Hello people! Wow it’s already May. Time has been passing fast this year. In the blink of an eye, it’ll probably be Christmas soon. But let’s get back to the SEO news. Here’s what went down this week.

1. John Mueller’s advice on optimizing images while not hurting image search rankings
2. Google adds links to featured snippets leading back to Google search results
3. Verizon sells AOL and Yahoo for $5 billion
4. Google doesn’t penalize sites for using Google Analytics
5. Google says adding images to your pages does not make you rank higher 

Let’s get into it!

03/05/2021 – John Mueller’s advice on optimizing images while not hurting image search rankings

Google’s John Mueller posted a long thread on Twitter on how you can optimize your images more, while not affecting your rankings in Google Image Search.

PSA: If you change your image URLs, and you care about Image Search, remember to redirect them. While tweaking my site, I noticed PSI suggesting to change some of my image formats, and realized it’s worth mentioning this again. pic.twitter.com/gDHAqJB6eC

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 1, 2021

I’ve broken them down to 8 simple steps, which you can read below.

1. If you change your image URLs, and you care about Image Search, redirect the old URL of the image to the new one.
2. Use image lazy loading, especially if they’re below the fold. WP and plugins can do this for you.
3. Make images the right size (however you’re displaying them).
4. Specify the image size using a plugin.
5. For big images, load them in your image editor, and see if there are compression settings you can use to save them with the same format in a smaller size.
6. Depending on your site’s setup, you may be able to use responsive images to include modern formats together with your previous image formats. (This is the optimal configuration, but it can be hard)
7. If you need to move from .jpg to .webp, set up redirects for these images on your server.
8. Set up redirects for the old URLs to the new CDN as well.

At the end of the thread, John also posted a few resources links to learn more about image optimization.

Want more links? Here’s our guide to images: https://t.co/BPDOV02us9 , and our guide for responsive images: https://t.co/iSKBykZrO1

What did I miss? What worked best for your images?

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 1, 2021

03/05/2021 – Google adds links to featured snippets leading back to Google search results

Google is adding links to featured snippets. Clicking on the link will send the user to a new search results on Google.

This was spotted by Ramesh Singh, which he posted to Twitter.

This may be already there but seeing this first time, on featured snippet now Google adding hyperlinks from the text to google search for the related terms.
In the screenshot, cloud, cloud security, and cybersecurity are linked to the google search page.
cc – @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/2RFhfVwHSR

— Ramesh Singh (@ramesh_s_bisht) May 3, 2021

Currently, this cannot be replicated in the United States. But if you set your location to India, you should be able to replicate it.

A Google spokesperson said that this was a bug and not the intended behavior they want to have in featured snippets.

“We can confirm that this is a bug and is not intended behavior for links on featured snippets,” Google’s spokesperson said. “We are actively working on a fix.”

04/05/2021 – Verizon sells AOL and Yahoo for $5 billion

AOL and Yahoo are being sold, again.

Wireless company Verizon is selling 90% of both companies to Apolo Global Management in a deal worth $5 billion.

Verizon spent about $9 billion to purchase AOL and Yahoo in 2015 and 2016 respectively, with the intention to compete with Google and Facebook.

The new company will be called Yahoo, slowly moving away from the name Oath. Verizon will keep a 10% stake in the new company.

Apollo believes in the tremendous potential of Yahoo. They also expect the overall growth in digital advertising will be able to boost Yahoo too.

The deal is expected to close in the second half of the year.

05/05/2021 – Google doesn’t penalize sites for using Google Analytics

Simple Analytics, a competitor to Google Analytics, claimed that Google penalizes sites for using Google Analytics. They claim that Google hurts the performance score by roughly 4% in terms of page experience.

John Mueller took to Twitter to deny this.

“No, it’s not the case that we penalize for Google Analytics.”

No, it’s not the case that we penalize for Google Analytics. We don’t special-case Google products in Search, but that goes both ways. The LH score is not what we use in Search, but my ancient WP + GA site is 100 there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/fKl58V4dSt

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 3, 2021

Simple Analytics claimed this because Google is adding a Page Experience Update. An excerpt from the blog read, “Simple Analytics is performing better than Google Analytics. Google [Analytics] hurts the performance score by roughly 4%, and we almost have zero impact (0.1%).”

Google has said before that you should not expect drastic changes with this update to site rankings.

05/05/2021 – Google says adding images to your pages does not make you rank higher

A Twitter user asked Google’s John Mueller if adding images in a blog will affect the ranking of the page.

John replied on Twitter saying “There is no automatic effect from adding images.”

There is no automatic effect from adding images.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 2, 2021

The purpose of an image is to make your website more appealing to visitors, besides engaging them. But images are not a direct way of increasing your rankings.

John agreed with this, adding that “If your pages are shown in places like Discover, the preview image can play a big role in how attractive your page looks & how users click to your content. It’s not a ranking factor, but itcan affect traffic.”

Absolutely. And if your pages are shown in places like Discover, the preview image can play a big role in how attractive your page looks & how users click through to your content (also consider large image previews :-)). It’s not a ranking factor, but it can affect traffic.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 5, 2021

Closing It Up

And that’s all we’ve got for this week’s SEO news update. Check out our past posts by clicking the SEO News tab on top. You can also can get more in-depth guides on SEO and content marketing by reading our blogs.

Until next time!

Updated: 18 April 2024

About Ken

A coffee aficionado who's fascinated with the world of digital marketing and SEO. When he's free, he'll be chasing plastic discs out on a field.