6 Things That Google Doesn’t Care About and Won’t Affect Your Ranking

6 things that Google doesnt care about

 

The SEO industry spends a lot of time discussing and figuring out what sort of things Google pays attention to. It’s important, as these things usually have a big impact on how well a website ranks. While there’s a lot that Google looks at to assess ranking, it turns out they don’t care about everything. Some things may have an indirect impact, but tons of things you feel you need to spend time on, don’t actually matter. So here are 6 things that won’t affect your site ranking because Google just doesn’t care about them.

 

1. How Old Your Website Is

Age is important, just not your websites ages and not to Google. There’s been a long-standing debate over whether or not Google ranks sites higher based on age. The truth is that they don’t care at all. If your site was registered in 1999, 2008, or 2017, it makes no difference.

 

giphy

 

The only way age impacts ranking is that if a site was made in 1999, it’s had more time to build up links and content. If a website has a long, successful history that’s great! It means you’ve taken the time to curate quality links and create quality content. However, if a site is fairly new and has created the same online success, the two will be seen as the same in Google’s eyes.

 

2. Social Media Engagement Counts On Your Pages

Today, it’s a good idea to have buttons on your site’s content. It easily allows users to pin a cute graphic to Pinterest or share an interesting post on Facebook. Some sites even have counters for social media engagement on their pages. While it’s super cool to see that a page has gotten 20,000 shares, it’s not something that Google really looks at.

 

giphy-1

Social media engagement can have indirect results to SEO rankings. We’ve already discussed this, but social media can boost site traffic, start conversations, and increase brand awareness and authority. All of this will catch Google’s attention and impact your site’s ranking. So it’s the secondary actions of social media engagement that catches Google’s attention- not the liking, sharing, posting, retweeting, and commenting.

 

3. Whether You Use Google Services and Apps

People worry that by not using Google services and apps, that Google will take offense and rank them lower. Here’s the thing…Google is a program that doesn’t care about whether or not you utilize their other tools. If you do, great! If you don’t, great!

This also means that whatever you do within those services, like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Analytics is kept separate from Google’s search engine. You can use your Google email to buy all the bot followers you want- Google won’t know.

anigif_enhanced-23415-1434392939-14

4. Your Site’s Foundational Tech

Don’t stress about what programs and technologies you used to build your site. Does Facebook or Google own the JavaScript library you use? If you don’t know it doesn’t really matter because Google doesn’t care. Are you still coding in HTML or have a .net domain? That’s cool!

As long as Google can easily crawl through your site, and read the unique content on there, they don’t care what tech you’re using. For them, it’s about what’s transmitted, not how it’s transmitted.

tenor

5. Separator Characters in Title Element

The page title element is what sits on the header of the document. It’s usually the brand name, a separator character, and then some words and phrases after it. This can be reversed too, but it doesn’t matter. Don’t bother wasting time trying to figure out which separator character is better. To Google, it doesn’t matter if you use a bar, a hyphen, a colon or anything else.

 

giphy-2

 

Some companies claim that they’ve found certain character provide better click-through rates. If you’ve seen that, then great use that one. Usually, there isn’t any correlation between SEO and what character you use. It’s all up to personal preference.

 

6. Headlines and H-Tags

What happens when you put your headline inside an H2 or H3 instead of an H1? The world will end. No, just kidding, really Google won’t care. Google doesn’t care, and they pretty much just look at it and say “this is bold, big, and at the top, so it’s a title”. So whether you use H1, H2, or H50 (not a real thing!), it’s more a matter of aesthetic than ranking. As long as you and users can easily identify between titles and subtitles that’s all that counts.

 

harry-potter-he-who-must-not-be-named-headline-newsletter-newspaper-Favim.com-234881

 

Next time you start stressing about every little aspect of your website, stop. Google cares about far fewer things than we’re led to believe. Any good SEO agency will be able to figure out what things are important and what things aren’t. Contact us today to get started on your SEO campaign.