I analyzed more than hundred headlines to know main keypoints of what Google says to webmasters and SEOs. And got an interesting results, you’ll find them below. But first a few words about methodology.
Idea
I saw many headlines on SEO resources with a news containing “google says” phrase. One time I wanted to collect them and make a shorter and more convenient list for myself. But how to collect them?
I decided to parse article titles from Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal. But using Screaming Frog there is not a good idea, because those resources have a lot of pages and I need to scan thousands to get one-two hundred of relevant pages.
Second idea was to parse Google itself with the query like: site:searchengineland.com intitle:”Google says”. I didn’t find a quick way to do that so I did a different approach.
- Internal search on target websites used with the query “google says”
- URLs was extracted with using javascript console and xpath.
- URLs collected from 2 websites and scanned in Screaming Frog (list mode)
- Titles of the pages was extracted from Screaming Frog reports.
I got the titles, but what next? The next idea was to use ChatGPT to analyze them in bulk. I asked it to find only titles where Google says something and related to SEO.
What Google Says
The main topics about what google says something are: algorithm changes and updates, ranking system and signals, technical aspects of Google work, statistics about SERP or Google usage. These topics tell us what they are trending ones in SEO. Except these, also trending one is a topic about AI and how it affects on search.
Ranking
- Our ranking systems aren’t perfect
- Word count is not a quality factor for SEO
- Now Google uses core web vitals in ranking systems
- Title changes don’t impact rankings
- Emojis won’t hurt or help SEO
- Helpful content should have good page experience
- Domain registrations don’t affect SEO
- Search is evolving toward SGE
- Major changes coming to search rankings
Spam and Updates
- Improve content to recover from core update
- AI generated content is against guidelines
- No penalty for using affiliate links without markup
- You can recover from core updates without a new core update
- Repeated violations of their webmaster guidelines will lead to further action
- There’s no whitelist to save you from panda or penguin
- Took down 45% more fake reviews in 2023 thanks to new algorithm
- Google may unverify inactive local business listings
- Penguin looks mostly at your link source
- SEO is not spam
Technical topics
- You don’t need robots.txt on root domain
- Google will deindex pages if site is down for several days
- It’s not possible to prevent outages
- It’s normal for cached javascript pages to appear empty
- “Discovered – currently not indexed” status can last forever
- Mobile-first indexing is complete after almost 7 years
Other topics
- Impressions do not equal search volume
- Embedded links in featured snippets is a bug
- Search result snippets primarily come from page content, not other sources
- “near me” searches have doubled this year
- 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches
- AI overviews are increasing search usage
- Don’t try to reinvent the SEO wheel
This list highlights the current key points from Google, though it may not be exhaustive. If you have additional insights or suggestions, please feel free to share them in the comments below.
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