Keeping users engaged on your website is vitally important, but Google says it doesn’t affect your rankings. I suspect they want it to, but they don’t have a good way to tie your site engagement to the rankings.

The problem for Google is two-fold:

• If you have Google Analytics on your website, which captures many of those engagement metrics, it doesn’t feed that back to Google for search rankings. Google has stated repeatedly that your data from Analytics doesn’t impact rankings.
• While Google Analytics is used on a lot of sites, there are millions that don’t use it. Google wants the rankings to be the best they can be, so if they gave more of a boost to sites with Analytics on them, that could make for a worse user experience.

Secondary benefits

While Google doesn’t use engagement metrics directly, you can still gain in the rankings if users are highly engaged. Those highly engaged users are more likely to search for brand-related queries in the future, and they’re also more likely to link to your site and reference it from other places on the internet, which can have a big impact on your rankings.

Really, though?

There are some people that don’t believe this, and think that Google must be using Analytics data at least a little bit. While I’m convinced that they don’t, I certainly don’t have any hard proof so there’s always a chance.

Similar to my “Facebook still isn’t listening to you” post, I’ve done my research and I’m happy with my conclusion, but there is a chance I’m wrong and I’m willing to listen. If you find info that shows how Google might be using engagement to directly impact rankings, please let me know.

Until then, keep working on your website engagement, but consider it mostly a separate task from any search engine optimization work that you might be doing.

When Google reveals a bit of information about how their search algorithm works, the words they use are very important.

For example, last year Google’s Gary Illyes mentioned that website speed is a “teeny tiny factor” in ranking, which came as a surprise to many people. It’s very important for user experience, but isn’t a major factor to Google.

However, in a recent post about the importance of internal linking on your website, Google’s John Mueller said that it was “super critical” and “one of the biggest things you can do” to help Google. Those are bold words!

Internal Links

I try to be very intentional about links on this site. Sometimes I’ll link out to other sources (such as the link a few paragraphs up), and many times I’ll link to old posts of mine that are relevant for the discussion at hand. For example, while John made it clear that internal links are important, I can point you to a post of mine from last year where he said that you can certainly have too many internal links and perhaps create problems.

Internal links are a huge, easy win, because they benefit both the user and Google. Really, most things that are good for users (unique content, mobile friendliness, etc) are good for Google as well. In most cases, you can think “Would this be good for my visitors?” and be pretty confident that it would also be good in Google’s eyes.

Back to John’s thoughts on internal links, though, here is an extended quote of what he said, and you can read even more over on this great post at Search Engine Journal.

It’s something where internal linking is super critical for SEO.

I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.

And what you think is important is totally up to you.

You can decide to make things important where you earn the most money or you can make things important where you’re the strongest competitor or maybe you’re the weakest competitor.

With internal linking you can really kind of focus things on those directions and those parts of your site.

There is a growing number of tools out there that can write (or at least help write) content for your website. As of today, that kind of content goes against Google’s guidelines — but probably not for long.

According to Google’s John Mueller:

From our guidelines it is the case that if it’s automatically generated content it should be blocked by robots for example. But my feeling is at some point that is going to shift a little bit in the sense that we’ll focus more on the quality rather than how it was generated.

To be honest, I think we might be there already. If the content is of high enough quality, Google may not be able to tell the difference, and that’s only going to be become more difficult as machine written content improves.

Taking it further, John talks a bit about what happens if machine written content isn’t any good:

And this kind of low effort content I think will continue to be something that our systems will try to recognize as low quality maybe spam and treat appropriately. And in the end if it’s low quality content it doesn’t matter if it was written by a person or by a machine, it’s like it’s not that useful for people.

It’s that last sentence that really matters — is the content any good? If so, the source becomes less important.

As someone that manually writes at least a post every day, the idea of machine written content kind of makes me sad. On the other hand, it’s coming and there is no way to stop it, so understanding the usefulness of it will be important to follow in the coming years so we can all make the best of it.

(source: SE Roundtable)