Spoiler alert: Google’s crawlers don’t like messy links.
The company updated its SEO link best practices document to include more details for making your links easier to crawl and improving your pages’ relevance.
Before and after: Previously, Google’s best practices only included a section on how to make your links crawlable.
It’s still there, of course. But there are also a few freshly added sections:
- Anchor text placement. Describes the position of the anchor within the code.
- How to write a good anchor text. More descriptive instead of generic, but concise instead of long, and avoiding adjacent links.
- Internal links. Every page you care about should have at least one link from a page on your site, according to Google.
- External links. A good practice is citing sources and pointing towards reputable websites. No, you shouldn’t “nofollow” every link, only those you don’t trust or don’t want to give reputation from your link.
Nothing revolutionary, but still good to hear it from the big G.
Oh, and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) dropped something: It looks like Google reduced the number of touchpoints available in the conversion paths and multi-channel funnel reports.
Previously, you could analyze 50 touchpoints. Now it’s only 20. And according to Charles Farina—who tweeted the update—reports now load noticeably faster.
Why we care: Links matter. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Google mentions relevance and authority a few times in its linking guidelines, meaning it’s still one of the best authority factors you can have. So act accordingly.
Also, a switch to 20 touchpoints may mean smoother reporting, but there are certainly users that will miss the 30 touchpoints lost. Hopefully there’s a solution for that, too.
