Learning how the cogs turn behind the Google machine
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to actually talk to Google?
To ask them all the questions you’ve ever wanted to ask?
To find out why they do what they do.
Why they keep fiddling.
What they have coming up.
Imagine how great that would be.
Well, imagine no more, for today we have John Mueller, head of Google Search Relations, on the pod.
We’ve spoken to John before in my first season on Episode 15: Ask Google: Q&A with John Mueller, Episode 29: Mobile First with John Mueller, and Episode 30: GOOGLE Q&A with John Mueller.
And today, to kick off our pod in 2023 we have his ear again.
Hurrah.
Tune in to learn
- Biggest updates from 2022
- What small businesses should focus on for SEO
- What’s coming up in 2023
- Where to find out the latest Google updates
- Developments John is most excited for
- John’s top 5 tips for ranking on Google
- How important backlinks really are
Listen to the podcast
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About John Mueller
Together, they help to bring an understanding of the external web ecosystem to internal teams, and help publishers make awesome websites that work well for users and search engines.
John joined Google in 2007 and works in Zuerich, Switzerland.
Fun Fact: John has cycled 30,000km in his cellar since the pandemic started.
Connect with John Mueller
Useful Resources
- Google Search Essentials
- Best practices for ecommerce sites in Google Search
- In-depth guide to how Google Search works
- Google Helpful Content Update: What NOT to do with James Welch (NEWBIE)
Transcript
Kate Toon:
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could actually talk to Google? Ask them all the questions you’ve ever wanted to ask.
To find out why they do what they do, why they keep fiddling with things and what they have coming up. Imagine how great that would be.
Imagine no more for today. We have John Mueller, head of Google Search Relations on the podcast. We’ve spoken to John before in my first season on episode 15, ask Google and episode 29, Mobile first with John Mueller. And I thought it was only two times, but it’s three times. Episode 30, Google Q&A with John Mueller. He’s our most requested guest and I’m so excited that he’s back to kick off our pod in 2023. Yes, we have his ear again. Hoorah. Hello.
John Mueller:
Yay.
Kate Toon:
Hello, my name is Kate Toon and I’m the head chef for the recipe for SEO success and online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. And today I’m talking to John Mueller. Hi John.
John Mueller:
Hi Kate. Good to see you.
Kate Toon:
Good to see you. Yeah, good to hear you. I fluffed up that intro about three times. I think I’m a bit nervous, John. I don’t know why, but speaking to you makes me nervous, even though we’ve done it many times before. So those who don’t know, John coordinates Google search relations efforts as a search advocate. John and his team connect with Google internal world of search engineering to those who create an optimised public websites. Together they help bring an understanding of the external web ecosystem to internal teams and help publishers make awesome websites that work well for users and search engines. John joined Google in 2007 when he was only six years old and works in Zurich, Switzerland. Fun fact, John has cycled 30 kilometres in his cellar since the pandemic started. Oh my God, that’s amazing. Do you telly down there or anything? Do you have a screen to watch?
John Mueller:
I mostly use this Zwift, which is this virtual cycling.
Kate Toon:
Oh yeah, Yeah.
John Mueller:
It’s like you cycle with other people together, so it works, fun.
Kate Toon:
Like the Peloton thing. Yeah, I’ve seen.
John Mueller:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. And you’re like cycling through the Swiss Alps or the jungles of Borneo and things like that.
John Mueller:
Yeah. Cool.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. It’s fun. It’s not the same as going outside, but you don’t have to worry about traffic.
John Mueller:
Yes.
Kate Toon:
It’s not that cars are going to hit you or there’s a red light or anything.
Yeah. Or pollution. Just as a little fun facts about me, I want cycles from Phuket in Hua Hin in Thailand. Yeah, it was fun. We got up at 4:00 AM every morning and started cycling in the dark and it was good. I was very fit then. So you must be super fit. But we’re not talking about fitness today. He’s shaking his head. We’re not talking about fitness today. We’re going to be talking about Google and catching up with John. We haven’t spoken really since the pandemic started and finished.
Sorry, my dog is freaking out. He’s excited that you’re here as well. So let’s do a bit of a catch up. I don’t expect you to catch me up on the last three years, but what have been some big changes that Google has made in 2022? We’ve heard about the May update, the helpful content update. What are some of the big shifts that Google has made in the last year?
