In a podcast that is also available on YouTube, Google's John Mueller, Gary Illyes, Martin Splitt and Duy Nguyen spoke about how Google ranks search results and prevent spam. How does Google rank web pages? Google starts with a shortlist that contains around thousand results. For that list, Google uses pages that have relevant and topical content for the query. Google then applies many ranking signals to the shorter list. Each document in the list gets scores and numbers. The search results Read the full article ..read more

Google's Gary Illyes explained in Google's official blog how Google uses spam reports. Google uses we spam reports only to improve the spam detection algorithms. Spam reports are not used for manual actions. "Spam reports play a significant role: they help us understand where our automated spam detection systems may be missing coverage. Most of the time, it's much more impactful for us to fix an underlying issue with our automated detection systems than it is to take manual action on a single Read the full article ..read more

If you used spam methods to promote your website, Google will penalize your site. It can be very difficult to recover from a website penalty. This article shows you how to avoid Google penalties. You'll also learn how to recover from a Google penalty. Important: avoid things that Google doesn't like Google will penalize your website if you did something that Google does not like. Google says that you should avoid automatically generated content. You should not participate in link schemes, Read the full article ..read more

Google's John Mueller said that most websites do not have 'toxic' links. If they do, they usually created them on their own: Most sites don't have "toxic" links, or at least, created them on their own. IMO there are more important things to focus on, by our engineers, and definitely by site owners.— ? John ? (@JohnMu) January 28, 2020 Toxic links are spam links that have a negative impact on your search engine rankings. If you built spam links in the past, use the Read the full article ..read more

Google's John Mueller said on Reddit that Google uses many different signals for ranking and that a website won't outrank your site just because of hidden text. "A site is not going to outrank your site just because of hidden text. We use many, many signals for ranking. Inversely, just having hidden text on a page won't get the site banned from Google. Lots of sites get things wrong, lots of sites have text accidentally hidden (or even purposely hidden until you interact with the UI) Read the full article ..read more

John Mueller said on Twitter that Google primarily uses spam reports to improve Google's algorithms. For example, they won't remove a page from search just because of inappropriate structured data on the page. We wouldn't remove a page from search just because of inappropriate structured data. Also, while I get that it would be cool to have all reports manually taken action on, we try to use these to improve our algorithms primarily, which helps to improve more search results.— ? Read the full article ..read more

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that you should not break Google's guidelines even if a competitor does it without getting penalized: Is your question "others are breaking the guidelines, can I do it too?"? You're welcome to use our spam report forms, but purposely breaking the guidelines if you want something out of them seems like a bad long term strategy...— ? John ? (@JohnMu) November 5, 2019 Better use SEO methods that deliver lasting results If you Read the full article ..read more

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that you only have to use Google's disavow links tool if you actively built spammy links. He answered the question of a webmaster who asked whether he should disavow some low quality links that pointed to his website. Unless you actively built spammy links, the answer is usually no.— ? John ? (@JohnMu) October 17, 2019 How to find bad links that point to your site As said above, you only have to disavow links if you actively built Read the full article ..read more

Google's John Mueller has posted several tweets that show that it takes a lot of time to get your website ranked after a penalty. For example, a webmaster complained that he didn't receive an answer to his reconsideration request after three weeks. John Mueller said it takes time to process reconsideration requests: Sometimes it can take a bit time to be processed.— ? John ? (@JohnMu) October 14, 2019 Some days later, John Mueller said that Google needs time to process Read the full article ..read more

Google's John Mueller explained on Twitter that embedded images from other sites do not count as links to these sites. You also do not have to worry about unnatural links if a shady website embeds your images. Correct -- if it's just someone embedding images from your site, that wouldn't be a link anyway, so no need to do anything.— ? John ? (@JohnMu) September 26, 2019 Just to be really clear, there's no need to disavow if a site embeds images from your site. Read the full article ..read more