Google has long said they don’t use CTR as a ranking factor, although they sometimes use it when doing experiments in the search results to judge quality of the serps. The question came up (again) in today’s webmaster hangout, and John Mueller went into detail about what he sees as indirect benefits from CTR in […]
Archives for January 29, 2016
Why Google Doesn’t Use Google Analytics for Ranking Purposes
Multiple Googlers have said many times that Google doesn’t use Google Analytics data for ranking purposes, but have never really gone into detail about why this is. In today’s hangout, when John Mueller was commenting about CTR not being a ranking factor (again, something they have said multiple times) he got into specifics about why […]
Submit Reconsideration Requests in Same Language as Website
If you work on international sites, Gary Illyes from Google made an interesting comment about filing reconsideration requests – make sure you are filing the request in the same language as your website. TIL: Writing a reconsideration request in English if the site is not English is a brilliant way to shoot yourself in the […]
Links from Forms Don’t Pass PageRank
This was an interesting question in today’s hangout with John Mueller. Someone asked about the potential impact of an affiliate/advertising link that was placed inside of a form tag as a user action, and whether this could be a problem from a link perspective. Now links inside forms cannot have a nofollow attribute attached to […]
Valid HTML Not a Ranking Factor But Invalid Can Cause These Issues
In the changes yesterday that Google made to their webmaster guidelines, Google changed the phrasing of “clear HTML” to “valid HTML.” So as expected, that phrase got a lot of attention, especially from those who advocate for compliant W3C validation, which Google links to. But is valid HTML a ranking factor? In today’s webmaster hangout, […]