John Mueller:
So I went back and tried to collect all of the things that I could find, which is surprisingly difficult sometimes because when you’re working on something, it’s like, “Oh, it’s obvious that this is happening.” But looking back a few months, it’s sometimes really tricky to figure out what are the bigger things that happened. And I found a bunch of things that were related to search, to search console, and to the documentation side of things that we worked on.
On the search side, of course, there are various ranking updates that we had, which we announced. We make a lot more ranking updates, but these are the ones where we think they’re bigger changes that might be happening. And especially ones where we think, if we told site owners about these, they would improve their sites too. It’s not that they don’t want to do better, so that’s the reasoning behind some of these updates.
And that’s on the one hand, the page experience update, which is around speed and experience, which feels like a more obvious one. And then around products, we made a bunch of updates, product reviews, then core updates happen of course over time. And one of the new things that we started working on is the helpful content update that you also mentioned. And that’s really to try to help elevate the real good honest content that is out there, which I imagine a lot of your viewers or listeners I guess would also be creating. And it stands in comparison to a lot of the SEO focused content where it’s really, I’m only creating this for search engines and actually users just get the minimal amount of information so that it doesn’t look like I’m creating gibberish. So those are the bigger updates there.
And on the search console side, we removed a bunch of things, which some people were sad about, but not everyone. So I think we removed some good stuff. So the international targeting is gone. I get questions around that every now and then. So that’s something where, I don’t know, it feels a little bit weird, but URL parameter handling tools, one of those tools which everyone was like, “Oh, I have no idea what to do here.” You touch it and your website will blow up. I don’t know if you have this experience as well, but whenever I looked at it for my websites, it was like, there’s so much stuff here, I don’t want to touch it. Then some of the new things in search console are APIs that we launched for people, which are really cool. The search consult insights teams started sending out milestone emails, which probably a lot of the listeners have seen as well where you get an email-
Kate Toon:
Yeah, they’re so great. People use Google Analytics insights, but they’re so great because they just narrow your focus to a few key points and prompt you to actually do something. Because a lot of people I know go into Google search console, click on a few things go, “Ah.” And then shut it down and don’t make any changes whatsoever.
John Mueller:
Yeah, exactly.
Kate Toon:
So I think they’re a great little innovation.
John Mueller:
Yeah. I really like the emails as well because they give you a pat on the back where you look at the charts, you’re like, “Oh, the graph is changing.” It’s like, “Oh, whatever.” But if you get an email saying like, “Oh congratulations, you have so many thousand visitors.” That’s like, “Oh yeah, I did something.”
Kate Toon:
Ironically, just before I came into this, one of the members of my SEO community just posted some screen grabs from that very email saying she’d had a terrible day, clients had been all over the shop, but she just got that email and she’s like, “At least I’m doing something right.” So yeah, I think you’re making people happy with that one, so that’s a good one.
John Mueller:
Yeah. Cool. So good to hear. Yeah, that’s what we’ve been trying to do there and it’s something where we realised search console is something which we try to keep it simple, but in the end if you’re a small business owner, you look at that and it’s like, “Oh, it’s like a nuclear reactor dashboard and I better not touch anything.” And having something even more simplified that gives you some idea of where you’re standing, what you could be doing, that’s what we’re trying to target there.
Kate Toon:
And as we mentioned, sorry, I actually want to go back a little bit to the algorithm update. Sorry, I should have made you do this in chunks. So we talked about page experience, product reviews, the core updates, the helpful content. We did a great episode with James Welsh about helpful content. You haven’t listened to that than do. Then there was also the new site titles and that’s throwing people out a little bit. I think this is very recent mobiles, if you do branded search, the title becomes the site name, is that right?
John Mueller:
Not so much the title, but we try to understand what the site name is and we show that in a separate line on top, just to make it easier for people to recognise, “Oh, this is that website and this is that page within that website.”
Kate Toon:
And is it pulling that from metadata from Schema? Where’s that coming from, that site title?
