Here are some digital marketing items that caught our attention during the week of March 11, 2022 …
During a recent SEO Office Hours session, Google’s John Mueller shared some insights about internal linking and why it’s so important to websites. One item to note is that it helps Google understand the context of the content, such as the importance of a page within the website. Another essential tidbit that came out of the discussion was that links need to be visible to visitors in the content of pages, not just in formats that are generally only visitors to search engines like XML sitemaps or Schema tags.
There was an online debate between Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, and Professor Ramesh Srinivasan about personalization and how it affects Google search results. While from one perspective, it was merely an argument about defining “personalization.” For us digital marketers, though, there is a lot of nuance in what Danny shares and a couple of things that apply to our work:
- Google is very open about how they use personalization in search results. One can read through their documentation and learn what is used in what contexts
- Whether it’s “personalization” or not, as we pointed out in last week’s roundup, there are a lot of factors that play into individual searches that can affect how a particular website ranks from one search to the next
John Mueller was involved in an interesting discussion with someone on Reddit about a month-old website that was not ranking in search results. Towards the end of the exchange, it came out that the site’s 24,000 pages were about stocks, with much of the content seemingly generated automatically. In the end, it is far more effective to create unique and compelling content that is not available in other places, unlike what seems to be going on with the website in question. Something else came up: A website needs to rely upon more than just internal and external linking and XML or HTML sitemaps to rank well in search results. There must be valuable content that people can’t find on other websites.
