Google algorithm archives

To get your page to the top of the search results, you need to create content that people are actually looking for. That’s why you need to consider search intent before you start writing. Google is getting better and better at guessing what people want or need when they type in their – sometimes cryptic …

Search is a never-ending story. A search engine is never done fine-tuning the way they get their results to you in a way that makes sense for them and for you. First, Google was all about digging through loads of information to find what you need, but now, AI increasingly helps them make sense of …

Another month, another SEO news webinar at Yoast HQ! For the uninitiated, in these webinars, Jono Alderson and myself, run through the most important bits of news relevant to us and to you. We cover many SEO topics and expand on internet marketing and the state of the web itself. Plus, we’re having a ton …

Every month, Jono and I sit down to discuss the latest news in SEO in a live webinar for our Yoast SEO Academy members. It’s a fun way for us to provide you some of our insights on what’s happening right now. In addition, you get to ask your questions as well, so it’s a …

Your post is optimized, all your bullets in Yoast SEO are green and still, the post you want to rank with does not rank for that keyword. And yet, another page on your website does show up in the results. But that’s not the one you wanted to rank highest with. Why is Google ranking …

Search engines are getting better and better at understanding language. Does that mean they can also understand questions? And what does that mean for the way you should write and optimize your content for questions? We’ll find out in this post! First, we’ll explore how Google understands and uses questions. Then, we’ll go into why …

Search engines are trying to understand language: they want to understand what users are searching for, and they want to be able to provide them with the best results. Before I started working at Yoast, I studied linguistics: the scientific study of language. During my years at Yoast, I’ve noticed that linguistics and SEO have …

Handling your social media is a necessary part of any marketing strategy, but it’s also a vital part of any good SEO strategy. The popularity of social media has risen and probably will keep doing so. That means Google and other search engines can’t ignore them, and you probably shouldn’t either. You even see recent …

By announcing it as the “biggest change of the last five years” and “one that will impact one in ten searches”, Google sure turned some heads with an inconspicuous name: BERT. BERT is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model that helps Google understand the language better in order to serve more relevant results. There are …

Whenever you delete a page (or post) from your site, you also delete one or more URLs. That old URL, when visited, will usually return a ‘404 not found’ error, which is not the best thing for Google or your users. Is that what you really wanted to happen? You could redirect that deleted page …