Whilst February is the shortest month of the year, it’s not lacking in terms of news from the SEO world. Let’s take a look at what happened in February…
Nofollow Your Credit Links
New advice about site credit links came out earlier this month during Google’s SEO office-hours video.
If your site has credit links in the footer – such as: site designed by – then these links should be marked as no follow, Lizzi Sassman says.
Sassman said: “In general, if the links are boilerplate stuff like ‘made by Squarespace’ that come with the website theme, this is not something that you need to worry about.”
She continued by saying that these links should be marked as no follow if you have control over the link. Sassman also recommended that you “check to make sure that the anchor text is something reasonable. For example, make sure that the link isn’t gratuitously keyword rich, for example, ‘made by the best Florida SEO’.”
Changes to Multisearch/Lens
During a live stream from Paris, Google announced a bunch of changes coming to Search and Google Lens.
The big announcement surrounded new information on multisearch. Multisearch allows users to use their phone’s camera to search with an image and text, via Google Lens. Both the image and text will be used to bring up visual search results.
Multisearch also allows users to find local results, meaning you can find businesses nearby that sell the product you are searching for.
Multisearch is currently available globally on mobile, in countries where Lens is available, and will come to the web in the coming months.
New Link Best Practices Published
A new link best practices has been published in Google’s SEO and search developer documentation. Classically the document was about how to create crawlable links, however the document now includes anchor text placements, how to write good anchor text, internal links within content, and external links from other sites.
Crawlable Links
The document now reads:
Generally, Google can only crawl your link if it’s an <a> HTML element (also known as anchor element) with an href attribute. Most links in other formats won’t be parsed and extracted by Google’s crawlers. Google can’t reliably extract URLs from <a> elements that don’t have an href attribute or other tags that perform as links because of script events.”
Anchor Text Placement
The document provides examples of both good and bad written anchor text and Google says:
Anchor text (also known as link text) is the visible text of a link. This text tells people and Google something about the page you’re linking to. Place anchor text between <a> elements that Google can crawl.”
Internal Links
On internal links, Google writes:
You may usually think about linking in terms of pointing to external websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links can help both people and Google make sense of your site more easily and find other pages on your site. Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. Think about what other resources on your site could help your readers understand a given page on your site, and link to those pages in context.”
External Links
Trust factor of links is a big talking point in this document, noting how sites who link to you can use nofollow tags for spammy links.
Google says:
Linking to other sites isn’t something to be scared of; in fact, using external links can help establish trustworthiness (for example, citing your sources). Link out to external sites when it makes sense, and provide context to your readers about what they can expect.”
Links are a vital ranking factor for search engines, so using links correctly is imperative if webmasters want to rank highly in SERPs. Keeping up to date with Google’s documentation will allow you to make sure you’re using links to the best of your ability.
Don’t Use 403 or 404 Status Codes to Limit Googlebot Crawl Rate
“Please don’t do that” is the advice Gary Illyes from Google Search Relations gave against using 404 and other 4xx status errors for trying to set a crawl rate limit for Googlebot.
He went on to say: “Over the last few months we noticed an uptick in website owners and some content delivery networks (CDNs) attempting to use 404 and other 4xx client errors (but not 429) to attempt to reduce Googlebot’s crawl rate.”
If you’re interested in reducing Googlebot crawling on your site, Google has a document to help you out.
The document reads:
To quickly reduce the crawl rate, you can change the Googlebot crawl rate in Search Console. Changes made to this setting are generally reflected within days. To use this setting, first verify your site ownership. Make sure that you avoid setting the crawl rate to a value that’s too low for your site’s needs. Learn more about what crawl budget means for Googlebot. If the Crawl Rate Settings is unavailable for your site, file a special request to reduce the crawl rate. You cannot request an increase in crawl rate.”
However if this isn’t possible, Google says to “reduce the crawl rate for short period of time (for example, a couple of hours, or 1-2 days), then return an informational error page with a 500, 503, or 429 HTTP response status code.”
Site Move Documentation Updated
Google had a little pre-emptive spring clean of the site move documentation – which impacts brands that are looking to change their hosting setup.
Gary Illyes writes: “just cleaned it up; it collected a lot of potentially unnecessary sentences over the years. And we linked out to a couple external resources from those with more working knowledge on site moves.”
Rather than a full blown change, the update serves as a little refresh to the wording and simplifying content. If you have a site move coming up, it might be a good idea to freshen up on the doc.
Favicons No Longer Need to Be Hosted on Same Domain
Another day, another documentation update for Google; this time it’s the favicon search developer documentation.
The document was updated to say that favicons don’t need to be hosted in the same domain to be eligible for a favicon in the SERPs.
Google says: “Removed the hosting location requirement from the favicon documentation; you don’t need to host the favicon in the same domain in order to be eligible for a favicon in Google Search results.”
AI Updates
AI continues to grow in 2023 with February bringing Bing’s AI based search and Google’s Bard to life. Whilst both Bing and Bard both have their problems, they demonstrate that their future in search is inevitable.
Check out our recent blog post on the story of Bing and Bard here.
Disavowing Links
Last month we discussed John Muller’s tweets discussing how disavowing links is a waste of time; Gary Illyes followed suit in February during a Q&A session at PubCon.
Discussing disavow files @methode said it most likley isn't doing anything.
— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) February 27, 2023
He clearly stated that the number of sites who shot themselves in their foot with these is higher than the number of sites he thought would of benefitted from a disavow file. #Pubcon
This further confirms that disavowing spammy links is very low in priority for webmasters and that building new links from high authority sites makes for a much better investment of your time.
February 2023 Product Reviews Update
Google rounded out February with a product reviews update. Named the February 2023 product reviews update, this is the sixth update to product reviews and expands to more languages rather than just English.
The product reviews update now supports English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Polish, and is expected to take around two weeks for this update to rollout.
The first product review update was launched on the 8th of April in 2021 and served to reward quality review content.
If you’ve noticed a dip in traffic following this update, it might be time to assess the quality of your site’s content. If you need a hand with this, Fusion Unlimited has the expertise to help.
by Jack Bell
