Weekly SEO Updates July 1- July 7
?John Mueller says: "No ranking factor compensates missing relevance, or missing user interest."
For example, semantic HTML helps Google understand your content but it is not a ranking factor and doesn't really help you rank better. That is the relevancy comment.
Thus, he explained, "it's easy to forget that a site doesn't just 'rank' on its own, it ranks for what it's relevant for."
Google's John Mueller said it doesn't matter either way if you put your blog posts on a subfolder of /blog or just on the root directory of the site, without the /blog.
It looks like Google is testing placing author names in the top stories carousel within the mobile search results.
See the example here:
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On June 30th, Twitter decided to block unregistered, signed-out users from seeing public tweets. That meant that for Google's normal crawling purposes, it was unable to see some of these tweets. It seems that Google now has about 52% fewer Twitter URLs in its index today than it had on Friday.
Twitter URLs indexed went from about 471 million URLs to 227 million, a drop of about 52%.?
Then, an update happened on July 5th - it looks like Twitter made some changes and now Google is having an easier time crawling and indexing content on Twitter.com.
Twitter is now using a modal window for users not logged in (and Google can see the tweet content below the modal). And search visibility is bouncing back.
More on 5th of July Twitter update we just mentioned:? Google stopped crawling and indexing Twitter content after Twitter made it so that unregistered (signed-out) users were not able to see tweets.
Twitter made a change in the past 24 hours or so that now Google and unregistered users can see the tweet but there is a modal that overlays asking users to sign up for Twitter.
That means Google Search can now crawl and render tweets and see the content in the tweet, thus index it and ultimately rank that content. Site command is now showing more content from Twitter this morning than it did after Twitter made that change.?