John Mueller:
That comes from various places. So we look at the title element that you have on the page, which a lot of times tells us this because it has the site name at the end or in the beginning or somewhere like that, but there’s also special structure data that you can use specifically for site names. If you’re seeing that Google is picking up the wrong part of your title, then you can tell Google what to do. And I guess the other part that’s more visible there is the favicon. That’s something which I think a lot of people get right nowadays, but if you search for your site and you see this random globe next to it, then you know, could be standing out a little bit more.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, you got to take what you can get. I love me a favicon. And with the helpful content update, at first it was a lot of misconception that it was trying to penalise people who used AI content, but it really doesn’t seem to be about that at all. It seems to be more about, as you said, writing really useful, complete content with great sources and expert commentary and trying to create something that completely solves a problem. Whether you’ve used AI or not at any stage to generate some bullet points or you could generate the whole article and then tweak it, is not so much the point is it? It’s more about the end result rather than the mechanism by which you created the content.
John Mueller:
Yeah. I think what I found interesting with the reactions around AI content to me was that it almost sounds like people are doing a lot of this stuff. And then that’s something where I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know.” It’s very easy to fall into the trap of these tools will do everything for me, therefore I won’t even bother thinking and what could possibly go wrong. And of course when people come to your pages and they’re like, “This doesn’t make any sense.” Or they’re coming to conclusions which are not really correct, then suddenly you lose a lot of things that is really hard to build up again afterwards.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I think a lot of copywriters were hoping it was an anti AI algorithm update, but it definitely isn’t. But the thing is, I was reading some content the other day, John, about dreams. I was trying to find out the meaning of a dream and I was reading this article and it kind of made sense. All the right words were there, but it never led anywhere. It just went round and round in circles. They were all there but in the wrong order. And it took me a while to… I was like, “Am I having a moment?” But no, you could tell it was just that spun content. It kind of made sense, but it kind of didn’t. And I think that’s what we’re trying to get rid of really.
Yeah, fantastic. And as you always say on these podcasts, and I think it’s so true, a lot of these algorithm updates aren’t about penalising small businesses because most small businesses probably aren’t making the mistakes that you are trying to eradicate from the search results. It’s maybe more the players trying to push the boundaries. So that’s the algorithm updates.
Sorry, you started to talk us through search console. You talked about international targeting, it’s gone, URL parameters, it’s gone. Thank goodness. You’ve got the new inspect URL, API, the insights email, we talked about couple of other ones where the video indexing, which was super exciting to me. Sorry, I’m sad. And what are some other ones that you’ve added in this new features?
John Mueller:
We added a report on https. That’s something where we noticed in the page experience ranking factor, we include https, but we never really had a report for it, so we made one for that. I think there was some kind of confusion in the report initially, and people were thrown off a little bit by some of the things that we were showing there, but I think in the meantime it’s settled down fairly well. So in particular, one of the points of confusion was if you look up a page that isn’t actually indexed by Google, it’ll say like, “Oh, I don’t know what the https status is. And it’s like, we don’t know because we haven’t actually looked at the page. It’s not a sign that there’s anything broken. And then for merchants and specifically for product reviews, I think we added reports specific for that as well. So if you’re selling something online with Shopify or whatever setup that you have, you have some more reporting there.
Kate Toon:
Fantastic. So that’s evolved a lot over the last couple of years from when it was first launched. And then another area that you focus on is search central, and famously the webmaster guidelines have had a revamp, a bit of a makeover, so that’s exciting. Tell us about that.
John Mueller:
Yeah, the webmaster guidelines are gone.
Kate Toon:
Yay.
John Mueller:
I don’t know, it’s been one of those things that nobody has wanted to touch.
Kate Toon:
Because it’s so big, right? It’s so huge.
John Mueller:
There’s so many things connected to the webmaster guidelines and we reworked the whole thing into three categories of things because we noticed over the years it just collected and collected stuff. And basically we have the requirements, what you need to get indexed in search, which is a very small list, the spam policies, the stuff that you should avoid and general best practises. And I think that makes it a little bit clearer because in the past we would call these almost our policies that you had to comply with and it included things that were basically just good ideas and not really something that’s required. I don’t know, having a site map file, it’s like we’re not going to throw you out of the search results if you don’t have a site map file. But it’s was hard to recognise which of these were critical and which of these were good ideas.
Kate Toon:
And that’s important, especially when you’re dealing with people who have very limited time. They just want to be told as much as possible, black and white, “Do I need it or don’t I. Okay, I’ll move on.” And I know there’s a lot of grey as well, but that’s really helpful and I’ve really noticed a real increase and improvement in the help videos that you’re doing. There’s a lot more of those. You got new office hours. Tell us a little bit more about that.
