SEO UPdate #19 | 01/04/2022

Welcome to the nineteenth update from SEO land. I am Ralf van Veen, SEO specialist at my own company and I am happy to write these updates for you. We start today with the quick news, enjoy reading!

Today’s fast-paced news

The fast-paced news from SEO land, laid out point by point.

• John Mueller confirms that a nofollow attribute does not reduce the value of a link, but that no value is provided with this attribute. A number of SEO specialists have indicated that they thought Nofollow links would provide some value after all, but that is really not the case.
• A lot of volatility is now being noticed in the SERP. See the screenshot below of Glenn Gabe.
• Google now displays messages such as “come back later” and “check the source” to indicate that for certain searches, results are getting better at a later time (with news) or that certain results do not have good sources.
• Update from GDS. Google Data Studio now supports data from Google News Traffic from the Google Search Console. I don’t know how many websites will benefit from this, but still a nice update.
• For the local knowledge window in the SERP, Google can now translate it into different languages.
• With MUM, Google is getting better at recognizing when a person is in distress. When you are in a personal crisis and search for something in Google about this, Google will automatically show a more relevant SERP.
• BERT is now also being used to not show content that might unexpectedly be perceived as shocking when a searcher is not really looking for it. This goes beyond the Safesearch results deployed by Google in the past.
• Bing is testing a snippet from Wikipedia in the upper left corner of the SERP. When you search for something in Bing that is also an article in Wikipedia, it is triggered. I think it looks sloppy, I think bing is looking for new features not yet used by Google.

Redirects in the XML sitemap

Interesting for SEO specialists working on a website migration: Google indicates that it is a good idea to keep URLs short in the XML sitemap after they receive a redirect. Remembering to remove them will help Google detect redirects faster. John Mueller indicates: keep redirects in the sitemaps for about 1 to 3 months.

For URLs that remain stable on the website (that change less frequently), it is interesting to keep them in the XML sitemap for the canonical. With this, you explicitly indicate to Google that you want those URLs to be indexed. For URLs that change, it is interesting to do this so that Google discovers them just a little faster. See correspondence with John Mueller below.

Closing

That was the SEO update of April 1, 2022. I hope you found it interesting and picked up something to pick up with your own clients. Good luck.