EP208 - Google Confirms: Fewer Links Needed for Effective SEO Rankings!

Welcome to episode 208 of This Week in Marketing. I'm your host Sajid. Today I'm going over the digital marketing updates from the week of April 15 through 19, 2024. First up, Google has confirmed, well Gary Ellis from Google has confirmed that, you know, fewer links are needed for effective SEO rankings.

What this does is breaks the thinking in the industry where, you know, you need to have a lot of backlinks so that, you know, your content can't rank. Now what Gary is saying is that because the algorithm has gotten smarter it requires very few links to rank pages signaling a continued move away from relying only on link quantity. Now link was something that was considered in the early days of SEO and then over time as the algorithm was able to understand and comprehend the content on the page and the overall website it kind of kind of moved away from it.

Okay with that let's move on to the next topic. The next topic is about preventing de-indexing during hosting transitions. Now if you have recently migrated your site and notice a drop in search visibility this information is crucial and this was actually a discussion between John Mueller and someone who has migrated their website recently and then kind of asking John, hey, what do I do? So what John's saying that, look, first of all, you need to utilize Google Search Console.

This tool can help identify whether pages are not found, which is 404, or if there is a robots.txt file that's blocking crawlers, or there's some third thing that's going on. Mueller points out that often during a WordPress site migration, settings intended to hide the site from search engines during development and not reverted. To check this, you can navigate the settings in different plugins.

And, you know, it's not just the SEO plugins. There are other tools and other plugins, whether it's your theme. Make sure everything is there and then kind of go from there. Again, he did not have a direct answer as to why, you know, you might get de or you might not your search in search bots are not able to reach your site after the migration And that what it means by preventing de because you want to be careful of your new site as you spinning up to make sure that you are not accidentally putting something in the robot.

txt or in one of the plugin settings that says, you know, hey, Google, hey, Microsoft Bing, do not index my site. Okay, let's move on to the next ones. This is about Google's stance on impact of owning multiple websites on SEO. So basically what it comes out down to is like, you know, someone saying, you know, hey, if I have two niche sites where they're on the same topic, does that have an impact on my SEO?

So Mueller again is saying, look, there is no right or wrong. you can have a website on let's just say uh iphones or two websites but however what's going to happen is now you're going to decide which site site a on iphone or site b on iphone gets the content right well i have two sites now that's this is a strategy that you know multiple seo professionals and slash affiliate marketers have have oh we're going to spin up two sites on the same topic, iPhone again on this case, and we're going to try to rank one or the other, and then one of them is going to win, and the other one might not win, but at least we are expanding our chances of winning, right?

It's like buying a lottery tickets. However, in SEO, that doesn't work. What John is saying, look, if you want to do it, you might as well do one and write really good content and focus on that one versus trying to create two and then have two, you have to write content for two, and then you have to decide who's going to get the content and who's not going to get the content and so forth. I hope this helps.

Let's move on to the next one. What are the impact of SC404 errors on website ranking? Well, Gary Ellis says there isn't none, right? These are 404 error happens for whatever reasons, whether it's intentionally, unintentionally, and the search engines or the algorithms are, or crawlers are pretty smart to know when they get a 404, just ignore.

Now obviously over time if you have a lot you could look into it you can use link checker or something like that to kind of see you know hey are we getting an internal 404 or is it an external 404 Now if it getting external 404 which is someone linking to your site dear you can contact the other side but there is not much you can do again what gary is saying look we know it happens nothing on the web is permanent you are more better off focusing on creating content on other aspects of seo versus trying to fix this 404 and the other question is does changing your website host impact your seo so this is again a feedback from gary illis gary is saying look it really doesn't but it also depends now if you're moving in from a very slow server to a high servers and now you know there is a the server response quickly obviously you're going to get benefits but at the same time if you're moving to a slow server sometimes it's having throwing out five or three errors things like that what's going to happen right we you are going to get impacted eventually so this is more falling into the line of technical issue but uh what's uh gary is saying look if all things are equal it should not impact but if sometimes things people accidentally move from one host to another host with the second host the new host is slow or is not as responsive or for whatever reason is bogged down then you might have some issues okay uh next update and what about five or three errors right which is what i said and with five or three errors i mean you know it's the way of life in of the web uh gary is saying it does not harm a site if it's brief now if it's an extended period of time uh then it's an issue so and what is brief uh he's he said like you know if it's lasting 10 to 15 minutes and happening occasionally it's considered acceptable and it does not impact the website's crawl rate or ranking now if it's happening for an extended period of time what's going to happen is that your crawl rate is going to a crawl budget is going to get impacted so you want to make sure that you are doing right in those areas again it's more into falling into the line of technical SEO but it's helpful to know.

Lastly or second to last is what about hyphenated domains right hyphenated domains are where you have like you know market dash grow a dash online right and maybe it was a good thing back in the day but now basically, and we covered this in the past, it does not really make a big difference. There are so many top-level domains, .co, .ai, .

nl. You can go to something else. John Mueller is saying, look, any reason for you to do hyphenated, it might be harder to explain. to tell to people as well, just stick to something that's easy, memorable, and gives you better use over time.

Okay, and the other thing is GF4 has basically renamed conversions into key events, and that's all you need to know. Basically, you know, GF4 is saying, you know, why call it a conversion, because not everything is a conversion, so they're calling it key events. Other than that, there's much to know. Again, if you're looking for conversions in GA4, you won't find it.

It's called key events. And lastly, oh, no, actually, it's not lastly. There's a few more. So Google ad strength is not what you think.

Ad strength does not influence ad rank. Despite prevalent beliefs, Google's Jeannie Marvin confirmed that ad strength is merely a diagnostic tool, not a determinant in the ad auction process. The revelation is crucial for advertisers who've been puzzled by the visibility of ad strength versus the opaque nature of ad rank. Ad rank is what Google uses to show, calculate whether they are going to show an ad or not.

And obviously, that's where quality score comes into play and things like that. And a lot of people think ad strength is quality score, and it's not. It's just ad strength is something that gives you a guideline, hey, your ad is good, and that's Google's BS.