Welcome fellow readers to another week of SEO News Weekly; I guess it’s that time of the week again for a recap on this week’s SEO news. These are the SEO news of the week: 

• Content in hidden tabs result in lower rankings 
• People Also Ask box displaying two or more times on search engine result page 
•  Google’s John Mueller gives a hard lesson on Google ranking and spam

9/3 – People Also Ask box displaying two or more times on search engine result page 

Recently, Twitter users have reported that the People Also Ask box has been coming up two times on a single page. 

With the increase in People Also Ask box, would this mean that optimizing your website to appear for People Also Ask box would be the way forward? 

This may be the case as People Also Ask box is unlike featured snippets. It is possible to appear in a People Also Ask box and hold a standard organic ranking on page 1 of Google. 

Content in hidden tabs results in lower rankings 

In 2018, Google came out to refute the claims that contents hidden in accordion tabs, etc., for user experience are not given full weight and demoted.

However, recently SEO consultant Dan Schure posted on Twitter that he saw an immediate improvement in traffic and rankings when he made some content hidden to users behind accordion dropdowns visible for users by default.

10/3 – Google’s John Mueller gives a hard lesson on Google rankings and spam

Recently, a Reddit user mentioned that his backlinks were not indexed on Google Search despite having created backlinks on top websites with good domain authority and low spam scores. 

Google’s John Mueller then replied to the user, saying that he should spend more time on more effective SEO things rather than just dropping links on random sites. For years, search engines have been dealing with and ignoring these issues.

He also stated that there shouldn’t be an overreliance on SEO tools as everyone who crawls the web does it differently, with different speeds and assumptions.

In his parting advice, Google’s John Mueller said to throw all these strategies away and instead focus on a long-term, real effort approach. 

That’s it, Folks!

That is all for this week’s SEO news, gentleman and gentleladies. Do you have any comments on this week’s news? Would you be changing your optimizing strategy upon reading this news? Drop a comment below. 

Updated: 22 May 2022