings?
Hi Rand,
I have one that I’m a little uncertain about. Is a domain’s geolocation a ranking factor?
I’m sure it is not but maybe the domain location is used by Google to deliver your content in an area that is more geographically relevant to searchers?
I’ve inherited two sites recently, one of them (the parent site) is located in the US. However, the other is located in Russia - I used the Moz Bar to research this. I don’t know why Russia was selected for the 2nd domain but I do see in GA that traffic from Russia is within the top 10 countries. Compared to the parent domain, where Russian traffic is not in the top 10.
Granted, it is only one indicator that geolocation is a factor but it would be good to know that it is NOT a ranking factor. If it is then someone has decided the location of the domain more on an economical factor rather than an online performance factor.
Just to note, the 2nd domain is in English and is aimed at US and UK markets - not Russia.
Great WBF as ever.
David
I've read somewhere that Yandex, a search engine quite popular in Russia, gives more visibility to .ru domains an those in a russian server. Maybe that's the reason.
Thanks,
The domain is a .com though, the server hosting is Russia but thanks for the thoughts on it.
D
Same is true for Baidu.
Hi,
Still couple of additions to list of things that do not affect SEO (that I didn't see anyone else commenting):
- Links from Wikipedia. Well, they are nofollow and Google has confirmed that they do not affect SEO.
- Text/HTML rate. Some SEO tools show this, but it's total nonsense.
- Brand name mentions. Or what's your take on this Rand?
Hi Rand,
I understand that the structure use of header-tags not a direct ranking factor is, but is wrong use of header-tags a bad thing for on-page SEO? For example, I've seen a lot of websites that use H1-tags around their site logo, and then another H1-tag for their headline.
Just to be sure: Mutliple H1-tags on a website is bad for SEO right?
There are also rumors that since HTML5, the use of 1 H1-tag per <section> tag, is actually better for on-page SEO. Is this true? In my opinion, using H1-tags only for the 'title' of your website, is a great flow of header-use.
Have a nice weekend:) Greetings from the Netherlands.
One more question, does using things like Google embedded maps help improve rankings (compared to not having a map or using a different type of map? Does Google give you "extra credit" for using their on page utilities?
Great "myth-busters" WBF, Rand! On the shared hosting topic: the one exception I'd make to what you're saying is if you're on shared hosting with a bunch of "rough" sites (penalized, known link farm, etc.) I would suspect that would be one of a long list of things that Google would look at in evaluating how trustworthy your site might be.
Great WB Friday!
I was always curious about embedded content other than just images and links; like Embedded Tweets, Posts, Pinterest, etc.
Any other Moz fans see a difference in ranking for these?
Thanks!
For #9 and the page title tags; Does it matter where the separator is, in regards to rankings? For instance, would it matter if I separated the keyword and geo or would it be the same as if they were unseparated?
Thanks!
Ofcourse all of the above points are so true and valid. How about technical seo front? If you serve many 301 redirections that also wont affect your ranking until and unless the redirections are to different pages which have different content
Many SEO's believe having too many 301 redirections can harm their website ranking.
This is quite true: Particularly a bad idea is to keep internal links to a 301ed page. In this case, it's worth the work to update the affected links.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for sharing. But domain age and heading tag are the ranking factor and you have told that "Ah, jeez, no, that's not a ranking factor,"
I think the H1/H2 debate is a very common misconception with SEO.
I also work closely with bloggers who always are extremely overwhelmed trying to nail down the exact word count they need for SEO purposes. I worked with one blogger who insisted each blog post be 5,000 words while another wanted just 500. It's a wide spectrum, but at the end of the day, Google rewards good content. If you can product good content in 500 words, great. If it takes you 2,000 words, that's fine too. I think the biggest thing to shy away from is filler content.
Great stuff Rand! I believe one of the biggest hurdles in SEO is not what to focus on and what to not worry about, especially if you handle dozens and dozens of clients and monthly time management if extremely important. Thank you for sharing these and your insight on each one!
Some that we've dealt with include:
As for the Heading tags, our designers probably get annoyed every time I send over a request to adjust those, but like you said at the end, you might as well use best practices like that for HTML, especially in the design process. Unfortunately, many designers don't have that in their process. We recently built it into ours.
