Does Google Use Social Media Likes as a Ranking Signal? Attendees on our SEO training courses often ask if Google uses social media likes as a ranking signal. The short answer is no they don’t and here is a short snippet from a video produced by John Mueller of Google where he explains why.
For the last 15-years links marked with the rel=”nofollow” attribute have been ignored. However, earlier this week Google announced that they were changing their “nofollow” markup policy and that now they would take the attribute as a hint rather than an instruction. They also introduced two new attributes: “sponsored” and “ugc”.
The new definitions for each term is now as follows:
rel=”sponsored”: Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.
rel=”ugc”: UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
rel=”nofollow”: Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.
For more information see: Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links
I often get asked about AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and what effect it has on SEO and so here is a short blog post on the subject. Read more
A WordPress theme is a ready-made set of pages that allow you to create a high-quality result in a fraction of the time. Using a WordPress theme allows you to create a world-class website without having to pay many thousands of pounds in deign costs. WordPress themes offer a lot of variety in both style and presentation and have all of the production problems already solved. With a theme selected, you are then free to add your own logo, images and content and give your website its own unique look and feel. Read more