SEO UPdate #10 | 23/02/2022

Already the tenth SEO Update. Reason for a party? No, we do that at #100. We are back on track, this is already the 2nd update in 2 days. So let’s get right down to business.

Page experience update (desktop) now rolling out

The Page Experience Update for desktop is now rolling out. Rollout began on 22/02 and is expected to continue until the end of March. Rolling out the mobile version for this (always mobile first now), had little to no impact on rankings. Would this be the same with the desktop variant?

See the factors in the table below.

Quick News

Here we also cover important topics from the land of the SEO specialist, but quickly.

• Google’s John Mueller indicates that the location of internal links does not matter. Now I’m not sure I agree with this. After all, a link at the bottom of the page is less visible (some internal links are never found by visitors), than an internal link in the first paragraph of a page. What John does confirm in the article is that content and anchor text do get used by Google.
  • Martin Splitt, also of Google, contradicts John Mueller on the above point. Martin explains that the main content section is used by Google to understand the overall picture. Google divides the website into sections and assigns a certain strength to each section. Further up, usually weighs more heavily as well. Here I agree: The higher the probability of someone clicking on an internal link, the heavier it weighs.
• This is a fun one. Even if you knew Google’s entire algorithm by heart. You still need that…
  • Natural backlinks.
  • Good content.
  • A user-friendly website.
• A while ago, something called deduplication took place. What happened was that companies often got a featured snippet and, along with it, an organic result (often with a different page). This is now being increasingly countered by Google.
• Google noticed six months ago that page titles and meta descriptions were over-optimized. What they have done now is that more often they generate the page title themselves (often based on the H1).

That was the SEO update again. Hopefully you learned a lot that you can apply as an SEO expert with your clients. Good luck!