I also found your social comment interesting, in a way I disagree but the way you explained it as having other things happening that impact engagement metrics makes sense.
I'm sure after watching this post i'll have some client emails this week where I can potentially add to this comment haha.
Thanks Rand!
Hey Rand,
Great one! I've got a couple of points to add:
What do you think? Number 6 is very debatable
"Valid" HTML! I wrote a post about how HTML validation fits into SEO because I see it misunderstood probably more than any other SEO concept. I even had a marketing firm tell a client they would have to add .html to the end of every URL on their site in order to show Google "valid HTML."
I mean I guess it's a pretty direct ranking factor if you consider that badly-written HTML is probably too broken to be crawled at all...?
Hello Rand. Thank you for making this clear that there are some fast-growing wrong ideas that some people think are the basics of SEO while they are not even true !
Hi Rand,
I hope you well. But I have one concern that some factor which you have mention in your article quite seems wrong to me as since I am in the field of SEO, I have read and seen that these point are ranking factors. Please correct if I am wrong.
Thanking you..!
Hi Vikas,
Could you mentioned non-ranking factor that you are talking about here? I think you are talking about domain age and heading tag.
A new site can also rank on low competition keywords. (Experienced it)
Heading tags are just for the designing purpose only. (Experienced it)
You can use multi heading tags, it will not harm your website. (Experienced it)
Hey Rand,
Thanks for sharing this WBF in audio format, I loved to listen it.
Most of them are ok. Some of them are surprisingly false. Surprisingly because it comes from Rand, who've managed to generate a lot of controversy in a real-working world :)
If "directly" would've been skipped from the title, I'd say around half are BS. Rand, baby, you've kind of screwed this up.
I own a website 2 days old ranking above a 15 yo competitor. My tech? JS generated content, but I can't install mod_rewrite, because I'm not a tech guy. Still, I produce a lot of buzz on social media, although I haven't shared anything (I'm 2 days old, remember?). My meta-description is soooo unappealing, I rarely get clicks, but I'm still #1, right? And my page has strange colors, making everyone leave (bs bounce rate, right.). That's weird also because I'm hosting my site in a shady neghborhood, although people stated hosting doesn't matter.
Yep.
Reframing #10 slightly, is it not true that - by utilising H1s/H2s/H3s in the best practice format - we are making it easier for crawlers to understand a page's content structure?
I agree here, this is way tooo important and have seen considerable impacts by implementing the correct html structure. In fact, I've out jostled sites and picked up additional keywords from using multiple h3s on page, esp, with e-commerce websites. Like I think it matters, then at some point Google pays attention to it and then machine learning takes over. But sites out-the-gate or revamping sites that never gave this signal; dude I think this one matters still.
Hey Rand,
Really appreciate this non organic/SEO myth whiteboard addition. However I'm a little bit confused with your point #3. Does that mean that there's nothing about social signals then? and I would like to contribute one here.
Number of comments isn't a ranking factor. If you have hundreds of comments saying "Thank you" and "nice posts" and those aren't adding value to your post/page or not leading it to a helpful discussion then it won't help your organic ranking.
Looking forward to your answer! :)
I think at one point it did, but with so much abuse, I think it's one of those things after-a-while, Google ignored all together. I think if used properly, it can signal "affinity" content, but that's a really big init for most websites. Like it can help if you push lotta dollars into content marketing init. But influencing direct ranking position today.........not sure.
Age of Domain Name - years ago I did comprehensive research on HARDSCAPING industry in Chicago. 3 major companies in the Northshore - multiple keyword phrases all of tthose keywords were were ranked exactly the same with the same businesses in the same order. I spend all day - literally all day deconstructing the 3 sites to see why they were ranked this way.
Turns out that after taking everything into account, the first ranked site had a 1997 domain name purchase, 2nd ranked was 1999, and third ranked domain name was originally purchased in 2002. \
Since all 3 sites were exactly the same (content, backlinks, etc), Google ordered them by domain purchase date every time.
This may have changed, but I believe it is/was one of the last determining things if small business competitors have equal sites this matters.
Google must have a tie breaker, right?
Hey Rand
In recent Youtube video of business and Burger, You said that shares, likes of the blogpost in one of ranking factor, Now you're saying it doesn't have direct impact?
