Search Engine Recap - Week 38 (2024)

This week brought renewed crawler documentation, discussions on ranking factors, and updates on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Here is an overview.

Google Updates Its Crawler Documentation

Google has revamped its crawler documentation, restructuring it into three sections: general crawlers, special-case crawlers, and user-triggered fetchers.

The update also introduces new details about supported content encodings, such as gzip, deflate, and Brotli, along with the protocols crawlers use, like HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.

This reorganization aims to provide clearer, more comprehensive guidance for website owners without changing the actual behavior of Google’s crawlers.

The goal is to improve clarity and offer more detailed information on how crawlers operate.

Google: Why Simple Factors Aren’t Key Ranking Signals

Google’s John Mueller explained why simple factors, like valid HTML and spelling mistakes, are not considered ranking signals.

While valid HTML is a technical best practice, he emphasized that it’s too easy for spammers to implement, making it a poor ranking signal.

Spelling mistakes also don’t directly impact rankings, though frequent errors can hurt user experience, which may indirectly affect performance.

Mueller underscored that ranking signals are more complex, and factors that are easy to achieve, like valid HTML, aren’t necessarily indicators of quality content.

Google Integrates Wayback Machine Links

Lastly, Google has recently integrated links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine into its search results.

This feature is available in the “About this page” option, allowing users to easily view archived versions of websites.

The integration helps researchers and regular users access older content that may no longer be available on active domains.

However, this feature won’t be available for sites that have opted out of archiving or if the page violates content policies.

Takeaways and Recommendations

Week 38 introduced new crawler documentation, making it easier to understand with its division into general crawlers, special-case crawlers, and user-triggered fetchers.

Another key takeaway was Google’s clarification that simple factors shouldn’t always be interpreted as ranking signals, even though they’re commonly assumed to be.

Want to learn more about how to understand and work with ranking factors? Reach out to Bonzer. As a specialized SEO agency, we help ambitious businesses secure top rankings in search engines every day.