John Mueller:
We’ve worked to create more video content, especially in the pandemic where we wanted to go to events, but there are no events. And doing virtual events was interesting in the beginning, but after a month or so you’re like, “I just have too many virtual events. Toon can’t be bothered.”
So we work with the office hours. I used to do the office hours alone and more like a lifestyle thing and now we’re doing them as a group together, so it makes it a little bit more interesting to record. We have different ideas and backgrounds behind it and I think that’s working out fairly well. The other video series that we have been working on, the one hand, the e-commerce side that came this year. A lot of videos by Alan on the ways to take advantage with an e-commerce side of search. And Martin has been doing a lot of videos together with external people to highlight their specific inputs and their backgrounds and give a little bit more flavour past, “Google says to do this.” And then you click this button and then you click that button kind of thing.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, that’s really enjoyable. It’s giving back to the community as well and hearing it. And I always used to think it was quite a heavy burden for you to bear alone, dealing with all fielding all of this yourself. I don’t know how you managed it. So I’m glad you’ve got some backup. So as well as all of that, there’s a few other bits and bobs, the general stuff that you were going to mention, What were you going to talk about there? The un-conferences.
John Mueller:
Yeah, so with the events, we initially thought we could do more virtual events, but I mentioned it’s just too much. We came up with the idea to do un-conferences, which are a lot more interactive. So it’s a smaller group of people like 150 people maximum. And then you split out into breakout rooms and you’re a group of five to 10 people and you can chat about specific topics and bring that back to the main group afterwards. I thought those worked really well and they were really useful also for different product teams at Google when they’re working on an idea and they don’t really know exactly what it’s supposed to be doing, then this was a really lightweight way to get feedback from people who are like, this is a stupid idea or this is a great idea and you should do that. All of this feedback is useful and it helps if we bring it to them and we say, “People are not going to like this.” But it helps a lot more when they hear it from actual people.
Kate Toon:
And it helps when they hear it before they’ve launched it rather than afterwards.
John Mueller:
That’s always tricky because at the same time you can’t disclose your plans and times. You’re like, “Oh, we’re going to make a big ranking change and suddenly all green websites are going to rank a lot higher because it’s a nice colour.”
Kate Toon:
Did you hear that? I’m going to record that snippet now and spread it as disinformation, John Mueller says green websites…
John Mueller:
Oh my gosh.
Kate Toon:
I’m totally being silly. No, it’s so difficult for you and I mean we’re going to talk a little bit about the future and some things that are coming up and I’m going to try and get you to disclose something, but we’ll see how we go. I guess my audience is primarily small business owners, sole entrepreneur, it’s not big SEO experts in corporates and obviously a lot of them are just tired of life, of business and they’re like, “Oh my goodness, please stop changing things. It works, it’s really cool, we like it. It’s doing what we needed to do. Can you stop fiddling?” So what would you say to small business humans who are trying to keep up with all the changes?
John Mueller:
Yeah, I understand the desire to have things just remain the same, but at the same time the expectations are just growing and grow. People want more and more from search and want it to be more fancy and to understand the queries better. So I expect some of these changes to continue happening. I think for small business owners, especially those that work together with a physical local business, I think a lot of these changes are less critical though, because what really matters is what they do locally in their business. Who they interact with, how they interact with clients, the products that they sell, the services that they provide. That’s really the bulk of what is relevant there. And from our point of view, if we can recognise that they’re doing reasonable things, then that’s something that we should be highlighting.
And it’s not so much that, “Oh, you need to add the newest meta tag to all of your pages.” It’s really more about providing stable base of good business. For folks who focus on online businesses, I think it’s a little bit trickier because then we do have to focus on the online side that you’re providing there. And the important part is really to try to focus as much as possible on really what is relevant for your users, what is relevant for your audience, and not so much focus on how can I get the most search traffic?
And obviously that’s tricky because on the one hand you want to focus on your users so that you get more search traffic and you shouldn’t be focusing on search traffic so that you get more search traffic. How do you balance that? But I see it regularly where people are just doing things with the hope that, this will trick Google into thinking that my website is a lot better than it actually is. And I think you have to start with your website first and grow from there rather than to trick Google first and then hope you get a lot of visitors.
