Google Says This Will Cancel Your “Linking Power” via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller was asked in an SEO Office Hours podcast if blocking the crawl of a webpage will have the effect of cancelling the “linking power” of either internal or external links. His answer suggested an unexpected way of looking at the problem and offers an insight into how Google Search internally approaches this and other situations.

About The Power Of Links

There’s many ways to think of links but in terms of internal links, the one that Google consistently talks about is the use of internal links to tell Google which pages are the most important.

Google hasn’t come out with any patents or research papers lately about how they use external links for ranking web pages so pretty much everything SEOs know about external links is based on old information that may be out of date by now.

What John Mueller said doesn’t add anything to our understanding of how Google uses inbound links or internal links but it does offer a different way to think about them that in my opinion is more useful than it appears to be at first glance.

Impact On Links From Blocking Indexing

The person asking the question wanted to know if blocking Google from crawling a web page affected how internal and inbound links are used by Google.

This is the question:

“Does blocking crawl or indexing on a URL cancel the linking power from external and internal links?”

Mueller suggests finding an answer to the question by thinking about how a user would react to it, which is a curious answer but also contains an interesting insight.

He answered:

“I’d look at it like a user would. If a page is not available to them, then they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it, and so any links on that page would be somewhat irrelevant.”

The above aligns with what we know about the relationship between crawling, indexing and links. If Google can’t crawl a link then Google won’t see the link and therefore the link will have no effect.

Keyword Versus User-Based Perspective On Links

Mueller’s suggestion to look at it how a user would look at it is interesting because it’s not how most people would consider a link related question. But it makes sense because if you block a person from seeing a web page then they wouldn’t be able to see the links, right?

What about for external links? A long, long time ago I saw a paid link for a printer ink website that was on a marine biology web page about octopus ink. Link builders at the time thought that if a web page had words in it that matched the target page (octopus “ink” to printer “ink”) then Google would use that link to rank the page because the link was on a “relevant” web page.

As dumb as that sounds today, a lot of people believed in that “keyword based” approach to understanding links as opposed to a user-based approach that John Mueller is suggesting. Looked at from a user-based perspective, understanding links becomes a lot easier and most likely aligns better with how Google ranks links than the old fashioned keyword-based approach.

Optimize Links By Making Them Crawlable

Mueller continued his answer by emphasizing the importance of making pages discoverable with links.

He explained:

“If you want a page to be easily discovered, make sure it’s linked to from pages that are indexable and relevant within your website. It’s also fine to block indexing of pages that you don’t want discovered, that’s ultimately your decision, but if there’s an important part of your website only linked from the blocked page, then it will make search much harder.”

About Crawl Blocking

A final word about blocking search engines from crawling web pages. A surprisingly common mistake that I see some site owners do is that they use the robots meta directive to tell Google to not index a web page but to crawl the links on the web page.

The (erroneous) directive looks like this:

There is a lot of misinformation online that recommends the above meta description, which is even reflected in Google’s AI Overviews:

Screenshot Of AI Overviews

Of course, the above robots directive does not work because, as Mueller explains, if a person (or search engine) can’t see a web page then the person (or search engine) can’t follow the links that are on the web page.

Also, while there is a “nofollow” directive rule that can be used to make a search engine crawler ignore links on  a web page, there is no “follow” directive that forces a search engine crawler to crawl all the links on a web page. Following links is a default that a search engine can decide for themselves.

Read more about robots meta tags.

Listen to John Mueller answer the question from the 14:45 minute mark of the podcast:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/ShotPrime Studio

Google Warns Of Last Chance To Export Notes Search Data via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google updated their documentation for the Google Labs Google Notes experiment to remind users that Notes will go away at the end of July 2024 and showed how to download notes content, with a final deadline beyond which it will be impossible to retrieve it.

Google Notes

Notes is an experimental feature in Google Labs that lets users annotate search results with their ideas and experiences. The idea behind it is to make search more helpful and improve the quality of the search results through the opinions and insights of real people. It’s almost like Wikipedia where members of the public curate topics.

Google eventually decided that the Notes feature had undergone enough testing and they decided that their are shutting down Google Notes, a decision announced in April 2024.

Update To Documentation

The official documentation was updated to make it clear that Notes is shutting down at the end of July and that users who wish to download their data can do us with their Google Takeout, a Google Accounts feature that allows users to export their content from their Google Account. Google Takeout allows Google Account holders to export data from Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Photos, a total of up to 56 kinds of content can be exported.

Google’s Search Central document changelog explains:

“A note about Notes

What: Added a note about the status of Notes to the Notes documentation.

Why: Notes is winding down at the end of July 2024.”

