Weekly SEO news: 26 February 2019
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Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

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Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Google: What’s the difference between discovering, evaluating and indexing?

It's not enough to publish your web pages. If you want to be found by Google, Google must be able to discover, evaluate, and index your content. What's the difference between these steps and how can you facilitate the process?

How Google finds web pages: discovery, evaluation, indexing

1. Web page discovery

Google must be able to find your web pages somehow. In general, new pages need at least one link from another web page before Google can find that page.

When you publish a new page on your existing website, it's usually enough to link to the new page from one of your existing pages. If you have a brand new website, you need links from external websites.

Without links from other pages, it's unlikely that Google will discover your web pages. The better the linking web pages are, the faster Google will discover your pages.

2. Web page evaluation (this is where things can go wrong)

After discovering your web pages, Google will evaluate them. Google will parse the HTML code of your pages. There are many things that can go wrong at this point:

  • Your web page might deliver the wrong HTTP status code. If your web page looks fine but sends a 4xx or 5xx HTTP status code to search engines, then Google won't consider your page.
  • Your web page might contain unwanted indexing instructions. For example, the page might contain a canonical URL that points to a different page, or it contains a robots meta tag that tells search engines to ignore the pages. In both cases, Google won't consider your page.
  • Google might not be able to see the content of your pages. If your web pages need JavaScript to display the content, chances are that Google won't see everything of the page. Google might also think that the page is a low quality page because it doesn't contain much content.
  • Your web pages might contain low quality content. If the page does not contain many words, or if the page contains content that Google finds dubious, Google might not consider your page.
  • If your web page is password protected, Google won't be able to evaluate the content.
  • If your robots.txt file does not allow search engines to access the pages, Google won't evaluate your pages.

There are many things that can go wrong when Google evaluates your web pages. Use the website audit tool in SEOprofiler to remove all errors that can cause problems.

3. Indexing

When Google has evaluated your content, it will add your pages to the index (if there haven't been any problems). To check if Google has indexed a particular page of your website, enter site:https://www.yourwebsite.com/page-url/ in Google's search form (replace everything after site: with the actual URL of your page).

The actual rank of your web pages depends on many different signals

Being in Google's index doesn't mean that your website will get a particular position in the search results. The position of your web pages depends on many different factors. The most important factors are the relevance of your content to the search term and the quality of the links that point to the page.

You can optimize the relevance of your web pages with the Top 10 Optimizer tool in SEOprofiler. You can optimize the links that point to your website with the Link Profiler tool in SEOprofiler.

Google ranking overview

SEOprofiler offers many more tools that help you to improve the position of your web pages in Google's search results. You can try SEOprofiler here:

Try SEOprofiler now

2. Internet marketing news of the week

GoogleNew Google white paper reveals further information on how Google ranks web pages

"Google has published a white paper with the name ‘How Google fights disinformation.’ In this document, Google explains how they fight disinformation in their products (search, news, ads, YouTube, etc.). [...]

Google explains how they use ranking algorithms to evaluate high-quality information. [...] Google adjusts the ranking algorithms for different query types."

Google patent: context clusters in search query suggestions

"The patent tells us that context clusters might be triggered when someone is starting a query on a web browser. [...] The patent says that context clusters would appear before someone began typing, based upon topics and user information such as location. So, if I were at a shopping mall that had a movie theatre, I might see Search suggestions for movies like the ones shown here. [...]

The context cluster may be related to the location and time that someone accesses the search engine."

GoogleGoogle Ads: updates to mobile page speed score

"Google has announced updates to the mobile page speed score. Google’s mobile speed score is based on a number of factors, including page speed and potential conversion rate. It’s evaluated on a 10-point scale, 1 being very slow and 10 being extremely fast."


E-A-T confirmed by Google to be an important part of their algorithms

"Our ranking system [...] is specifically designed to identify sites with high indicia of expertise, authority and trustworthiness. [...]

Do all that you can to display E-A-T related information for the business. Brag about why your business is the best, has loads of experience, where you have been mentioned, etc. Do the same for your authors. Get them published in authoritative places. Display E-A-T related info in an author bio and link to a full author profile."


+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++

  • New in SEOprofiler: exclude particular external domains from your website audit reports.
  • Google scrapes content without linking to the original source.
  • Google built a microphone into its Nest security system – and forgot to tell anyone.
  • Google Ads 2019: What to look out for.
  • Bing Ads to require certification for addiction services.
  • How to get more views on YouTube.
  • Google Ads updates mobile speed score for landing pages.

3. Previous articles

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