Google Search Advocate’s stated that Authority no longer is needed to rank your website in 2022
As a website owner anyone would like to rank their website on Google SERPs. but Google used to work on authority rankings to show top sites.. but now in 2022 there is good news. Your website does not necessarily need to establish itself as an authority for ranking in the Google search results.
John Muller gave this statement on 10th December 2021 during Google’s Search Central SEO office hours hangout. “Not all websites need to be seen as authorities for achieving a good ranking in the Google search results.“
You can also watch the John Mueller Google Search Central Office Hours video.
Brain Harnish a Lead SEO professional, also took part in the live stream on Date?? because he wanted to ask John Muller a follow-up question related to a comment he made on Reddit about the authority of a website.
The question he asked was “ Is more than 30 pages to be seen as authority was about more critical and high-level subjects?”
John said “It is not easy to call a site authoritative after publishing thirty articles related to a particular subject.”
For example, a website cannot just publish 30 articles related to a medical condition and be viewed as having the same authority as a doctor. He added that they do not need to be seen as an authority for many websites, and they can put their content out there and have it in Google’s search results.
Keeping this statement in mind, another user from the group asked how Google views single-page websites? After this question, John Muller added more information to his statement by saying that;
“it is not compulsory for any website to position itself as an authority. As far as single-page websites are concerned, it is easy to make good ones.”
Muller’s statement about requiring more than 30 pages to be seen as authority was about more critical and high-level subjects.
If you are a small business owner and are selling something, you don’t need your website to be an authority. And especially things like one-page websites, they are often primarily focused on this one thing only, and there is no need for you to become an authority to do that one thing. So simply having a one-page website is also a fine idea.
You need to know that having a one-page website is not a bad idea, it is a good starting point, but it can continuously proliferate from its foundation. In this process, one needs to consider how more and more pages can be added to the site in the future so that it does not get stuck in a place where the new content is continuously being added to a single page.
Here is also an important information about Website Downtime:
When a website is unable to do its primary tasks for users, then the website is referred to as down and the situation is called website downtime.
“I don’t think you’ll be able to do it for that time, regardless of whatever you set up. For an outage of maybe a day or so, using a 503 result code is a great way to tell us that we should check back. But after a couple of days we think this is a permanent result code, and we think your pages are just gone, and we will drop them from the index.
And when the pages come back we will crawl them again and we will try to index them again. But essentially during that time we will probably drop a lot of the pages from the website from our index, and there’s a pretty good chance that it’ll come back in a similar way but it’s not always guaranteed.”
Geotargeting Can Harm Google Search Ranking in 2022
According to google, one can impact their ranking using google search console’s international targeting option if you are planning to target the mainstream audience.
The same topic was recorded on the 31st December during the Google Search Centre’s office hour’s hangout session.
An SEO named Aleem Bawany joins the livestream to ask Google Search Advocate John Mueller “why a smaller sister site is outranking his main site”.
After looking at the site, Muller says “this could be due to the international targeting option in the google search console.”
“The one thing I did notice is that you have geotargeting set up in Search Console for Pakistan. I don’t know if that’s by design, if that’s something you’re trying to do. If you want to make a general English-speaking news website, then probably it makes sense to turn off the geotargeting. So that might be something that can help you.”
Conclusion from google search advocate is If you want to target the international audience to your website then you should put your search console international setting to turned off mode.
“ When it comes to search, if you want to target countries other than Pakistan, like a general English-speaking news site, then I would definitely turn that off. Because that can have an effect there in that it really focuses on Pakistan and then slightly focuses less on other countries.”
Now for SEO: Nofollow, UGC, Sponsored Link has same value
Muller confirmed that there is no such difference between these three types of link attributes which are used for search engine ranking factors. Google supports all kinds of links whether it is UGC, sponsored or no follow links. In terms of the difference in SEO value, there is no such thing, they all do the same thing – which is not pass any link value from the source page.
John was asked “is a nofollow backlink better, equal or worse than an ugc and a sponsored backlink?” John responded on Twitter “there’s no practical difference in terms of “SEO-value” for the site you’re linking to.”
