Summary of SEO 101 Episode 390
Guest co-host, Scott Van Achte discusses the latest SEO news with Ross Dunn such as upgrades to Googlebot, support for regional schema in videos, and another glitch with Google My Business Insights. The hosts also discuss a number of news items from the past couple of weeks prompted by comments from Google’s John Mueller; mainly debunking SEO myths and common misunderstandings.
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GENERAL SEO NEWS
Googlebot to Crawl over HTTP/2
- Starting in November 2020, Googlebot will start testing crawling using HTTP/2
What is HTTP/2?
HTTP2 is a revision of the HTTP network protocol. Essentially HTTP/2 is more efficient and will make applications faster, simpler, and more robust.
- Google says that there is no ranking benefit to your site supporting HTTP/2. (But they once said that about HTTPS and even mobile friendliness, so HTTP/2 likely will apply at some point)
- Many hosting companies already support HTTP2. You can check to see if yours supports it here: https://tools.keycdn.com/http2-test
Google Adds Support for Regional Video Structured Data
Roger Montii “The regionsAllowed structured data property is meant to define what regions a video is meant for. A search engine can use that information, for example, to limit what regions to show a rich result about a particular video.”
LOCAL SEO NEWS
Google My Business Photo Insights Reporting Delayed
No new photo analytics since Aug 31.
Mueller Files
Keywords in Generic TLD Won’t Help Rankings
In an episode of AskGoogleWebmasters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSAVmUvMU_0&feature=youtu.be) John Mueller was asked “Does a .jobs domain improve the ranking in Google for job websites?” John confirmed that, NoTLD’s with keywords such as *.jobs, etc, have no impact on rankings.
An exception to this, Country TLDs (.ca, .vn, etc) can however, play a role.
Don’t Expect Same Rankings After Manual Action Recovery
John notes that often a site is running artificially,
“The other thing to keep in mind with manual actions in general is that, if you clean up a manual action, that essentially means in the past your website was ranking in an artificial situation.”
For instance, if a site has hundreds of offending paid backlinks and those backlinks are removed, the penalty may be lifted but you also lose the value that you once had from those links.
When a site recovers from a penalty it’s now being ranked in a completely different situation.
Google Mostly Treats Affiliate Links As Nofollowed Links
Google: Speed Is Complex To Measure But Focus On Core Web Vitals
End of Show Notes
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