The Ask Google Anything panel at the end of SMX is always chockful of useful SEO nuggets. Todays talk with Gary and Mariya did not disappoint. Here are some great takeaways that most of us knew, some of us suspected, and all of us should review: – The Mobile-First index is months away. At least June or after. – It is confirmed that Mobile Page Speed will be a Ranking Factor in the Mobile-First Index. It will replace Desktop signals. – Google does not have a Domain Authority metric but individual Page/URL Authority does exist. – Authorship is dead. Its never coming back. – For featured snippets its ALL content quality. Relevant and well-structured. (links, structured data, etc, not used) – Wikidata entities are THE most popular source of information for the Knowledge Graph – There is no specific % of 404s that hurt your rankings. None. – Google still has no plans to use Social Signals to rank pages. – Length of content on a page is NOT a ranking factor. Answer the query and move on. – Again, Duplicate Content is NOT a penalty. But you can dilute signals and shoot yourself in the foot. – Google is doing its best to automatically discount bad links but they make mistakes. So keep disavowing. – The Fred update was a Quality Update — the answers as to what to address are laid out in the Google Webmaster & Quality Rater Guidelines (no other comment than that) Oh, and a funny point today when it was discovered that Google does not rank on the 1st page of Google for Search Engine. LOL.
Juniper Mason: This is all true
Violet Morrison: Interesting – So keep disavowing
Hayden Roberts: This falls into the should already know category.Never leave a link quality question up to Google to figure out. Proactive disavowing is just a best practice.
Violet Morrison: Hayden Roberts: Question was asked in another thread… ie Disavow vs Algorithm
Daniela Lindsey: I agree with most. We had some sort of a hiccup recently where we had a surge of 404s (about 148000) We had no idea why, and even asked Yoast and Woo to help. No one could answer.In short this did affect our ranking.
Carter Hudson: Or whatever underlying condition was creating havoc with internal links and their HTTP Status caused the Gbot to time out on crawls and THAT affected ranks – maybe
Hayden Dixon: Jordan Kasteler
Selah Rios: I really wonder about length of page when quality is otherwise equal.
Carter Hudson: Necessary and comprehensive. All that is relevant and expected and not an ounce more.
Selah Rios: Carter Hudson: yes but, for example, taking SEO, you could write one page on backlinks thats 10000 words long, with examples and ideas, how to get them, how Google responds to them, case examples, etc. Or you could write something more general, but still accurate, thats 500 words. Comprehensive can be variable depending on how comprehensive you want to be, for virtually any subject.
Carter Hudson: Yup. I like the inestimable Barry Schwartz as an example, whose Search Engine Roundtable relies almost exclusively on brief news dispatches. Of course, it is the Kind of content that also matters. It does not hurt that there are often more User-Generated Content comments than there is text, all signs of current interest as genuine citations.
Hayden Roberts: For anyone interested, we had the above main takeaways moved to an Infographic. Check it out here.
Juniper Mason: You move fast!
Hayden Roberts: Arsen, yeah Im NOT a graphic artist but that was put together by Neesha Mirchandani @neeshamirchi. She does good work.