Next topic should be 10 things that directly affect your Google rankings. I will wait for your next white board Friday.
Hello Rand! Phew! You broke my heart when you said H1 are not so important! Cheez!
Well, I don0t want to argue BUUUUT I have to tell you that when I'm using Moz Bar in my competition sites usually I see that the ones that better rank usually have their better key words in a text that is in H1. Simply the "theme" of the site must be in H1. Maybe it's a coincidence... maybe not... but I think this is useful for Google not for ranking but yes for understanding what's your site about. Hope someone can comment about experience in this topic :/
Hey Rand! A great WBF. I think the xml sitemaps are overrated and overused. I have seen on many sites and worked with sites which have got all the pages indexed and still did not have the updated sitemap or any sitemap at all. Still, the sites' pages were ranking well. Another thing is the reviews shown in the SERPs, though they help in increasing CTR which impact the rankings, but the reviews do not directly affect the ranks. Third is the code validation. Though, it is good to have the right code structure, but having W3C errors in code doesn't affect the ranks. Another factor which I think is not considered for ranking by Google directly, is the shares on Google+.
Recently I wrote a blog & then decided to use the tactic of guest posting for it. I posted my 50% of the content on guest posting sites such as LinkedIn, Medium, YourStory etc. & then I applied backlink for my site.
Is it beneficial for my site?
Is it a Ranking factor? what are your opinion regarding this.
I regularly follow your WhiteBoard & one thing I noticed that your articles are always informative but the readability of the site is poor. Can you improve the design of your website? If you don't mind!
Thanks for your post first. I am new on SEO so today i have learnt a lot of things from you that will be very helpful for new jobs circular website and i will follow your instruction.
Howdy Rand,
Awesome post, again :)
With respect to fourth feature - bob and time nearby - would you say you are certain that they're not esteemed by Google?
Doesn't the most recent Google refresh esteem the time the client spend on our site? I've likewise perused a few posts expressing that a page with high bob rate will most likely be considered as an awful site page
Keep doing awesom
I've always thought Domain Age actually matters. Now I understand that more years of existence equals just more time for the website to get links and brand awareness. This changes the whole way I evaluate domains, thanks!
A few things in here I have not contemplated some time recently.
Thanks for the article.
I am not happy with Rands point which is I mentioned below and hope it makes a valid point.
I think Google does care of Google products like blogger and Google sites for content and if you publish any post under they prefer to index and rank better as compared to other platforms on the same type of content I seen. I would like to also point out that google consider heading tags as a miner signal for ranking because it makes the user experience better, and anything which is better for the user will count as valuable for google rank algorithm, also Rand point out domain age which is also considered as a minor ranking signal.
The Google products (Blogger & Google Sites) are used for Web 2.0 purpose only.
In this article Rand mentioned only Gmail, Analytics, Adsense or G-Docs
Hello Rand,
I think one thing about backlinks should also be discussed. As we can see many people have myth that only backlinks numbers matters, but quality of backlinks(as per higher DA) matters. So thousands of useless backlinks will not be effective compared to one quality backlink.
Beautiful article Rand, liked your topic on domain age not affecting search engine ranking, but the overall effort put into your website that counts most, well said. Overall I would say content is the key to building a better brand authority in the web, unique quality contents bring lovely link juices in lesser time, especially when promoted properly.
I would like to ask you, if verifying a business on Google Business does affect overall Google ranking? What are the impacts on SEO?
Hi Rand,
Below are few pointers from my side which I think shouldn't be consider in ranking factor:
1] Too many internal links on a web page.
2] Having a SPA website. (I have heard that Google can now render JavaScript to some extent)
How about these old standbys?
O boy! That was helpful! So happy to learn that Google doesn't care about age of website! It felt silly not being 100% sure if a rise in organic traffic could only be explained by age of domain. Happy to know now!
About Google+ plus one. I read somewhere that it impacted the way that the user that follows a Google plus page sees the SERPs results. That if I follow coca-cola and not pepsi, I will have more coca-cola results than pepsi!
Can somebody confirm this to me?
Thank you!
I agree about the lenght of the post-it seems itdoesn't have a direct impact over the search results. Same about the shared content.I'll be able to provide more in a Week time, but what I noticed-on some blogs the counters for how many times the content was shared out of the sites were manupulated...
