Google has released the link spam update. How does this affect your website and what do you have to do now to improve your rankings?
Why links are important
Links are one of the ways Google understands what content may be helpful to searchers, and they can be good for sites to receive, as long as they're well deserved. If your website contains links that are paid for (affiliate links, guest posts, sponsored posts), then these should be marked with the rel="sponsored" attribute.
How Google tackles link spam
The effectiveness of link spam has been greatly reduced over the past two decades. According to Google, the new link spam update is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages. Sites taking part in link spam will see changes in Search as those links are re-assessed by Google's algorithms.
There is no penalty for the spam links but the spam links won't be used in Google's ranking algorithm.
How to analyze the links that point to your website
The link analysis tool in SEOprofiler enables you to analyze the links that point to your website. Just enter the domain of any website in the search box on OpenLinkProfiler.org.
You get an overview of the linking pages, the anchor texts, the linked pages, the LIS (Link Influence Score) of the linking websites, and much more:
The filters enable you to find the links that you are looking for.
Check and optimize your links now
Check your links and then optimize the link structure of your web pages. Remove low quality links and make sure that the links that point to your website contain relevant keywords.
You can use the free OpenLinkProfiler.org link analysis tool to analyze your links. You can also use the Link Profiler tool in SEOprofiler to analyze the links of any website. The free version enables you to download up to 1,000 links of any site, the full version in SEOprofiler offers much more:
Analyze your links now
How Google ranks news, videos, images, featured snippets & other features
"In short, each feature (i.e. news, videos, images, featured snippets, etc) bids for a desired position in the result, they request position X and bid for it. Google's overall search engine that decides where it should go based on several factors."
Google: Reach back-to-school shoppers online and in-store
"We see that more than 50% of North American back-to-school shoppers say they’ll check for in-store inventory online before going into a store and 48% will shop at stores that offer curbside pickup or contactless shipping."
Google's Gary Ilyes: what to do if you're not listed on mobile
"Sooner or later every site will shift to mobile first indexing, and if Google can't find the content on the mobile site that the desktop site used to rank with, it won't be able to rank the site the same way it did with the desktop version. The menu itself is also important for discovery, if nothing else, so you probably want to replicate the desktop version on the mobile, too, in some way. I'd also look for other differences, like missing structured and meta data, and image attributes and properties (eg. size)."
Google: you might get a ranking benefit if someone steals your images
"Surprisingly hard to answer. In short, you do get some benefit from an image syndicated on other sites if your HTML landing page can become canonical."
+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++
- Google removes the rich result type from the performance reports.
- Google: Changes to enforcement for the MPN [mpn] attribute.
- Bing Search added AI chat.
- Featured reviews in Google My Business.
- Google: Sometimes we show multiple results from the same site.
- Google still indexes HTTP domains.
