If you’ve been away from your computer or want a summary of things happened in SEO industry in last month, you’ve come to the right place as we’ve got eight of ‘em.
Directly jump to:
#1. Most Websites Rank Without Any Link Building, Says Google
#2. It Doesn’t Hurt Your Rankings, If Your Site Indexed With Its IP Address
#3. Google Will Penalize Your Site For Using Event Markup in a Misleading Manner
#4. Google Officially Changes info: Search Operator
#5. Transfer Parameter Handling In Google Search Console, If Moving To HTTPs
#6. If You Don’t Have A Manual Action, You Don’t Need To Submit A Disavow File
#7. Adding Structured Data Helps Google Understand & Rank Web Pages Better
#8. Google Extends the Length of Snippets in Search Results
Let’s get into details.
1. Most Websites Rank Without Any Link Building, Says Google
Google’s John Mueller on Twitter confirmed that most websites rank on Google without building a single link.
So, what does it mean for SEO professionals and website owners?
For years now, we’ve heard the importance of link building to rank higher in Google. However, Google always said that marketers should focus on the quality content and how they can better user experience, instead of focusing on building links.
If you’ll create a great content, people will definitely link to it.
2. It Doesn’t Hurt Your Rankings, If Your Site Indexed With Its IP Address
Sometimes, instead of your website address or name, Google shows its IP address in search results due to misconfiguration or other bad settings from your end.
Google’s John Muller confirmed on Twitter that it does not hurt your rankings. However, you should implement the proper redirection and make sure that the changes made to fix such issues have been indicated in Search Console.
Google will see the changes and will update the search results. This is important because it can impact user experience to a great extent. Users love to see and read textual domain names, not numerical website addresses.
Plus, if they link your website IP address over your domain name, this is also not an ideal thing for SEO. So, make sure that you have a proper redirection and a good index in place.
3. Google Will Penalize Your Site For Using Event Markup in a Misleading Manner
Google recently said that they will penalize sites that use event markup to describe something that is not an event and looks confusing to users.
Image credit: Google
Google may take manual actions on such case that will result in structured data markup for the whole site not being used for search results.
4. Google Officially Changes info: Search Operator
Google has confirmed that they have removed the additional links section from info command functionality.
Previously info operator used to give you the information including the cached version of the page, similar pages and the pages that link to the site. It now just only shows the snippet of the site.
Why Google has removed this extra information and changed the functionality is unclear.
5. Transfer Parameter Handling In Google Search Console, If Moving To HTTPs
Google reminded that if you are moving from HTTP to HTTPs version, make sure you transfer the parameter handling setup from search console property, verified for HTTP version to new verified property for HTTPs.
This feature specifies whether or not a parameter changes the content on the web page.
6. If You Don’t Have A Manual Action, You Don’t Need To Submit A Disavow File
Recently in Pubcon conference, Gary Illyes of Google said that if you don’t have any manual action for your website then there is no need to submit a disavow file.
Since Penguin 4.0 is a real-time algorithm which devalues link spam and can lower the rank on page-level basis instead of dropping down the entire website, there is no need to have a disavow file.
7. Adding Structured Data Helps Google Understand & Rank Web Pages Better
In the Pubcon conference, Gary Illyes said that structured data plays an important role in helping Google understand pages better.
“Add structure data to your pages because, during indexing, we will be able to better understand what your site is about. Think about any schema.org schema that you could use on your pages. It will help us understand your pages better, and indirectly, it leads to better ranks in some sense, because we can rank easier.”
Gary explained.
8. Google Extends the Length of Snippets in Search Results
Google has made a significant change to its SERP listing by extending the length of description shown below URL. In a statement, Google said that the snippets are more descriptive and useful, so they resulted in becoming slightly longer.
So what does it mean to SEOs?
These snippets are dynamically generated based on the query and page content. Some SEO professionals are going to increase their description length but it looks like Google is recommending not to waste time on counting the characters.
Snippets have pretty much always been dynamic. Counting characters isn’t really a good use of your time there.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) November 28, 2017