Hey Rand, there was a video by Matt Cutts awhile back (2010) that details how they use "domain age" within the algorithm. It's technically not the true age of the domain, but when Google first found it and crawled it, and he mentions that there is a slight difference between a domain they found and crawled 6 months ago vs 12 months ago. I think that's where most of the "age of the domain" rumor comes to play, because the devil is in the details and the average person who is not listening carefully could easily misconstrue what he was saying.
And heck, they may not even look at that sort of historical data within the algorithm anymore. Let me know if you want a link to the video. Or you can, you know, Google it.
Just curious, but if Google doesn't give higher authority to the H1, H2, H3 etc., will you still get dinged for having multiple H1 tags on a page?
Hey Rand,
I wish I could get agree with what you have mentioned in point 10 but this ultimate <a href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.goo...">Google's SEO starter guide</a> is stopping me to do that. What will you say about H tags preferences by Google mentioned in the document.
SEO Starter Guide
Interesting mythbusters episode.. Rand, you'd be great as a guest host for them ;)
I'd like aslo to mention these things:
Not getting Expected visitors on my website.
I am using all latest tools to get business from my website.
But it is 5 months passed but still i am not getting expected visitors to my website.
Suggest me how can i get more visitors on my website.
thanks
Hey Rand!
Great addition of WBF - something worth considering for your list . . .
I see a lot of people wrapping their keywords in <strong> tags and bolding specific phrases. I like to think that this has absolutely no benefit to your SEO - surely instead it goes the other direction and appears as SPAM - going against everything Google seems to be working towards!
All in all > bolding keywords = no benefit to SEO or Google ranking :)
Personally I liked this WBF except the last point. I'm calling BS on that until I see different action taken by all the major SEO tools.
I'm constantly nagging designers, to stop messing around with Heading tags, and to follow best practise, mostly on the advice of everything I've read on SEO over the last 18 years. So why all of a sudden do headings not matter?
If I was google, or any search engine I'm going to be looking for light, well formed code.
Designers can just use CSS to format headings. If you MUST have a small H1, no problem use CSS to render it that way but follow the TGD format.
Please :D
For Knowledge panel, I agree in concept that having the knowledge panel won't directly impact non-brand related queries, but there are a few considerations I would encourage to ensure it doesn't lose priority internally:
In short... getting a knowledge panel doesn't necessarily mean you will see better rankings, but having a knowledge panel can be an indicator of brand strength, which may correlate to improved rankings :)
-Jake Bohall
Hi Rand,
A great post and thanks for sharing views.
I have a few to add:
Stuffing keywords in your image alt text
Schema markup does not affect search results – What are your thoughts on this.
Mentioning keywords phrases many times in your content.
a dedicated IP address will not affect your rankings.
PPC ads and any other forms of paid advertising (Facebook ads, etc.) does not affect your organic search rankings. It can drive traffic, conversions to your site only.
Schema tag is used to understand the content of the website.
Not getting Expected visitors on my website.
I am using all latest tools to get business from my website.
But it is 5 months passed but still i am not getting expected visitors to my website.
Suggest me how can i get more visitors on my website.
thanks
I know this is mostly an obvious one but a a few sites I work on have a 'keyword generator' in that they are automatically created by the eCommerce platform. Furthermore they scoop up every tag, cat and sub-cat and use it as a keyword. Whilst we know that keywords are not a ranking factor for Google, could this overuse of keywords be considered stuffing? (I'm talking 30 -50 keywords!)
Granted they are not on the page but they are repeated extensively in the code.
I once read on a hosting company's blog -- I won't say which -- that ranking was improved by having your site on a domain name licensed for three years, not one.
They reasoned that Google would think it showed greater permanency as a longer license indicates the domain is owned by a substantial organisation.
This host was also a domain name registrar, so there wouldn't be anything there, that strikes you as total and complete self-serving BS, would there?
Nah, me neither.
Awesome post, there was several things included here that I've wondered about so it's helpful to get some clarity on those topics. Thanks Rand!
Hi Rand,
Good Info on this, but I think you missed 2 factors:
Meta Description: Even Google has officially said that they don't consider them as a ranking factor and they can chose some snippet from the content itself to display in the SERP.