Kate Toon:
And as you know, I’ve had thousands of people pass through my courses and most of them it’s not about those high end tweaks that are going to make their site 0.0 of a second faster it’s really the basics that haven’t been done. Great navigation, easy to understand content. It’s the basics and it also depends how competitive your market is, as you said.
As we said a little bit earlier, a lot of these more advanced changes aren’t aimed at your average small business Joe who’s just doing his thing. You have to be quite sophisticated as Google gets more sophisticated, you have to be quite sophisticated to trick it. And I think it’s ironic. People are like, I don’t want it to change. And it’s like, but if we go back 10 years ago and it was just 10 blue links, we see what it is now. We wouldn’t be happy going back to that would we? So want to be able to talk to our fridge, our Google home device, but we don’t want things to change. You can’t have it both ways. I’m sorry.
Let’s talk about the world ahead. A lot of work has been done to make sites faster, more usable, to think about how they load, how long it takes you to interact with the page, really trying to get rid of a lot of the wiggle and the jiggle and the pointless kerfuffle on sites. A lot of work has been done to understand content. We’ve had Burt, we’ve had Mum to really understand how we write language. The word on the street or the thing that I’m just going to suggest this to your teams is that accessibility is really the next big thing. Really making sites on a global level easier for people with sight difficulties, hearing difficulties, reading difficulties. People whose English isn’t their first language. Do you think that’s something that Google’s going to focus on or can’t you say? Give me a wink. Nod, yes, for… no one’s watching, Nod yes.
John Mueller:
I can’t really say, but I think in general this is one of those areas that aligns with the page experience, things that we’ve been doing there. And I do know that page experience folks are working on finding new metrics, new things to include there because the web keeps evolving as well. And that’s something where accessibility would fall into that fairly nicely. I don’t know what the specific plans are there. I think when it comes to predicting where search will be going, one of the things that I recommend is to look at what people hate about the web or where they get upset about the web. If you’re using the web and you’re searching for something and you’re like, “Oh god, this is a terrible site, why did Google show this to me?” Those are the kind of things where we get that feedback as well. And then our product teams are like, people really hate this one thing that we do, maybe we should fix it or maybe we should find a way to address it.
And I think one of the aspects that for us is really critical is that it doesn’t matter what website you land on after Google, we always see it as our fault if we send people to a bad website. So it’s not that it’s our fault that we would show bad search results, it’s really our fault if people end up on a bad website where they get frustrated. And that’s the thing that we want to try to improve. And if you run across these things or anyone who searches runs across them regularly, some things work really well and some things you’re like, “Oh, this is terrible.”
And if you go to some of the user facing search forums or on Reddit or on other forums, you almost always have people who are like, “Oh, I did this search and look at this hilarious thing that Google brought up” or “Look at this terrible website that Google brought up.” And those are the things where we would be focusing on. So if you see that people are upset about accessibility there, then that to me that would be a sign that probably Google sees that too and maybe Google will take this seriously and do something about it.
Kate Toon:
And I mean I think we’ve seen that before, haven’t we? Everyone loathes popups. Although they called them intrusive interstitials and classic Google style, everyone didn’t want to go to sites that weren’t secure because that makes you nervous. So Google introduced that and now massive push to make sites to look and function a lot better on mobile devices. I think you can see that and so things like contrast. We are old, do you remember when you used to go back and there used to be those little tickers running across the top of every website and then a flashing picture of a lion for no reason and 17 different colours. Yeah, I used to have a website with flames animating up the side for no reason whatsoever.
John Mueller:
Wow. So cool.
Kate Toon:
I know, I miss it to be honest, but so looking for dislike trends is probably a good… Because if we are thinking that thousands of other people are seeing, and Google’s seeing it on a much bigger level, they’re seeing it across hundreds of thousands of sites, not just the six sites you’ve looked at today. I like that attitude. I think that’s a great way of predicting.
Cool. So you’ve mentioned a few of them and I think obviously a lot of small business owners are looking for sources of truth and it can be a bit of a wild west out there, you go on Twitter and there’s 17 different people arguing about what to put in this meta tag and you don’t know who to trust. And also it can be hard because Google doesn’t like to disclose everything, it can’t tell every secret that’s coming up. But where can we find out more information about what Google is up to or what’s coming down the pipeline, the official sources I guess?
