Mueller goes on to note that valid HTML is a low bar for a ranking factor:
“…this is imo a pretty low bar. It’s a bit like saying professional writers produce content free of typos – that seems reasonable, right? Google also doesn’t use typos as a ranking factor, but imagine you ship multiple typos on your homepage? Eww.
And, it’s trivial to validate the HTML that a site produces. It’s trivial to monitor the validity of important pages – like your homepage.”
Ease Of Achieving Characteristic Of Quality
There have been many false signals of quality promoted and abandoned by SEOs, the most recent one being “authorship” and “content reviews” that are supposed to show that an authoritative author wrote an article and that the article was checked by someone who is authoritative. People did things like invent authors with AI generated images that are associated to fake LinkedIn profiles in the naïve belief that adding an author to the article will trick Google into awarding ranking factor points (or whatever, lol).
The authorship signal turned out to be a misinterpretation of Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines and a big waste of a lot of people’s time. If SEOs had considered how easy it was to create an “authorship” signal it would have been apparent to more people that it was a trivial thing to fake.
So, one takeaway from Mueller’s post can be said to be that if there’s a question about whether something is a ranking factor, first check if Google explicitly says it’s a ranking factor and if not then consider if literally any spammer can achieve that “something” that an SEO claims is a ranking factor. If it’s a trivial thing to achieve then there’s a high likelihood it’s not a ranking factor.
There Is Still Value To Be Had From Non-Ranking Factors
The fact that something is relatively easy to fake doesn’t mean that web publishes and site owners should stop doing it. If something is good for users and helps to build trust then it’s likely a good idea to keep doing it. Just because something is not a ranking factor doesn’t invalidate the practice. It’s always a good practice in the long run to keep doing activities that build trust in the business or the content, regardless of whether it’s a ranking factor or not. Google tries to pick up on the signals that users or other websites give in order to determine if a website is high quality, useful, and helpful, so anything that generates trust and satisfaction is likely a good thing.
Read John Mueller’s post on LinkedIn here.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/stockfour