It’s been a busy month for SEO news! We’ve had lots of Google updates and the start of the Page experience rollout. Plus loads of new Google Business and Shopping features — is Google the new high street? Finally, don’t miss our first look at WordPress 5.8, and a brand new search engine called Brave….
How does Google understand text?
On yoast.com, we talk a lot about writing and readability. We consider it a very important part of SEO. Your text needs to be easy to follow and it needs to satisfy your users’ needs. This, in turn, will help your rankings. However, we rarely talk about how Google and other search engines read and…
A long term SEO strategy? Knowing what Google wants is the key
Ranking signals, algorithm updates. One day you have the right number of keywords, the next day it’s too many. It might leave you wondering what Google wants to achieve. Or worrying what all these search changes mean for SEO in the long term. Will that change, too? Maybe you’re thinking about auditing your SEO again,…
Google’s MUM understands what you need: 1000x more powerful than BERT
Natural language understanding has been a tough nut to crack, but thanks to Google’s continued investment in AI, it has reached a whole new level. At I/O 2021, Google introduced MUM — Multitask United Model. According to Google, this new language model is 1000x powerful than BERT, released in 2019. MUM is coming to Google…
What can Google’s “product reviews update” teach us about “high-quality content”?
In April 2021, Google changed how they assess content which ‘reviews’ products and services. The “Product reviews update” made it harder for pages that do little more than “summarize a bunch of products” to rank highly. But, unlike many other Google updates, this one came with a cheat sheet that describes what site editors need…
5 ways to improve your Core Web Vitals
“If only I could simply wave my wand and have a super fast website!” This has probably crossed your mind as well, right? Optimizing site speed and user experience is a lot of work and gets technical — and complicated — really fast. Most site owners or managers quickly need to talk to their developers…
Google’s algorithm is amazingly smart and incredibly dumb at the same time
Google is really smart, amazingly smart. The algorithm is very close to reading texts like human-beings. At the same time, parts of Google’s algorithm aren’t smart at all. Computers aren’t that good at understanding ‘what is what’ on a page. If you have a recipe site, you’ll need to tell Google what an ingredient is,…
What does Google do?
How does Google work? What does Google actually do? For many of you, this will be fairly old news. But for everyone who is new to the world of SEO: let me explain what Google does and how SEO works. In a way that is easy to follow, because understanding this really helps you create…