This is the new announcement:

“Notes is winding down at the end of July 2024. If you created a note, your notes content is available to download using Google Takeout through the end of August 2024.”

Check out the updated Google Notes documentation here:

Notes on Google Search and your website (experimental)

Featured Image by Shutterstock/ra2 studio

Google Confirms Ranking Boost For Country Code Domains via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about a ranking preference given to sites that use country level domain names and explained how that compares to non-country domain names. The question occurred in the SEO Office Hours podcast.

ccTLD Aka Country Code Domain Names

Domain names that are specific to countries are called ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domains). These are domain names that target specific countries. Examples of these ccTLDs are .de (Germany), .in (India) and .kr (Korea). These kinds of domain names don’t target specific languages, they only target Internet users in a specific country.

Some ccTLDs are treated by Google for ranking purposes as if they are regular Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), which are domains that are not specific to a country. A popular example is .io, which technically is a ccTLD (pertaining to the British Indian Ocean Territory) but because of how it’s used, Google treats it like a regular gTLD (generic top level domain).

Ranking Boosts For ccTLDs

The question that Gary Illyes answered was about the ranking boost given to ccTLDs.

This is the question:

“When a Korean person searches Google in Korean, does a com.kr domain or a .com domain do better?”

Gary Illyes answered:

“Good question. Generally speaking the local domain names, in your case .kr, tend to do better because Google Search promotes content local to the user.”

A lot of people want to rank better in a specific country and one of the best practices for doing that is to register a domain name that is specific to the country. Google will give it a ranking boost over other sites that are not explicitly targeting a specific country.

Gary continued his answer by explaining the ranking boost of a ccTLD over a generic top level domain (gTLD), like .com, .net and so on.

This is Gary’s explanation:

“That’s not to say that a .com domain can’t do well, it can, but generally .kr has a little more benefit, albeit not too much. “

Targeting Country Versus Targeting Language

Lastly, Gary mentioned that targeting a user’s language has more impact than the domain name.

He continued his answer:

“If the language of a site matches the user’s query language, that probably has more impact than the domain name itself.”

A benefit of targeting a language is that a site is able regardless of the country that a user is searching from whereas the country code top level domain name targets a country.

Something that Gary didn’t mention is that using a ccTLD can inspire user trust from searchers whose country matches the country that the domain name is targeting and because of that searchers on Google may be more inclined to click on a search result that uses the geotargeted ccTLD.

If a user is in Korea they may feel that a .kr domain is meant specifically for them. If a searcher is in Australia they may feel more inclined to click on a .au domain name.

Listen to the podcast answer from the 3:35 minute mark:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Dean Drobot

Google Clarifies H1-H6 Headings For SEO via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about the SEO value of hierarchically ordering heading elements (H1, H2, etc.). His answer offered an insight into the actual value of heading elements for digital marketing.

Heading Elements

In simple terms, HTML Elements are the building blocks of a web page and they all have their place much like the foundation and a roof of a home have their places in the overall structure.

Heading elements communicate the topic and subtopics of a web page and are literally a list of topics when a page is viewed just by their headings.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which defines HTML, describes headings like this:

“HTML defines six levels of headings. A heading element implies all the font changes, paragraph breaks before and after, and any white space necessary to render the heading. The heading elements are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 with H1 being the highest (or most important) level and H6 the least.

Headers play a related role to lists in structuring documents, and it is common to number headers or to include a graphic that acts like a bullet in lists.”

Strictly speaking, it is absolutely correct to order headings according to their hierarchical structure.

What Google Says About Headings

The person asking the question commented that the SEO Starter Guide recommends using heading elements in “semantic” order for people who use screen readers (devices that translate text into spoken words) but that otherwise it’s not important for Google. The person asking the question wanted to know if the SEO Starter Guide was out of date because an SEO tool had a different recommendation.

Gary narrated the submitted question:

“I recently read on the SEO starter guide that “Having headings in semantic order is fantastic for screen readers, but from Google Search perspective, it doesn’t matter if you’re using them out of order.”

Is this correct because an SEO tool told me otherwise.”

It’s a good question because it makes sense to use heading elements in a way that shows the hierarchical importance of different sections of a web page, right?

Here’s Gary’s response:

“We update our documentation quite frequently to ensure that it’s always up to date. In fact the SEO starter guide was refreshed just a couple months back to ensure it’s still relevant, so what you read in the guide is as accurate as it can get.

Also, just because a non-Google tool tells you something is good or bad, that doesn’t make it relevant for Google; it may still be a good idea, just not necessarily relevant to Google.”

Is It Relevant For Google?

The official HTML standards are flexible about the use of headings.

