10 Things that do not affect your Google Rankings
What is the common thing in the age of your site, bounce rate, your headline H1/H2 preference, and shared hosting? We have given a hint in the title, i.e. all of them do not affect your Google rankings directly. In this article, we will tell you about top ten factors that people thought influence your rankings. However, the reality is pretty different as Google don’t care about these things anymore.
Age of your site
The age of the site is a matter of long-standing debate from the past some years. The people question whether Google cares about the year in which your site is published? The answer is a simple no, they don’t care about it at all? The Google simply cares about the content that you add to your site and the authority signals, links & other similar things. However, it is a reality that there is a correlation that goes in this direction. For instance, if you have started a site in 2000 that is still going strong, then there are great chances that you have created many links, authority, equity and other similar things about which the Google cared a lot.
On the other hand, there are chances that you might have succeeded only in the past one year and your site is registered in 2015, but you have created the same amount of signals. In that case, Google will give you better results as you have created the similar authority and impact in a very small quantity of time as compared to the first website.
Whether you are using Google apps and services or not?
The majority of people worried about this thing. They thought whether Google tracks what they are doing with their Google Analytics account and check out all the important data and AdSense from there?
Firstly, the Google engineers who work on this type of products never cared about these things. They don’t have adequate time to check out your Gmail accounts and discover that you have bought some shady links or not? So, there is no need for fear while using this type of things. They will not hurt your Google rankings in any manner. So, just chill out?
Likes, tweet, shares, plus one’s counts of your web pages
So, you own a Facebook counter that shows more than 20,000 shares. That’s great, it is lots of shares. However, does Google care about that? No, they don’t care about that. Furthermore, they never look at these types of things. But, the people who share it on the Facebook also do some other activities that can cause lots of search and browser activity, increased branding, click-through activity, lower pogo-sticking rates, brand preference for you in the search links and results? Yes, these things can impact your Google rankings. So, we can say that it can affect indirectly on your site. But if you ask us directly, then the answer is straight no. Whether there is a need to buy 10,000 Facebook shares, no you shouldn’t.
What regarding raw bounce rate or time on site?
Well, it is one of the most interesting ones. For instance, you have a time of one minute on site and you see in your benchmarks, and industry averages through Google Analytics if you choose to share there. You can see that the benchmarks of your industry are lower than the average. Will it affect your Google rankings? Not necessarily. It can be the case where the visitors come from the other source or it could be an instance where you serve a faster-loading site and you are individuals who need information quickly. This way, the time on site may be lower or maybe the bounce rate is quite high.
But, if it is a pogo-sticking kind of activity, then the visitors go back to the search results and selecting a different website as they don’t find the answer to their query. It means, there is no need for any trouble if that remains fine. So, you shouldn’t worry about the raw bounce rate or raw time on the site much.
The tech under the hood of your site
Are you are one of the people who use JavaScript libraries, such as React or Node, one is Google and another one is Facebook. If you are using the Facebook, is there a chance that you will be given a halftime by the Google? No, it’s not. Facebook might do that because of the patent issues, but we don’t require to worry about that anyway. .NET or what if you are performing coding things in the raw HTML? You just need to be fine as it doesn’t matter. If Google crawls any of these URLs and find out the unique content there and the content that the visitors and Google are seeing is the same, then you don’t need to care what is utilized under the hood for delivering it to the browser.
Having a knowledge panel on the right side of the search results or not
There are instances where you get the knowledge panel that features around the web and some details from Wikipedia. What about the links to the site where you are checking the name of your brand and getting branded site links? The starting sets of results come from your own site and they are like indented. Does it affect your rankings? The answer is simple no. It doesn’t affect your site for any of the search queries in any possible manner.
It could be featured here and it may be showing up here because you are going to receive a number of these clicks and a higher share of those clicks, which is a pretty wonderful thing. But does it affect your rankings due to another unbranded query to your website? No, it wouldn’t at all. There is no need for stress too much. The sites tend to develop links and knowledge panels over time because their brands become larger and they become popular and offer more coverage on the web both online as well as offline. So, you don’t have to stress about anything.
What about utilizing the power of shared hosting or one of the inexpensive hosting options available there?
There will never be a direct effect on your site unless it hurts up time or load speed. If your site doesn’t harm by both these things and they work good as they will work on the solo hosting, then there is no need to worry about. Just go for the shared hosting as you don’t need to worry regarding it.
Utilizing defaults that already resumed by Google
When a site is crawled by the Google, when they came to a site and if there is no robots.txt file on your site or there is a robots.txt file, but it doesn’t have any disallows, exclusions or reach to a page and has no meta robots tags, then they will assume that they have crawled all the things and they should follow every link.
Google can crawl everything by utilizing things, such as meta robots index, follow an individual link, a rel= follow in the robots.txt file or inside the href tag. It will boost anything on your site. These things can be assumed by default. You can do the default thing by using these things in the places. It won’t give you any specific type of advantage. It may not be harmful for you, but still it doesn’t give you any advantage because Google doesn’t care about it.
Characters used as separators in your title element
The page title element can be found in the document’s header and it can be something like the name of your brand and then a separator and some phrases or words after that or the other way, phrases & words, the brand name, and separator. Do you think, does it matter that the separator is a hyphen, a colon, the pipe bar or any other special type of character that you want to utilize? The harsh reality is, Google doesn’t care about this thing as you don’t require to worry about anything. It is a personal preference issue, depending on your wish.
Now, there are chances that you might think that some of these characters have a better click-through rate and preferred over other. It is a great thing if you have found that. I haven’t seen anything like this on the entire web. Some individuals might suggest using hyphen over the pipe, while others vice-versa. This type of things doesn’t matter at all. So, it is up to you.
What about using headlines and the H1, H2, and H3 tags?
Well, I have heard it lots of time, where people said putting your heading inside an H2 tag will be less beneficial as compared to the H1 tag. However, it is not a reality. If you ask me, I will simply say that I am not sure about the extent at which Google cares about using H1, H2 or H3s tag or whether they just check out the content and say they are big and located at the top and bold. It must be the headline and that’s why they will treat it like that. This one is smaller than the first one and it should be a sub-header.
No matter, you are using an H3, an H5, or even an H5, it is your site
CSS and it is up to you and your hired designers. However, it is still considered as ideal practices in HTML for ensuring that the headline, the biggest of all is the H1. I generally do that for the designing work and having some crystal clear HTML and CSS, but I wouldn’t think about that from the perspective of Google. It means if your designer says that we can’t use that in the headline, H1 and have to use it in H2 due to the format of the sheets. No problem, it is not a big deal for which you don’t need to stress.
We regularly post articles that can help our readers. So, these are the top 10 things about which you don’t need to worry about. Thanks, everyone.
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