SEO UPdate #14 | 17/03/2022

Welcome to already the fourteenth SEO Update, written by an enthusiastic SEO specialist from Rotterdam (that’s me). Let’s start right away.

New ways to broaden or refine your search

There are new ways in Google to both broaden or refine your search. This allows you to turn your long-tail search into a short-tail search and vice versa. See the screenshots below for what it looks like now.

Google in dark mode

There are multiple complaints in the Google Search Community forums in which Google users are talking about unexpected toggling from dark mode to light mode in Google. Also, other settings such as what region you are from don’t always stick.

Google uses “no” interaction on the page

Google does not use interaction with the page as a ranking factor. John Mueller stated this during a video for Google. The question was posed as follows.

“Can one page with a high level of interaction have a positive effect on the entire website, do these signals trickle down to the other pages?”

John Mueller indicated that this was not the case. Furthermore, John Mueller talked about how important it was that these topics, where there is a lot of engagement, are relevant to the topic for which you actually want to get higher.

What John Mueller also pointed out was that you may have internal links on the page that performs so well, this in turn may cause the internal links to pass some of this power on to other pages.

Fast news from SEO land

We have arrived at the fast news again. Faster, but no less important of course.

• Google never gives full weight to links to your website. For example, when Google has doubts about a paid link, Google never gives 100% of the power. Not even when you have a “paid” attribute. John Mueller of Google says of this: people do say more things that are not true and we cannot believe everything.
• Google indicates that in most cases you actually don’t need to use the disavow tool. Now I know from experience that SEO specialists hurt a website with this more often than they exert a positive effect on it. Be careful with this.
• To stay on the same topic: Google sees no difference between the attributes Nofollow, UGC or sponsored. This was to be expected, what is interesting is that they do all have the same as well as the rel=”Nofollow.”

Closing

that’s it again! Hopefully, you have learned something again and can put this knowledge to use for better positions in Google for your clients.