Oh gosh, it’s already the 4th week of September, can time just slow down already? Anyway, I’m here with the latest SEO news. Here’s a breakdown of what they are:

-Google: Don’t Remove Old News From Your News Site For SEO Reasons
-Possible Google Algorithm Update
-Google: You Don’t Need Reviews To Use Product Schema For Product Rich Results
-Changing Website Themes Won’t Severely Impact Your Google Rankings
-Google: It’s Not Terrible To Have Related Links Dynamically Change All The Time 

20/9/2021- Google: Don’t Remove Old News From Your News Site For SEO Reasons

Google’s John Mueller was asked about removing old news from a news publisher for SEO reasons and said he would not recommend that you remove old content or old news from your news site for SEO reasons.  He mentioned that there was no value in doing that. 

In particular, he said that it was certainly not recommended for news websites because old content can still contain useful information.

If the reasons why you want to remove content or put it into kind of like an archive section on your website is for usability reasons or for maintenance or whatever, that’s fine but don’t blindly remove old content just because you want to. 

20/9/2021- Possible Google Algorithm Update

There was a possible Google algorithm update from 16-17th September but we’re not exactly sure what it was. People saw a lot a volatility on the SERP after these days. 

People were saying things like how they used to rank on the first page but dropped off for no reason or reported that their website traffic was bouncing all over the place. 

For example, this guy said the update caused his traffic to dip really badly as seen in the picture below. 

Google has yet to mention anything so it might’ve just been a minor update.

21/9/2021- Google: You Don’t Need Reviews To Use Product Schema For Product Rich Results

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that even if you do not have reviews on your product landing pages, you can still use product structured markup/schema on your product pages and gain product rich results in the Google search results page.

You either need reviews, aggregateRating, or offers and if you have that product on sale now, you can also use the offers type. So if you have one or more of these available, you can use product structured data and still be eligible to show product rich results on the page.

22/9/2021- 
Changing Website Themes Won’t Severely Impact Your Google Rankings

It was mentioned before that changing your website or WordPress theme will impact the rankings. 

John Mueller says that if you make changes like changing the color or moving HTML elements around, it should not really have an impact on your Google search rankings. 

But if changing the website theme results in the layout changing, how your internal linking looks and the overall site design then it will impact the Google rankings. Could go up or down, it depends.

22/9/2021- Google: It’s Not Terrible To Have Related Links Dynamically Change All The Time

If you see blog posts or product pages, there is often a related stories or products section. The question was if these related links were dynamic in the sense that a new set of links loads every time the page loads, will it be bad for Google or our SEO efforts?

John Mueller said “it wouldn’t be terrible” because these links still give Google context around that product or page and make it easier to crawl the website.  It also isn’t really common for sites to be set up like that and it’s not really bad from an SEO perspective either, it just makes tracking and debugging harder.

That’s All, Folks!

Well, that’s the end of this week’s SEO news update. Hope you managed to learn something from it. Have a good weekend, people! I’ll see you next week.

Updated: 25 April 2024