Hello fellow readers, welcome to another week of SEO News. Are you excited? Well, let’s see what news we have for this week. 

• Ahrefs announces new search engine: Yep
• Google: Restricting XML sitemap is acceptable 
• Google: Don’t waste time filling up alt texts with nonsense 

6/6 – Google: Restricting XML sitemap is acceptable 

A Twitter recently asked John Mueller whether it is fine that some websites use Cloudflare to restrict access to their XML sitemaps? 

John Mueller’s response to this was that it is perfectly acceptable for websites to restrict access of their XML sitemaps to visitors and make them available only for search engines. 

Google: Don’t waste time filling up alt texts with nonsense

A Twitter user recently asked Google’s John Mueller whether it is detrimental to a website SEO to fill up all the images in a website with a company’s name as this was requested by the Twitter user’s client. 

John Mueller’s response to that was that it is a complete waste of time. He said that you not only waste time by implementing it but you are also wasting time in the future if you would need to clean it. 

Image Alt texts are meant to convey the “why” of the image as it relates to the content of a document or webpage. 

Ahrefs announces new search engine: Yep 

Ahrefs has recently announced that they are releasing an all-new search engine to compete with Google. 

How Ahrefs plans to differentiate its search engine from Google is by 2 methods. 

Firstly, the search engine would not collect personally identifiable info from their searches but instead would only collect necessary information such as the entered keyword, the searcher’s preferred language, and the general geo-location of the searcher e.g. the city in which the city was made. 

Secondly, the search engine would practice a 90/10 ad revenue sharing with content publishers taking 90% of the cut. Ahrefs says that by implementing this 90/10 revenue sharing, content publishers would be incentivized to create good content for readers instead of just doing clickbait titles to lure people into their website. 

Additionally, websites like Wikipedia wouldn’t need to ask people to donate to keep their website afloat anymore. 

That’s it, folks!

What do you think of this week’s news? Do you have any comments or suggestions about this week’s news? Would you use Ahref’s new search engine? Leave all your thoughts in the comment below. 

Updated: 26 April 2024

About Sheldon

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