Google algorithm archives

Recent Google algorithm articles


Should you optimize your content for questions?

28 July 2020 | 20 Comments Fleur Heesen

Search engines are getting better and better at understanding language. Does that mean they can also understand questions? And what does that mean for the way you should write and optimize your content for questions? We’ll find out in this post! First, we’ll explore how Google understands and uses questions. Then, we’ll go into why …

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Should you optimize your content for questions?

A linguistic approach to creating content that ranks

2 July 2020 | 41 Comments Fleur Heesen

Search engines are trying to understand language: they want to understand what users are searching for, and they want to be able to provide them with the best results. Before I started working at Yoast, I studied linguistics: the scientific study of language. During my years at Yoast, I’ve noticed that linguistics and SEO have …

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A linguistic approach to creating content that ranks

Does social media influence your SEO?

16 January 2020 | 32 Comments Marieke van de Rakt

Handling your social media is a necessary part of any marketing strategy, but it’s also a vital part of any good SEO strategy. The popularity of social media has risen, and I probably will keep doing so. That means Google and other search engines can’t ignore them, and you probably shouldn’t. You even see recent …

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Does social media influence your SEO?

Google BERT: A better understanding of complex queries

4 November 2019 | 6 Comments Edwin Toonen

By announcing it as the “biggest change of the last five years” and “one that will impact one in ten searches”, Google sure turned some heads with an inconspicuous name: BERT. BERT is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model that helps Google understand the language better in order to serve more relevant results. There are …

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Google BERT: A better understanding of complex queries

How to properly delete a page from your site

Whenever you delete a page (or post) from your site, you also delete one or more URLs. That old URL, when visited, will usually return a ‘404 not found’ error, which is not the best thing for Google or your users. Is that what you really wanted to happen? You could redirect that deleted page …

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How to properly delete a page from your site

15 questions about ranking factors – Yoast webinar recap

People are always talking about ranking factors. You know, the secret ingredients to Google’s magic algorithmic formula. If you know them and find a way to please these factors, you’re well on your way to that coveted number one spot — or so people seem to think. In general, chasing all these individual ranking factors …

Read: "15 questions about ranking factors – Yoast webinar recap"
15 questions about ranking factors – Yoast webinar recap

Google says it doesn’t use rel=prev/next for pagination

22 March 2019 | 8 Comments Edwin Toonen

Sometimes you wonder if Google even knows how Google works. Search is getting more complex by the day and there comes a point where it’s anybody’s guess. Yesterday, Google ‘announced’ that its search engine doesn’t use the pagination markup rel=prev/next at all and hasn’t for years. That’s curious because they have been advocating using it …

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Google says it doesn’t use rel=prev/next for pagination

5 link building DON’Ts you didn’t know about

19 March 2019 | 42 Comments Marieke van de Rakt

A lot of link building strategies can backfire, causing more damage than doing good. If you want to improve your ranking in the long term, use a holistic SEO strategy, and avoid certain link building tactics. In this post, I’ll discuss some link building DON’Ts: tactics you should most definitely NOT use. Some of these, …

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5 link building DON’Ts you didn’t know about

On Google’s related entities patent: Write awesome posts!

24 October 2018 | 2 Comments Marieke van de Rakt

Perhaps you’ve read about the related entities patent which was recently granted to Google, or perhaps you haven’t yet. You should read Dave Davies post about it on Search Engine Land and find out more about it. The related entities patent gives us valuable insights into how Google identifies relationships between content. It was a …

Read: "On Google’s related entities patent: Write awesome posts!"
On Google’s related entities patent: Write awesome posts!