Search Off the Record, a google podcast, resulted from the ongoing debate that improving third-party metrics won’t boost rankings. During the podcast, when some google employees were having a conversation, the topic got side-tracked. They started talking about third-party metrics and the impact that they have on Google searches.
The speakers concluded that improving the third party metric won’t boost rankings. And they advised the writers to look for a wider variety of factors instead of just third party metrics. The podcast had John Mueller and Duy Nguyen as the speakers.
Contents
Third Party Domain Authority Metrics
Google provides many tools and metrics that help users or publishers to compare or analyse their website with other developers who also rank each site. It also provides metrics for computing these rankings based on traffic and links and some other things.
These metrics are made to help the developers and publishers in doing the competition analysis. Also, some developers see these metrics as a measure of site quality, and they also know the content and linking of the other websites to boost their rankings.
According to the conversation in the podcast, Google showed its surety that they have never observed that using a third-party link boosts the search ranks.
Third Party Metrics And Search Rankings
In the podcast, John Mueller began by commenting that most of the creators and developers focus on the factors that do not impact the search rankings. Nguyen also added that many publishers focus on those external metrics that google does not use.
He also added that many people waste their time and money on external factors hoping that these will improve their rankings, but it does not work. And he further added that if the publishers focus more on better user experience, better quality content, and high-quality images, it will help them improve their search rankings instead of using external factors.
How To Improve Search Rankings?
Both the speakers further added that the publishers should not only focus on one factor.
By doing this, they neglect the actual hundreds of other proper factors that improve the search rankings. Duy further explained the benefits of focusing on a wide range of metrics rather than just focusing on a single or few metrics that do not help.
See also: 5 Hacks To Enhance Your Organic CTR And Rankings In SERPs
According to them, to improve search rankings, it is necessary to focus on a wide range of popularity signals. For instance, some publishers have perfect linking, but their content does not seem exciting, so that won’t improve their ranking. Another publisher might make their content exciting but not the web page.
And one publisher makes everything correct but forgets the linking. Some publishers focus on linking and other things but neglected to build an audience and relationship with readers and influencers. Then also, there will be no impact on the search rankings.
The Takeaway
So, to make things work according to our preferences and expectations, the publishers should work on every metric rather than focusing on only one metric. i.e. third-party metrics. This will help the content creators boost their search rankings.