John Mueller:
Yeah, I think we’ve tried to be a little bit more deliberate over the past couple of years around that. To really make sure that if we have something to announce, we’ll try to announce it everywhere, which mostly is our blog and our Twitter account. We do also bring things up on YouTube as well, but as creating something for YouTube just has a much longer lead time. So if you want to announce that, “Oh, we’re launching this thing tomorrow.” Then on YouTube it’ll end up maybe a month later. So it’s always a little bit trickier, but following our blog and following our Twitter account I think is a good mix. The other thing to keep in mind is that we talk about a lot of things and some things are kind of mentioned in random side tweets as well. And to catch up on all of that, sometimes it makes sense to follow people that you trust in industry, which to your listeners is probably you.
Kate Toon:
Oh, thank you John.
John Mueller:
And so they should be watching you and following what you’re writing about because you can also filter out all of that information and say, “This is actually relevant for people.” And a lot of things are like, “No, none of your listeners might care about that.” And there’s a big fuss about it online, you should use this kind of redirect or that kind of redirect. It doesn’t matter.
Kate Toon:
Or the fuss blows over and it isn’t what people thought it was going to be. I think that happens. People like, “Oh my God, everyone panic.” And then it’s like, oh it didn’t make any difference and that’s the other thing, you don’t need to react. The comparison I would make for our listeners is something like WordPress. WordPress will release a new version of WordPress and most WordPress developers know not to necessarily download that version. They wait for the 6.1.1 version when a few of the kinks have been ironed out and then it flows down to normal people maybe a couple of months later. So I think it’s about not reacting to every single thing that happens on Twitter. I still think Twitter is one of the best places to get the updates from Google, but you have to be careful then not to get sucked into the vortex of the debates about what people say has happened, because that can be quite misleading and worrying and then turns into nothing.
So we told the members of our community, I love SEO community on Facebook that you were coming and we’ve got a few questions for you from our audience. Are you ready?
John Mueller:
Okay.
Kate Toon:
We can do this. Okay. So the first one is from Rachel Larkin and she’s from Lark Stories. She asks, “What development in SEO has been most exciting for you?” I love that question.
John Mueller:
Yeah, I think there are two things that stood out to me, especially over the past handful of years maybe. And the two things there for me are, on the one hand, making websites has gotten so much easier and making them so that they’re technically correct is something that is basically just by default there. Where in the early days of WordPress, you would install WordPress and then you install 17 SEO plugins to make sure that all meta tags are correct. And nowadays you install WordPress and it just works just set up really well. Or you use Wix or Squarespace or one of the other providers. Where in the past you would say, if you use one of these providers, then you get a really basic website and it doesn’t do anything good for SEO. And nowadays they understand all of these SEO basics and it works out of the box. So to me that is really a good thing.
And the other thing which is almost something that you can’t really control, is that people just search so differently nowadays and search just continues to work. To me is part of the magic around Google search in general is that you have this text box, you enter whatever you want there and that the systems behind it are massively complex and they keep getting worked on, but you don’t see any of that complexity. You basically see a text box and you’re like, “Oh, I’ve seen this text box for 20 years now. It’s the same thing.” You don’t realise that everything behind it has been changing around so often. And that shift from us going into Google and saying like keyword, keyword, keyword, and then maybe another keyword if it’s not enough and new people going to Google and asking a specific question which is not focused on keywords which is the question that they have in mind and it just works as well.
Kate Toon:
I love that. Yeah, I think those are two of my favourites as well. The fact that the platforms are all much of a muchness now is a relief because it used to be Camp Wix, Camp Shopify, Camp WordPress and everyone’s battling and the fact that a lot of it’s taken care of because business owners don’t want to be worrying about blimming Amp and Schema and all of it’s like, “I want to be selling my socks. I don’t want to be fiddling around in the back end of my site breaking stuff.” But when you talk about the magic of Google, as I said back in the day, it was these staccato queries, good pizza, Sydney. And I still search a bit like that because I’m middle aged and I can’t change. But the way my son who is 13 interacts with our Google device is he’s got mastery over it.