Here’s what the standards say here:

“A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces. Heading information may be used by user agents, for example, to construct a table of contents for a document automatically.”

And here:

“The heading elements are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 with H1 being the highest (or most important) level and H6 the least.”

The official HTML5 specifications for headings state that the hierarchical ordering is implied but that in both cases the headings communicate the start of a new section within a web page. Also, while the official standards encourage “nesting” headings for subtopics but that’s a “strong” encouragement and not a rigid rule.

“The first element of heading content in an element of sectioning content represents the heading for that section. Subsequent headings of equal or higher rank start new (implied) sections, headings of lower rank start implied subsections that are part of the previous one. In both cases, the element represents the heading of the implied section.

Sections may contain headings of any rank, but authors are strongly encouraged to either use only h1 elements, or to use elements of the appropriate rank for the section’s nesting level.”

That last part of the official standards is quite explicit that users are “encouraged” to only use H1 elements, which might sound crazy to some people, but that’s the reality. Still, that’s just an encouragement, not a rigid rule.

It’s only in the official HTML standards for heading elements in the context of accessibility that the recommendations are more rigid about using heading elements with a hierarchical structure (important to least important).

So as you can see, Google’s usage of heading elements appear to be in line with the official standards because the standards allow for deviation, except for accessibility reasons.

The SEO tool is correct that the proper use of heading elements is to put them into hierarchical order. But the tool is incorrect in saying that it’s better for SEO.

This means that H1 is the most important heading for screen readers but it’s not the most important for Google. When I was doing SEO in 2001, the H1 was the most important heading element. But that hasn’t been the case for decades.

For some reason, some SEO tools (and SEOs) still believe that H1 is the most important heading for Google. But that’s simply not correct.

Listen to the SEO Office Hours Podcast at the 13:17 minute mark:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/AlenD

Google’s John Mueller On How To Verify An SEO Agency’s Work via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

In a recent session of Google’s SEO office-hours Q&A, the Search Relations team addressed a common concern among business owners: how to determine if an SEO agency is actively optimizing your website.

The Business Owner’s Question

The discussion was prompted by a business owner who asked:

“If I have an agency that is managing our organic SEO on a monthly basis, how can I tell if anyone has been actively optimizing? I have a suspicion that the agency has not been optimized out of site for years.”

Google’s Response

In response, John Mueller, a Search Relations team member, shared his experience collaborating with an agency on Google’s Search Central content.

Key Points from Mueller’s Advice

1. Regular Meetings: Hold frequent discussions with the SEO agency to review their work.
2. Progress Reports: Request reports that detail the site’s progress over time.
3. Future Planning: Discussing upcoming work helps ensure the agency addresses your needs.
4. Client Education: Clients should have a basic understanding of SEO work to better evaluate the agency’s efforts.

While acknowledging that increased engagement requires additional time from both parties, Mueller believes it’s worth the effort.

This allows you to check if the SEO agency is meeting your needs. However, he notes that you need to have some trust in your relationship with the agency.

Resources For SEO Education

To assist businesses in managing their SEO efforts, Mueller pointed to two valuable resources:

1. Google’s guide on hiring an SEO provides insights into the selection process.
2. The SEO starter guide offers a foundational understanding of SEO principles.

Mueller’s Full Response

“This is a great question. When we worked with an SEO agency for some of the Search Central content, we had regular meetings to discuss the work that they did, to look at reports about the site’s progress, and to discuss any upcoming work. This did require a bit more time, both from them and from us, but I found it very insightful. I think it helps to lightly understand the kind of work that an agency would do, so that you can confirm that they’re doing what you expect them to do, and even then there’s a component of trust involved. We have a page about hiring an SEO which has some insights, and there’s our SEO starter guide, which can explain a bit more. And also, perhaps some folks from the SEO industry can comment on how they’d help a client understand how they’re spending their time.”

Previous Discussions On SEO Hiring

This advice from Mueller echoes a similar discussion he initiated last year, where he sought recommendations on what businesses should look for when hiring SEO consultants.

The conversation among industry experts highlighted key factors such as experience, customization, transparency, and adherence to ethical practices.

For more insights on choosing the right SEO professional, refer to our previous coverage of that discussion.

When To Seek Professional SEO Help

For businesses unsure about when to seek professional SEO help, here’s an article that outlines five critical situations that warrant hiring an SEO expert.

These include when Google isn’t indexing your site, during site migrations or redesigns, when organic traffic drops significantly, to reverse manual actions, and when current SEO strategies aren’t yielding results.

This information complements Mueller’s advice by helping businesses recognize when professional intervention is necessary.

Featured Image: YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral