Hey SEO peeps, it’s Friday again and time for our usual weekly SEO news updates, and here’s a quick overview of what happening this week. 

1. Google Chrome to support scroll to text links with images and videos
2. Internal linking gives Google a sense of page importance
3. Google see results that mention filter on the left side panel
4. Disappearing rich results might be a site-level quality issue
5. Google explains crawl budget and search console crawl stats report

Now let’s dive deeper into each news tidbit. 

2/3/2021 – Google Chrome to support scroll to text links with images and videos

Following scroll-to-text, Google Chrome developers have happily revealed that we’ll also soon be seeing scroll-to-image and scroll-to-video.

In a tweet, the Chrome developers have announced the text fragments team has a new project in the works that allow users to navigate to images, videos, and other elements. 

How does this impact SEO or rankings? 

Well, looks like it doesn’t. But for now what we understand is that this would work similarly to the text links, where if Google shows a video or image snippet and that image or video is clicked on from Google Search, Google might anchor the Chrome user to the specific location on the page where that image or video is located. 

4/3/2021 – Internal linking gives Google a sense of Page importance

Google’s John Mueller was asked how someone can help Google understand which pages of a site it really wants to index. 

The webmaster who asked the question said that Google was only indexing 10% or so of the site’s pages in the sitemap file and asked how does Google notate which pages are more important if it doesn’t look at the priority field in the XML sitemaps. 

John said it is true that Google doesn’t really look at the XML sitemap priority field. So instead, you really need to communicate which pages are more important to you through your internal linking. 

The more you link from your more important pages to other pages, the more Google will understand that the pages you are linking to on your website are important.

As a general rule, if you link to 10% of your pages from your home page, Google will likely think that 10% of those pages that you are linking to from your home page are more important than the other 90% of your pages. Of course, there are always exceptions.

1/3/2021 – Google See Results That Mention Filter On Left Side Panel

Google was seen testing a search refinement feature named “see results that mention” on the right sidebar. 

But now, as captured by Brian Freiesleben and posted on Twitter, Google is testing it on the left side and Shalom Goodman saw them on the top.

Here’s the previous tested right-side panel where if selected will actually filter the search results to show the more relevant ones according to the categories you ticked. 

4/3/2021 – Disappearing rich results might be a site-level quality issue

Google’s John Mueller was asked a question regarding disappearing rich results and he listed two reasons why a site may not be showing rich results in the Google Search results, which are:

1. Technical issues, such as either the structured data is invalid or the content on the page does not reflect what the structured data shows. 
2. Rich results won’t show is usually a sitewide signal that is about the quality of the site overall. 

So in this case, rich results are actually acting as a signal for the quality of the sites. 

4/3/2021 – Google explains crawl budget and search console crawl stats report

In a recent Search Console episode, Daniel Waisberg of Google explained how the crawl budget works with crawl demands and crawl rates. 

In the video, Daniel also shared a dive into the new crawl stats report in Google Search Console. Here is the video: 

 Specifically, he explained how Google crawls the web and explains there are not unlimited resources to do so. So Google needs to prioritize what and when it crawls.

Note, this topic is most relevant for larger websites, not really sites with a few thousand pages or less. But here’s a quick overview:

• Crawl Demand is how much of the content is desired by Google and it is affected by URLs that Google has not crawled before and by Google’s estimation on how often content is updated on the known URLs.
• Crawl Rate is the maximum number of concurrent connections a crawler may use to crawl your site. This number is calculated by Google periodically. If your server and site can handle it, Google can crawl faster. If not, Google will crawl slower, as to not hurt your server or site.
• Crawl Budget is calculated by taking the crawl rate and crawl demand, it is the number of URLs Google can and wants to crawl on your site.

All in all, it’s a pretty good video, so click into it to learn more and that concludes our weekly SEO news. Until net week, I hope you have a great weekend!

Updated: 23 April 2024

About Vivian

Vivian is an anthropologist lost in the world of digital marketing. She has an interest in learning about the science of marketing and the creativity that businesses use to transform themselves into purple cows.