Google: Paying Bloggers To Write For Dofollow Backlinks Is Against Our Guidelines

John Mueller of Google was asked the following question, “if I dofollow backlinks due to paying bloggers to write highly relevant review articles or paying for high-quality PR news articles, are they paid links that go against Google’s guidelines?” John responded that the short answer is yes, it is against Google’s guidelines.

Timeless SEO tips: 6 universal SEO tactics that never go out of fashion

  1. Stay on the light side
  2. Optimize your site speed
  3. Work on excellent content
  4. Keep your audience in mind
  5. Improve your internal linking structure
  6. Keep your content well-maintained

Dealing With “This Is The Way Our Old SEO Did It”

It seems like this is an ongoing issue for many SEO consultants. SEOs have to deal with, “well, our previous SEO did it this way.” One way to ensure your long-term failure is to use the line “we’ve always done it this way.” We often hear things like “Our old SEO told us we could do it this way, so we are not changing this.”

We need to examine what was done wrong with past SEO tactics and move forward with the things that will really make a difference while updating our knowledge to current 2021 standards, and not relying on things that may have worked 10 years ago but are not relevant today.

Top 8 SEO Trends In 2021 That You Cannot Skip Reading

  1. Increase in the dependency on Artificial Intelligence
  2. Voice Search Technology will take the lead
  3. Mobile-first indexing will be preferred by Search Engines
  4. Contents must be compatible with the Google EAT principle
  5. Long-form contents will improve SERPs
  6. Featured Snippets will gain prominence
  7. Predictive Search will increase
  8. Image and Video Optimization is going to play a lead role

 

DuckDuckGo’s focus on privacy-minded users pushes it past 100 million searches in a single day

DuckDuckGo served 102,251,307 search queries on January 11, breaking past the 100 million query milestone for the first time. Google’s estimated search engine market share in the US is 87.81%. The closest competitor, Bing, accounts for only 6.45%, followed by Yahoo! at 3.05% and DuckDuckGo with 2.3%.

 

Google’s John Mueller Clears Confusion About Mobile-First Index

Mueller explains nothing has changed with mobile-first indexing as it relates to sites with separate mobile URLs using rel-canonical: Mobile versions of a site are indexed by default. Google will use the mobile URL as canonical even if the rel-canonical points to desktop. It doesn’t matter which URL version is listed in the sitemap.

 

TikTok Beats Facebook in Time Spent Per User

Users are spending more time on TikTok than Facebook. Time spent on TikTok is up 325% year-over-year, which means it’s now beating Facebook in terms of hours spent per user per month. Average time spent is up for nearly every app in every market, but few are up by as much as TikTok.

 

It ranks #1 in the list of top breakout apps in 2020. It is on track to hit 1.2 billion active users in 2021.

 

Mobile ad placements grew 95% year-over-year in the US.

 

Time spent in business apps grew 275% year-over-year and is expected to remain high as companies continue to provide remote working options.