5 Strange Facts About Search Engine Optimization
SEO still has a lot of secrets for people who are just starting their website journey. However, people who are already good at it need to keep up with what’s happening in online marketing. Therefore, we have listed five strange SEO facts you probably don’t hear.
There are a lot of SEO facts and statistics out there, most of which are known. We have tried to put together a list of surprising SEO facts that give you a new way to look at the search engine market. This is not a list of SEO statistics; it is a list of SEO facts that will help you improve your SEO and overall online marketing strategy.
So, we have compiled a list of five strange facts you didn’t know about before today.
1. You won’t be penalized if you have duplicate content
Will having duplicate content cost you? No. Is duplicate content hurting your site? Well, it depends. Let’s talk about this a little more. First, we will quote from the September 2019 Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines:
“The Lowest rating is right if all or almost all of the main content (MC) on the page is copied with little or no time, manual curation, effort, expertise, or added value for users. Even if the page says that the content came from another source, it should still be given the lowest rating.”
Where did you hear about duplicate content? All of it has to do with copied content. And Google treats copied content differently than duplicate content. Copying content will get you in trouble, but having the same content will not. Google’s Andrey Lipattsev says:
“There is no penalty for having the same content on Google.”
Most people think that duplicate content always hurts SEO, but that is not always the case. There are better ways for pages to be set up than duplicate content. But most of the time, there are better ways to trick people than having duplicate content. You should be safe if you use canonical tags to tell search engines which content is most important. We want to emphasize that many people have never looked at what Google says about duplicate content.
If Google finds that your content is not unique, this is not called a penalty. Andrey Lipattsev, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google Ireland, talks in a podcast about how:
- There is no penalty for duplicate content on Google.
- It works to reward unique content and link it to more value.
- Duplicate content is screened out.
- Google wants to find new content and duplicates slow down the search engine.
- Sending XML sitemaps will help Google find your new content quickly.
- The big G wants us to put signals in canonical documents and make those canonical pages better for users.
- When we think about SEI, it is not duplicate content but the need for unique content that helps our ranking.
Remember that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, if a website uses your content without your permission, you can fill out a form to have it taken down. You can also use canonical tags, which is easy to do. This is a simple way to tell the search engine that this is where the official version first appeared. So, while planning your content marketing strategies or looking at your SEO rankings, you should keep track of duplicate content problems.
2. Links are not used as a ranking factor by every search engine
Can you rank without links? Yes, that’s the answer. Yandex, the most popular search engine in Russia, will no longer use links as a ranking factor. However, before you say that what happens in Russia stays in Russia, you should know that Google might be heading in the same direction.
Yandex said their algorithm would not have any links because of what was happening. What about the other search engines? Will Google take links out of its formula? It looks like Google wants to rank websites based on their content rather than on how many links they have.
“We don’t have a version available to the public, but we have tried things like that internally. For example, we’ve played around with turning off backlink relevance. But at least for now, backlink relevance still helps us make sure that we show the best, most relevant, and most topical search results”. – Matt Cutts( Google official) said.
According to New Scientist, a domain’s trustworthiness could help it improve rankings if Google measures quality based on facts instead of links.
3. There is much more Facebook activity at the top of the list
There are a lot of questions and rumors about how likes, sharing, comments, etc., affect SEO in general. A question that keeps popping out:
Are social signals used to rank things?
There is no simple “yes” or “no” answer. As a result of a detailed study, we can surely say the following:’
We also found links between Pinterest, Google+ (which is no longer used), and LinkedIn, and rankings and high shares on Linkedin, Facebook, and Pinterest all lead to better rankings. However, the strongest link was between many Facebook shares and better rankings.
Indeed, a correlation doesn’t prove a cause, but such a strong correlation is hard to ignore. For example, how people interact on Facebook affects how Google ranks search results. So, social networks not only help you connect with your audience, but it also has measurable effects that go beyond engagement, such as a higher ranking in search results.
You don’t have to be an SEO expert to know that organic listings are hard to get, no matter your SEO or social media strategies. However, anything that helps your search traffic is a good thing.
4. Rich Snippets don’t affect your rankings directly.
Since rich snippest first added in 2009, they have been a sneak peek on the SERP page. The question is: Do they affect your ranks directly? Not really.
Google has mentioned more than once that rich snippets don’t directly affect the current ranking of a site. On the Web Master Help Forum, you can even find answers:
Do the use of rich snippets change the ranking of my site?
A: No.
So Google said it all. Rich snippets don’t directly affect where a website ranks. This doesn’t mean it can’t help SEO in other ways, like making a page easier to index or giving the reader useful information. Rich snippets will indirectly help you get more people to visit your website, which could help your rankings. However, rich snippets have no direct effect on your rankings.
5. Only two of the top ten most-visited websites are content sites.
Let’s get a better idea of what this heading means. According to Ebizma:
“Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo! will be the most visited sites in September 2019. , Wikipedia, Amazon, Twitter, Bing, eBay, and MSN. I’m not surprised, I know. But if we think about them for a second, we can see that only Wikipedia and YouTube are content-driven. The other ones, if we truly name them, are “content gates,” but they don’t offer direct content like a normal website.”
This raises a big question:
Does being useful matter more than ranking?
Eight of these sites give frequent users something to do besides just read. For example, Carter Bowles from Northcutt says, “they don’t just let people read or watch videos, but also give them tools and places to do something.”
These websites are popular because their main users must do more than just read the content. For example, Google is a tool that lets people quickly search the whole Internet to find what they are looking for. They are popular not because of great content or link bait but because people talk to them. So, you might ask yourself:
Does the content still rule?
We don’t mean to say that content marketing doesn’t work. Quality content is great because it helps people grow in amazing ways. We want to stress that interaction is doing great things. If we figure out why these websites are so popular, we will see that content marketing is also a part of their strategy. But only to a certain point.
Additionally, the facts show us that the best websites put communities, tools, and interactive platforms ahead of content. Even more, YouTube and Wikipedia, two of the most popular content sites, still use interactive platforms.
Conclusion
We’ve shown you some facts about the search engine optimization market that will help you with your organic search and digital marketing strategy. The search engine market is a platform that is always changing, but good SEO still pays the bills and brings in traffic. Although you spend money on paid search or building links, we want as many internet users as possible to click on your site on their own.
All of us want to make more sales. And since 93% of online experiences start with a search engine, it’s very important to know the Google SEO facts that can affect the performance of your website, whether they are SEO facts from 2022 or older SEO facts from 2016. But, unfortunately, no one SEO statistic, tip, or fact is the most important, nor is there a lead generation formula that will guarantee marketing success.
Still, the SEO facts we talked about in this article might help you with your integrated marketing, your on-page SEO, or your content strategies. Of course, conversion rates are challenging, and a few SEO tips, paid ads, or marketing statistics won’t make a million users show up all at once. But your global web presence will improve if you know the SEO stats and facts and shape your online marketing around them.
Keep up with the latest marketing trends, watch where your users click, pay attention to content creation and put money into inbound marketing, and the results will come on their own. We’re excited to see how Google’s search engine changes as new technologies emerge, and we’re also excited to hear from you.
