Hello hello fellow readers! Let’s have a recap of this week’s important SEO news. However, I do concede that I might have cheated a little by adding SEO news from last weekend, but they are just too interesting not to be included. Without further ado, these are the SEO news for the week (and last weekend): 

• Insights by John Mueller from Google SEO office-hours hangout 
• Google’s John Mueller offers advice on blogging
• Google shopping experience scorecard will promote merchants in search that provide excellent customer service 
• Google’s John Mueller says that server location is not used for geo-targeting 
• Google Image Search is testing rounding the corners on images it displays in the search result

18/2 – Insights by John Mueller from Google SEO office-hour hangout 

Google’s John Mueller was asked a few questions in a recent Google SEO office-hour hangout. Some of the insights that can be derived from the hangout are that the referring page in the Inspection Tool in Google Search Console is not really important as it is just a technical thing showing which URL(s) Google first discovered the page. 

Besides that, John Mueller also stated that E-A-T factors (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) are important to a website but Google does not have an E-A-T score. However, there is indirect work done to accomplish similar things.  He went on further to say that it is more about understanding the context of content across the web.

Additionally, newer content published at the end of the pagination set has the downside of being not as valued by Google. This is because it is found deeper in content so Google might not crawl the pagination set as often because it does not see the newer content. 

Web Stories are hard to optimize for SEO because they typically have very little textual content. However, there is no need to worry as John Mueller confirmed that Web Stories in Google Search is not related to the overall ranking performance of your site in general.

Google’s John Mueller offers advice on blogging

If you are looking to start a blog. John Mueller, in a Reddit comment, offers this piece of advice where you should choose a topic you have a bit of knowledge about which you’ll be happy to write about even if it does not get indexed or ranked by Google. You should also choose a topic where you don’t necessarily have commercial intent and where there isn’t already an over-saturation of sites. 

23/2 – Google shopping experience scorecard will promote merchants that provide excellent customer service

Google’s latest email states that merchants who provide good service will be rewarded with higher rankings and more visibility in Google Shopping search through a boost in ranking, a badge, or other benefits that will help consumers find your business.

The Shopping Experience Scorecard will use metrics such as delivery time, shipping cost, return cost, and return window to determine whether you do well on your scorecard.

Google’s John Mueller says that server location is not used for geo-targeting 

The geographical location of a web server doesn’t affect SEO but it might slow down crawling when it sees a hosting change so that Google does not cause problems.

Although moving the geographical location of your web server doesn’t affect SEO, it might affect factors such as speed and page experience ranking factor for a website as users that are further away from the hosting location will have a long page loading time and that will play a part in their page experience. 

Hence, the safe route to take when choosing your hosting server location is by having multiple server locations so that users would have a better page experience when they are visiting your site. 

Google Image Search is testing rounding the corners on images it displays in the search result 

I guess you can say that Google is really at the forefront of “cutting-edge technology”. Get it? 

And….scene!

That is it for today boys and gals. What are your thoughts on the above topic? Do share your comments below. I do apologize if I have ruined anyone’s day with my lame joke. 

See you again on next week’s SEO News Weekly!

Updated: 25 April 2024

About Sheldon

Your everyday guy that loves soccer, educational documentaries and dad jokes.