SEO and Myths: 6 Lessons from Google

 

Have you ever heard of the "SEO Myth Busting" series? It is a series broadcast on the Youtube channel "Google Webmasters" which returns to the main myths circulating in the world of digital marketing and helps you disentangle the true from the false. The series is already in its second season. If you have a little time ahead and you speak English, I suggest you take a little tour here .    

 Don't have time to watch all the episodes? Don't worry, we've got you covered. Here is an episode-by-episode summary of everything there is to remember from this second season! 

 Episode 1: Google & Bing 

 Google and Bing in the same room, impossible? Not at all ! In this Season 2 premiere episode, Google's Martin Splitt and Microsoft's Sandhya Guntreddy reunite to discuss common issues facing both search engines and frequently asked questions from their users. 

 The big reveal: The relationship between Google and Bing is not at all hostile as you might have imagined. The two companies often work together to improve the online experience of their users. Bing has a crawl tool called "Crawl Control" which allows users to tell Bingbot the best time to crawl their site.  

 Takeaway Tip: Backlinks are an important ranking factor for Google and Bing, but they're just one factor among hundreds. So don't just focus on backlinks and most importantly don't buy them and spam URLs. 

 Best Quote: “There is one backlink myth that comes up especially often: If I have a lot of backlinks I'm probably more likely to rank higher. This is just a myth. Yes, this is one of the signals, but it is far from the only "

 Episode 2: Crawl Budget 

 In this episode, Martin meets Alexis Sanders from Merkle to discuss Googlebot. They are particularly interested in the speed of exploration, its frequency and the prioritization of priorities.

 The big reveal: Google limits how often Googlebot crawls websites. This is called the "Crawl budget". It was created to prevent the servers on which the sites are hosted from crashing due to Googlebot. Google, however, crawls news websites more frequently, such as news sites, to ensure that Google can offer the most recent information when searching for news events. 

 Although the Crawl Budget is the subject of much debate, it is a topic that really only concerns very large websites that have over a million pages. If the content on your website is not indexing fast enough, you should first look at other more basic aspects, such as the quality of your content or the configuration of your site's server. 

 The tip to remember: If Google notices that the content on your website is not updated frequently, it will crawl it less often. In order to avoid this, you should therefore regularly post new content, update your existing content and ensure that you have up-to-date publication dates and sitemap. If you have too many pages and they're draining your crawl budget, try to find ways to consolidate them and avoid duplicate content.  

 Best quote: "If some content is very similar to each other, should it exist? This is the first question to ask. Can you expand your content? For example, if it is about variations of same product, maybe you can use a table to describe them on one page instead of having one page for each variation. " 

 Episode 3: The Loading Speed ​​of Pages 

 The guest of this episode is digital marketing expert Eric Enge. He tells us about the concept of loading speed and its importance.

 The big revelation: Google does not only take into account the loading speed on a computer, it also wants Internet users who use their smartphone deep in the countryside with a bad connection to be able to access your site as well. 

 The tip to remember: Images play an important role in loading speed, consider reducing their size. Users who want to improve the loading speed of their pages should also be interested in the concept of Lazy Loading and the Lighthouse tool developed by Google. It allows you to check the loading speed of your pages. The only catch is that the results it gives its own to the device you are using at the time you do the test and it does not analyze the speed on another device.     

 Best quote: "53% of the time, people leave the page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. The average load time is 15.3 seconds."

 Episode 4: Canonical URLs

 In this episode devoted to canonical URLs, guest technical SEO consultant Rachel Costello tries to bring a little more clarity to duplicate content.

 The big reveal: As you may know, canonical tags can save you from being penalized for having duplicate content. They allow you to tell Google which page is the page with the original content, the one you want to see in search results. However, just because you use these tags does not mean that Google will necessarily respect your choice and display the page you have selected. Indeed, canonical tags are only one criterion among others on which Google relies to identify duplicate content. If your website has pages with duplicate content, you should definitely use these tags, but don't expect Google to blindly follow your recommendations. 

 The advice to remember: Pages that contain too much duplicate content can be considered as duplicated even if they also offer original content at the same time. 

 Best quote: "You must avoid finding yourself in a situation where Google (or Googlebot) has to choose for you"

 Episode 5: Site Migrations

 In this episode, Glenn Gave, digital marketing consultant, talks about site change, URL migration and domain name change. 

 The big reveal: Migrating your site to a domain that was previously owned by someone else won't allow you to keep the good rankings that person had. On the other hand, you could have big problems if she used her domain for activities against Google's policies. 

 Here's a tip: Make sure you've set up your Search Console account properly before moving your site. In addition to redirecting pages, you can speed things up and help prevent problems with Google by using change of address tools to let Google know that you are migrating your site. 

 The best quote: "No matter what you do, take it step by step"

  Episode 6: Do we always need more content?

 Episode 6 deals with a particularly important topic in SEO: content. To talk about it, Martin invited Lily Ray, SEO Director at Path Interactive. The question at the heart of this episode is how much content to produce for your website. 

 The big reveal: Many believe that when it comes to content, it's the quantity that matters, but that's not true. To be successful, it is above all necessary to bet on quality content that will provide useful information to Internet users. Writing blog posts on events or topics related to your industry can help you attract the right kind of audience to your site, but your content needs to be relevant. Producing tons of content that doesn't target the right keywords won't help you get more customers to find your business. 

 The tip to remember: If you target the same keywords from year to year, don't spend your time creating a new page for each of them every year. Update the content of your existing pages so that they correspond to current events and thus gain visibility.   

 Best Quote: "It's great to have a blog that talks about business-relevant topics or the latest industry news, but not to produce content just for the sake of producing content."   

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