A site that gets a lot of direct traffic is deemed to be of higher quality than a site that doesn’t get much direct traffic. Reciprocal linking used to be very effective but an update many years ago killed that. The official rules are you should apply the NoFollow tag to all paid links, but trust me – nobody actually does that. You will be penalised if you get caught out buying or sponsoring links.
Because more users are on mobile devices, Google followed the logical path and began prioritizing sites with designs that adapt to mobile screens. Google added experience as a new component, signaling the increasing value placed on content created by those with relevant credentials and direct, real-world experience with the topic. This is especially critical for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics like health, finance, safety, etc.
Optimize Website Structure
Create comprehensive guides that answer a user’s initial search intent and those jumping-off points with skyscraper content. Your content could then appear in multiple AI-powered snapshots, including jumping-off point responses. With AI Overviews, search is more than reaching users at the right time — it’s reaching them at the right time and anticipating their next move. Dig into SEO Anomaly user journeys, prompt AI models, and more to understand better how a journey starts and ends. Note — while MUM is important, we’ve categorized it as a separate ranking factor under AI models. The researchers found that 19% of YouTube channels have more than one video ranking in the top three positions for the exact keywords.
SEO best practices also apply to local SEO, since Google also considers a website’s position in organic search results when determining local ranking. A search engine like Google has its own proprietary index of local business listings, from which it creates local search results. All those can play a role in how well a page performs in search, but the focus should be on the users who will be reading the content. The more natural backlinks you have from high-authority (trusted) websites, the better your odds are to rank higher within search results. Very early on, search engines needed help figuring out which URLs were more trustworthy than others to help them determine how to rank search results.
User Experience is Everything
Audit your pages regularly to ensure they are well-optimized and aligned with the latest search engine guidelines and user expectations. When getting other sites to link to yours, focus on quality, relevant links from authoritative sites in your niche. Stay attuned to industry trends, emerging keywords, and changes in search behavior to keep your keyword strategy up-to-date and effective.
Link relevance is an important signal that tells Google that your website can be a good search result for the particular queries since other relevant websites are linking to you. Each signal may or may not be used by Google for ranking purposes or might be slightly less or more important depending on the search query or the search results. If you want to read more about ranking factors with a focus to prioritize facts and not speculation, then download a copy of Ranking Factors 2023 ebook. Many SEO professionals think that links are being deprecated as a ranking factor. In a 2022 poll by Marie Haynes, 44% of SEOs pros who responded thought that link building was less effective now compared to a few years ago.
- Though Google has penalized exact-match domains (those where the target keyword is in the URL), that penalty is generally for spammy sites with thin content.
- Therefore, having duplicate content can hinder your SEO efforts by diluting the visibility of your content in search results or, in worse cases, causing search engines to penalize your site.
- This tool will help you find and fix issues slowing down your website.
This means that future videos on this topic will be ranked even higher. Learn more about targeting this AI experience with our guide to Bing’s generative search. For more tips, check out our walkthrough on how to improve your visibility in Meta AI. As Google’s dedicated AI chatbot, it’s no surprise there is a correlation between Gemini responses and Google search results.
This of course does not apply to all search results – Google can distinguish content that needs new information constantly as opposed to “evergreen” content. Apart from the flow of PageRank, one of the reasons that links are important is that Google typically finds pages by crawling, and it traverses pages via links. Google wants to deliver the best product on the market, and this is a critical part of SEO that has been overlooked. Focusing on Google’s motivation and working with this will get you better results for ranking than anything else. The concept is important for all niches, but especially for anyone in YMYL niches, such as finance or health, where the results can really impact the user’s life in a significant way.
