Greetings, fellow newsreaders! Welcome to another week of SEO news. Let’s have a recap of this week’s important SEO news, shall we? These are the SEO news for the week: 

• Google’s John Mueller says that websites do not have some form of quota to only rank for a limited number of keywords
• Google Search is testing removing the estimated number of search results figure under the search bar 
• Google Business Profiles may require additional verification 
• Yoast founder Joost de Valk thoughts on Microsoft backed IndexNow protocol 

2/3 – Google Search is testing removing the estimated number of search results figure under the search bar 

When the search results figure started disappearing, some users thought this was a CSS bug. However, Google’s John Mueller clarified the issue on Twitter, saying that these are UI tests. 

Google’s John Mueller says that websites do not have some form of quota to only rank for a limited number of keywords 

When asked about it on Twitter, Google’s John Mueller said that Google does not have limits for websites, domains, or subdomains to only rank for a limited number of keywords. This means there are endless opportunities for your site to rank for endless keywords.

However, if you are competing with your own content by creating multiple pages to try to rank for the same keywords, you’re going to have a harder time ranking against stronger competitions. 

Google Business Profiles may require additional verification 

Google has recently updated the help document on how to verify businesses. The new update requires you to verify with more than one method. 

What does this mean? 

This means that Google will be implementing a stricter verification process which would, in turn, reduce fake locations on Google Maps and limit the number of fake businesses. 

Yoast founder Joost de Valk thoughts on Microsoft backed IndexNow protocol 

To start, IndexNow is essentially a protocol that notifies search engines about changes on your website that attempts to help search engines improve crawl efficiency by eliminating the need for exploratory crawls. 

However, Yoast founder Joost de Valk seems to have a contrary experience when using IndexNow. He said that there is no evidence that IndexNow would help sites gain more traffic, reduce crawling or improve crawl efficiency. 

Instead, he thinks that IndexNow does the opposite unless and until Bing is able to show contrary evidence that IndexNow does indeed improve crawling. 

The End!

That’s it for this week’s SEO news fellow readers. What are your thoughts on this week’s news? Do you agree with them? Are they relevant? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment. 

Till next week!

Updated: 19 April 2024

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