Google Lightning Talks: The State of SEO

A video in Google’s Lightning Talks sequence, titled the state of net SEO, presents knowledge on how web sites are following commonplace SEO practices.

Aleyda Solis, SEO advisor and founder of Orainti, joins Lightning Talks as a visitor presenter as she goes over the principle learnings from the SEO chapter of the 2020 Web Almanac.

The Web Almanac is a complete report on the state of the net, which is backed by knowledge and trusted consultants.

Solis authored the SEO chapter of the 2020 Web Almanac, together with Michael King and Jamie Indigo.

Here are key findings from the SEO chapter, which goals to determine most important parts and configurations that play a task in an internet site’s natural SEO.

It’s essential to notice knowledge is primarily gathered by analyzing the house pages of web sites, and all stats check with cellular pages.

Highlights From the SEO Chapter of the Web 2020 Almanac

Crawlability and Indexability

In 2020:

  • 75% of web sites had a legitimate robots.txt versus 72% in 2019.
  • A rel=“canonical” tag was discovered on 53% in 2020, versus 48% in 2019.
  • Of the canonical tags found, 45% had been self referential and eight.5% pointed to a distinct URL.

Content Trends

In 2020:

  • The median web page had 348 phrases, in contrast 306 phrases in 2019.
  • 99% of pages had a title tag, versus 97% in 2019.
    The median title tag size is 6 phrases/38 characters, which is up from 20 characters in 2019.
  • 68% of pages had a meta description, up from 64% of pages in 2019.
  • The median size of a meta description was 19 phrases and 138 characters, which is underneath 160 characters as advisable by SEO finest practices.
  • The median web page had 67 whole hyperlinks, of which 54 had been inside hyperlinks. Down 10% from 2019.
  • The median web page had 6 exterior hyperlinks, in comparison with 8 in 2019.
  • 30% of pages had a rel=“nofollow attribute.
  • Less than 0.3% of pages used the brand new rel=“ugc” or rel=“sponsored” tags.

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The improve in median phrase depend just isn’t essentially a sign that extra content material is best. What’s most essential, Solis says, is to fulfill consumer search wants with complete and useful info.

A discount within the quantity of inside hyperlinks on pages may recommend websites usually are not maximizing their means to enhance crawling effectivity and hyperlink fairness circulate in the way in which they did the 12 months earlier than.

The lower within the quantity of exterior hyperlinks on pages suggests web sites are extra cautious when linking out to different websites, which could possibly be both to keep away from passing hyperlink fairness or to keep away from sending customers to different websites.

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Structured Data

In 2020,

  • JSON-LD was the popular structured knowledge format, showing on 30% of pages.
  • 39% of pages put structured knowledge in uncooked HTML.
  • 40% of pages put structured knowledge within the renderDOM, which depends on serps’ JavaScript rendering capabilities.
  • AggregateRating structured knowledge (assessment stars) was used on 24% of pages, regardless of tips stating it shouldn’t be used on house pages.
  • Usage of VideoObject structured knowledge grew 28%.
  • Usage of FAQ web page markup grew 3,000%.
  • Usage of HowTo markup grew 623%.
  • Usage of QApage markup grew 192%.

Data Related to Google’s Page Experience Update

In 2020:

  • 20% of pages met Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds.
  • 73% of pages have adopted HTTPS, up 10% from 2019.
  • 43% of pages have a viewport meta tag with the precise configuration.
  • 11% of pages don’t use the viewport meta tag in any respect, suggesting they will not be mobile-friendly but.
  • 83% of pages use responsive options.

Data within the 2020 version of the Web Almanac is predicated on the evaluation of 7.5 million web sites. It additionally contains knowledge from Lighthouse and Chrome UX studies.

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For extra, see the total video beneath:

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