One more interesting thing I am gonna add is "AMP is not a ranking factor" as of now and this is tested by our team. We actually ran an experiment on our website which was ranking on the 2nd page for a very competitive keyword, which in return didn't gave any boost in rankings to our AMP page.
We have actually written a whole case study on this topic.
One day I thought, I should check my website on SEO Audit tool, and after checking it, I got depressed Because it was showing lots of errors regarding my site and those mistakes were:
1. Hey.. Your domain is new, and you have to wait for a long time to get traffic.
2. Hey.. you don't have a robot.txt file.
3. Hey.. On your website, there is no H2s, and H5s tags so make sure it exists.
4. Hey... Your site doesn't have a Favicon.
After getting these errors, I started to work on it, but after fixing these, I did not get any positive results.
After reading this article now, I feel that I was stupid.
As per my experience now I can say that all these points that included here are true even now I think that Favicon is used just for showing your website identity means it does not affect your Google ranking.
Does the UX become the ranking factors?, I see that you mentioned some points related to this.
I am doing site administration for two sites, one for longtime domain names : https://onaplioa.info/ and one for new domains : https://standavietnam.net/. Personally, I find that the perennial domain is always in favor. That's for sure! So instead of registering a new domain name, I still recommend people searching for perennial domain names.
I particularly like your thoughts about point 4 - raw time on site and bounce rate. Thanks.
I would like to get more info if anyone can share (a/b tests or more) the claim of notion that Google doesn't care about the age of a website?
Considering that there are websites still running back from '98 (with updated frameworks), and with new domains being reregistered to compete against the existing ones, are we saying that the search engine will view both the long running website and new website equally--or do search engines crawl the website that's been running the longest as a priority?
Some folks are still convinced that advertising on AdWords will help them rank better organically on Google.
Hi. Absolutely. I assume this could have a positive impact.
Good article, I guess you draw your conclusions directly from your experiences, I thought that the headlines H1, H2 ... were essential and that they had to be used methodically even if you lost the good design of the website.
It is also good to know that the positive votes in social networks do not influence because it is a thing that gives me a lot of laziness.
Any suggestions for reducing the bounce rate on the home page of an e-commerce?
Do you think pop ups on the cover can make people with little patience leave your page just as they enter?
A greeting and to follow well.
Hi Rand,
Great post, once more :)
Regarding the 4th headline - bounce and time on site - are you sure that they're not valued by Google?
Doesn't the latest Google update value the time the user spend on our website? I've also read several posts stating that a page with high bounce rate will probably be considered as a bad webpage
Keep up the good work
I've heard it debated whether or not social shares for a piece of content boost its rank. In reality, quality content that is likely to rank is also likely to be widely shared because it's good—not necessarily because Google is connecting the two. In other words, correlation does not imply causation.
Hi Rand,
Thank you for the as usual informative WBF. Here is a small weird one that sort of relates to your point on "Characters that you use as separators in your title element":
I was putting hyphens as my separators in my image alt text (I was just told to) and Yoast was acting as if the target keywords weren't there. I took off the hyphens and Yoast recognized the alt text in the image as having the target keyword.
My question is this: Would google not see your chosen keyword in an image alt text if the spaces were filled up with a character like a hyphen?
Make that the first paragraphy have the keyword is a ranking factor? I think not, but the Yoast SEO always ask to do it. What do you think?
The use of Google Services as a search engine metric always seemed a bit ridiculous to me.
But I would like to dive into this a little bit further. Can I get some sources for this?
Great piece, I love it every time someone de-bunks all those silly SEO hypes.. However regarding the H1 part I'm confused - shouldn't the headline of my page (the H1 when implemented correctly by the web developer) point to the main subject of my page and thus be a ranking factor? Yes, i could have some bold text there and let the bot think about it and make its own decision, but when my HTML is marked correctly I would think the headline should count... Bottom line - Philosophically it doesn't seem right, would love some more information if possible.
Rand,
To your 2. Whether you do or don't use Google apps and services. Is having the site on Google Search Console (or BWT) a ranking factor? I'm curious if MOZ has done any experiments with two equal sites but one is with GSC and one is not.
Thx!
