Hello SEO-enthusiasts, welcome to another week of weekly SEO news. Let’s see whats the lineup for today is, shall we? 

• Google’s John Mueller gives his take on ranking for Featured Snippets in Google Search 
• Google’s update on automatically generated content 
• Google Search Console will show links from a redirected domain to the new domain 

13/4 – Google’s John Mueller gives his take on ranking for Featured Snippets in Google Search 

Google’s John Mueller was asked on Twitter for advice on how to rank for the featured snippets section of the Google Search results. His response was that there was no technical way to rank for Google Search. 

He continued on saying that in your site optimization focus, ranking for featured snippets shouldn’t be your primary goal but you should focus on other useful stuff that may actually help your website. 

So, what are these things? You should instead focus on having your content structured in accordance with search intent. As a result, as you naturally focus on getting articles on the first page then you may get featured as a snippet. 

Google’s update on automatically generated content 

Google has recently updated its webmaster guidelines as you can see below. 

The new webmaster guidelines add that automatically generated content is against guidelines only when it is ‘intended to manipulate search rankings. 

However, the flaw with this new guideline is that Google is trying to ascertain intention which is subjective to a person’s state of mind. Google’s attempt to ascertain a person’s intention may be an arduous task than what they imagine. (provided of course they actually look at each case individually instead of having a blanket ban on AI content that ranks)

Google Search Console will show links from a redirected domain to a new domain 

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google Search Console will show links from a redirected domain to the new domain in the links report in the Search Console. 

The answer is yes. If the links are being redirected and you did a site move from an old domain to a new one, the links pointing to the old domain will show up as pointing to the new domain.

Link reports in Google Search Console are only a sampling of your links, so not all links will show. But the sampling of redirected links will show up. 

That’s it for this week!

That’s the end of this week’s news, boys and gals. Do you have any questions or thoughts on today’s topics? Do you agree with Google’s newest guidelines? Let me know by dropping a comment below. 

Updated: 26 November 2024