I’m still a bit frightened of my Google device, it doesn’t always do as I say. But my son, it’s like an extension of himself. He uses it for everything, every question, every query, every weather, anything, bring up this, show me that. And it works as you said, and it is magical and it’s seeing behind the curtain or the Wizard of Oz, I don’t actually want to see behind the curtain, thank you. It’s a bigger curtain as well. The curtain is huge now. No, I love that and I think that was a great question. So thank you Rachel Larkin. Then I love this one as well, it’s like short shortcuts. This one is Connie, I’m not going to get your name right, she’s going to be annoyed. Cirigliano – Silvestro, I think I got it right. Connie Cirigliano – Silvestro from Mini Treasure Kids asks if I wanted to rank my site on Google for the top in my field, what are the five top tips? Go on, give it away.
John Mueller:
Okay, I thought about this a little bit to try to see what I should be bringing or what I think would make sense, but I think especially for small businesses, what is really critical is that first you actually are a really strong business and it’s not that Google will make your business strong and bring you lots of traffic. It’s first you have to put in the hard work to actually make a really good business. And when it comes to content, of course you have to put in the work to make really good content first. And that I think is really the most critical part in the beginning. It’s not that there is a meta tag that you can put on your pages and suddenly Google will send you traffic. You really have to put in the work first. And then I think once you have put in the work, then obviously what matters is that you show Google and you show your users that you have done the right stuff.
And then things like, we would call them the basics of SEO, but they’re not basic, not everyone just knows this stuff. Things like having really good titles that match what people are searching for so that when they search they recognise, “Oh this is actually what I was looking for.” This is not a random collection of SEO keywords, it’s something that actually makes sense. Then using structured data and descriptions to stand out a little bit, that’s really important. And more and more, also images where you mentioned looking back at the 10 blue links from 10-20 years ago. Nowadays a lot of the search results that we show have images next to them and that’s a great way to stand out. That’s something where if you have good images that are relevant to your business that you’ve taken yourself that are not just random stock photo clip arts, that’s a really nice way to stand out and say, this is what you would find when you come to my business or what you would find when you come to my website.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I love that. And I think you’re so right, no one channel is going to make your business a success. You have to have a great brand, have strong values, a good brand personality, good product, good price, whether you are selling it online or in person. All of that has to work. And then this becomes one of the outlets. And again, you would never want to rely on one channel either. Just as I always encourage people not to build their empire on Instagram or Facebook, you want to have multiple sources of traffic. And you’ve mentioned their title, structured, data, description images, a fast site, a site that’s easy to use, a site that looks nice on a mobile. If most of your people are buying your stuff on the phone, make sure that’s easy. Make sure the checkout isn’t 17 steps.
It’s funny because I do this webinar and I’m like SEO experts say there’s 200 factors, there’s probably like 200 thousands, but think about the 10 top things you hate about websites. And they go, “Oh I hate slow ones, I hate ones where it feels a bit dodgy. I hate ones where I get there and the pages and what I thought.” And it’s like they’re all the things, there you go, you already knew it anyway. Do you know what you already know because you are using the internet every day and you know what sites you jump out of straight away and Google will be the same. So you already know Connie is my answer.
So the next one is Roz from the Good Life Backyard. She has a great product, she sells products for chickens, if you have chickens at home, which I like the idea of, but then I’m a bit frightened of chickens, so it’s a bit of a hard one for me. So her question is, “How important are back links?” She’s in a niche industry with fewer competitive, is it really imperative for her to be spending a lot of time to earn back links through all the various ways that you can earn back links or are there better things she could be doing?
John Mueller:
Yeah, I see people focusing too much on back links a lot of times, and I understand how you could get there because we do say we use back links in our systems and we primarily use them to find new websites. So that’s something where Google says they use back links, therefore I will make millions of back links. That second step is the part where the problem comes up because you can go off and create millions of back links, but that’s not going to change a lot for your website. So that’s something where it’s very easy to spend a lot of time and sometimes money on focusing on links when actually you could be building out your business instead. And I think in the long run, if you focus on building out your business rather than just buying these random back links or organising them some other ways, that’s something that’s of lasting value that you can keep forever.