I am surprised about the header information. I thought for sure that would have been a ranking factor. People have been pushing that hard for a long time.
On I often I hear about is the CMS or the platform that your website is built on! Rand mentions HTML and JS etc, however I am talking about if your site is built on Wordpress, Joomla, etc! So long as you stick to the fundamental rules of SEO and Crawl Errors, then Google really doesn't care what platform your website is created on!
For example, when I was working as a web developer, I had someone offer me a large sum of money to take a Wordpress site and code it into a static site without the CMS background because 'Google doesn't like Wordpress websites'. Needless to say, I did NOT accept the money, and instead corrected her worries!
So many people are still believe that If you keeps changes in contents whether monthly or yearly that affects website ranking.
I did in the past but so far I have not seen any ranking improvements.
In my opinion, changing optimized content frequently does not improve rankings. It's a ploy by some dodgy SEOs to charge tyhe client more money on an ongoing basis.
What is true in my experience is that repeated "freshening" of a well optimized page is just as likely to de-optimize it as anything else.
Hi Rand
Ok. I had never considered that a page with high speed of loading what it does is give the information faster and the user needs less time on the web, but does it influence what the user does on the web, regardless of the time that remains ?
Have a good weekend
Hi Rand, How about updating the current meta tags and content of same landing page?
Does it matter to keep same piece of content for years on a landing page or updating after some time is mandatory?
Is Google+ included in the 'Google Apps & Services' umbrella?
Google+ really helps in SEO.
Could you elaborate on how Google+ helps with rankings? Does just linking to your Google+ page from your website/blog help or do you need to be well connected in circles for it to help? I appreciate any info on the subject! I'm struggling to find any recent and credible sources out there.
OK, so it doesn't matter if you tag your headline with an H1 or an H2 (I'd argue teaching content teams best practise suggests otherwise!). But does Google still assign primacy to H1s if they're present in a document, further down the page? Or are there signal implications if your site features a big bold H2 - one that, say, overlays a banner image and has SEO-agnostic ad copy - and then an H1 after that? Could the H2 be mistaken for the headline, and the H1 taken for a sub-heading?
Thanks. Where you thoughts on Twitter cards?
They have an indirect positive impact, but not a direct one.
Reddit upvotes?
Great topic!
I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this. Does linking to your Google+ page influence rankings? A web designer we hired insisted we have it on our site to improve our SEO, but I can't find any credible information out there to back that up. We don't currently update our Google+ page and aren't in any circles, because we found that our audience wasn't using that platform. I want to know if I should spend the time to revive it or if I can disregard. Thanks!
So, in this comments section, I have seen a lot of dumbing down for things that I have observed as definitely affecting many of the client sites I have done consultation for.
With that in mind, what exactly is this community saying IS important?
Because I hear "Content" and "Backlinks", but there has not been any REAL discerning counsel, here, on what quality content actually means, and Matt Cutts raved for years about "Quality Content" being more important than link juice, essentially.
It seems like, after you guys cut everything to ribbands, the only thing left is backlinks.
Is that really the consensus, here? :/
Some people think that using or not using xml sitemaps is affecting rankings. (not even opening the priority #'s in the sitemaps)
Thanks Rand for lightning on long awaited topic!
Myths around ranking factors is much more than the Facts and problem is that few SEO folks are still misunderstood and not clear about Google's basic thought process behind the rankings.
Some folks are still convinced that advertising on AdWords will help them rank better organically on Google.
Hello Rand!
First of all, I would like to say thanks for such an informative post.
Now, I want to know your thoughts about Reddit upvotes. Does that gives a ranking boost? In my case, I have experienced that my Reddit posts which get more upvotes are ranked higher than the ones who don't get any of them. Is it true or just another myth?
Thanks, waiting for your replay :)
Great WBF Rand!
Although Shared or dedicated hosting may not have any impact, does server location make any difference? Let me know what do you guys think of this?
That is why it is so important for the SEO professionals to keep themselves up-to-datewith Google algorithm updates. :) Thank you, Rand.
Enlightening! Thanks Rand! As ever, you are the voice of reason.
I am pretty new in marketing and actually I have learnt all I currently know through YouTube, LOL. I am one of those professional essay writers. Though have been doing writing for over 5 years, it was up until recently that I decided to break free and start my own site. There is this comment that caught my eye "chances are good that you've built up lots of links and authority and equity and all these kinds of signals that Google does care about." It is a timely message for me as clearly the most important thing is the links you create. For one i have tried do-follow links and some don't reflect back like links. I did opt to teach myself the hard way but it's not bad asking for help. I really would love if someone guided me on how to get links with high PA and/or DA linking back. Great links and not those which will make me get flagged. As I am trying to build a dynasty. SOMEONE/ANYONE PLEASE ASSIST.
BEST REGARDS
Honestly really surprised about headers. Does that include having header after header without content in between? For instance, having an h1, h2, h2, h2, and then having a bunch of (good) paragraph content? Really good video as always!
Hi Rand,
In my opinion point 7 is very important since Google does not want to send traffic to servers with a bad ip reputation. Being shared you do not know what others are doing.
Ciao Rand,
(sorry for my bad english)
Thank you very much for this post!
After it, I wonder if there is something that really matter for Google... :)
What about "exact match domain" and "freshness"? Are them non-ranking factors?
Thank you very much!
As far as I'm aware "exact match domains" don't count as a ranking factor, however, they will attract more links matching the keyword, which itself may have an impact on rankings.
Thanks. I thought if we have many likes, shares, etc the site will have more authority and so have more ranking on Google
If you do things that lead to more organic Likes and Shares (for example creating content that users like and want to share) those same things will make you rank higher on Google. So there is a correlation but not a direct causation. It is more like "many Likes" and "good Google rankings" are caused by the same things.
But simply buying more Likes and Shares will not have a direct impact on your Google rankings.
Hi Rand,
Another great WBF, awesome information and really useful to see some of these myths dispelled.
I didn't realise about the domain age not counting, I heard it did, so it is really handy to be re-educated on that, as I've told some of my customers in the past who were setting up new businesses with brand new domains that they may be at a slight disadvantage to their competitors due to domain age...I stand corrected and won't be giving that misconceived advice again.
So I'd be interested to know what the communities take is on a couple of other related factors:
1. Length of Domain Registration i.e does it make any difference if you register a domain for 1 year or 10 years. I've heard in the past that registering a domain for a longer period of time can positively affect your rank, as it indicates the intention of a long-term project over a potential spammy, flash-in-the-pan project. Due to the domain age not counting I'm now suspecting that length of domain registration also does not count - G Don't Care - Can anyone clarify this?
2. Not Hiding "Who is" data on Domain Registration? Again I heard that if you hide the "Who is" information, the Big G might see this as a potential spammy behaviour, as some dodgy short-term throw-away websites do this, so not hiding the "Who is" is a potential indicator of a quality website. Presumably, the reality is that again G Don't Care, as even with hidden "Who is" this doesn't stop Google analysing a website and deciding on its suitability for ranking. So again clarification on if this is another pointless ranking myth would be appreciated.
Thanks to the community for all the amazing, useful information, keep it coming ;)
All the very best
Dave
Hey Rand,
What about meta keyword and sitemap.html?
Thanks
HI Rand,
My question is the same as Mahima Sharma asked.
Hello,
Great content! Thanks for that. How about structed data?
Hi, Rand
Thank you for this great post and the WB video. They gave me few new ideas for my research.I'm doing a research over 6 different articles (blog posts) about a popular topic, published on 6 different websites-all of them are in top 6-8 search results when using particular Keywords. I agree about the lenght of the post-it seems itdoesn't have a direct impact over the search results. Same about the shared content.I'll be able to provide more in a Week time, but what I noticed-on some blogs the counters for how many times the content was shared out of the sites were manupulated...
Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts about 'time of day' influencing SERPS?
As I think h1, h2, h3 card headers are still very important. H tags still help google understand what is highlighted in a page
Hey Rand,
One of SEO mates tried this technique of showing up random number of listings on a page every time someone accessed it - claiming this would give Google of fresh content on the web page. Is this even a white-hat technique or a ranking misconception? I would love to know that!
Hi, Mahima
I assume this might have a positive impact, only if the internal pages were not crawled (in case when listings are on the same site).
All my pages got crawled thou using PHP am getting errors. Am guessing PHP limits access for crawlers or?