And whereas if links like Google says, “These links are no longer really interesting or these links are bad or whatever.” Because if you’re creating these artificially, they are not really what Google is looking for, then it’s easy to spend a lot of time and money on these things and then suddenly it’s like, “Actually it was for nothing.” Whereas if you spend a lot of time and money on your business, then even if Google says, I don’t recognise that you’ve done something great for your business, that works for your customers for the long run. So from that point of view if you’re starting out with a completely fresh website, then looking around to see where you can get your first link or two, that makes sense. But afterwards I would focus more on your own content on your website and leave the links as something that happens over time, but not something that you must do in order to be visible.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, it’s like not forcing it. And if you are building a good business at a great reputation, the idea is that you will earn links naturally. People will be naturally attracted to you. They’ll want to talk about you in articles, you’ll want to be featured on podcasts, and of course you can egg that on a little bit by writing pictures and putting yourself out there. But yeah, just going on link hunts and trying to gather them I think often can be a fruitless exercise.
I have a nice idea, this is my little approach John. I like to do good Karma SEO. I think I made that up where I just try and do nice things for other people like leave them testimonials or give money to charities and then maybe they will pop by the site and give me a link. Maybe my logo will be featured, I’ll get a link. But at the end of the day, I’m doing good and therefore the benefit is there regardless of whether I get the link or not. Builds relationships, not links. That would be my way of putting it.
John Mueller:
I think that’s fantastic. Yeah, that’s a great way to look at it. It’s also something where you shouldn’t go out of your way to block links from happening.
Kate Toon:
Yes.
John Mueller:
If someone wants to write about your business, engage with them and say, “Actually, here’s what I do and this is what I’m doing special and here’s my website.” You shouldn’t shy away from showing people your website and letting them link to your website, but at the same time you don’t need to artificially push that. And your approach of doing good things and maybe you get a link out of it, I think that’s a good idea.
Kate Toon:
Thank you. Good karma, SEO. You heard it here first. John, it’s always a delight to talk to you. I’m going to include a link to John’s Twitter channel, also to the video channel of YouTube because you might not know where that is and some of those documentations that he mentioned as well. But as I said, you do write some funny tweets and you get some funny responses, the banter is good on Twitter. I’m sure it must get exhausting for you at times, but it’s enjoyable from the sidelines. But I do appreciate you sparing us some time today to come and chat. Always pleasure. Will you come back in 2024, John? Be the fifth time?
John Mueller:
Sure.
Kate Toon:
Fantastic. All right. Well here’s to another-
John Mueller:
- Wow. That’s a long way though.
Kate Toon:
I know. Who knows, you may have cycled off into the sunset by then, but hopefully not. John, lovely to talk to you. Thank you so much.
John Mueller:
Thanks for having me, Kate.
Kate Toon:
So that’s the end of this week’s show. I do so love talking to John Mueller, such a nice chap. I’ve included little picture of us in the show notes if you want to check it out. Now, if you have questions about Google, about SEO, you can’t necessarily get an answer from John every day, but you can head to the I Love SEO group on Facebook. I will say though, he’s really super responsive on Twitter, don’t bombard him, but you may get an answer there if you catch him on a good non busy day.
So I like to end the show with the shout out to one of my lovely listeners, and today is from Rach Mcway from Australia, and she says, “Love, love, love. I’ve been hunting for something to listen to that’s super informative but fun and boom, I feel like I’ve legitimately struck gold with this potty. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Thank you Rachel, and thanks to you for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a five star rating and your review. We have run out of reviews, so there will be no more shout outs moving forward unless someone helps us out. So it only takes a few seconds, just click on your device right now and pop something in.
Anyway, don’t forget to check out the show notes for this episode. I’ll include links to all the various bits and bobs, and you can also leave a comment about the show. So here we go. It’s 2023. What’s going to come our way with SEO? We’ve got lots of amazing episodes already lined up with SEO experts from around the world, as well as some tips, some more tips and direct advice from me, because I realise that even though this is my podcast and I’ve been running it forever, you don’t often actually get to hear directly from me.
So I’m going to change that. We’re going to have some Toon tips coming up. We’re also going to keep going with the Reality SEO episodes. We get a lot of feedback that they are really popular because it’s actually real people doing SEO rather than super duper SEO experts who you’re just never going to be as good as. So we’ll keep that combination going. Check out the labels, newbie, techie, tip, reality. We might do some Roundup episodes as well. So yeah, keeping it fresh. We’ve been doing the podcast for a long time now we’re up to over half a million downloads. So yeah, more to come. We’re not giving up just yet. So until next time, happy SEOing.
