A Brief October 2021 Webmaster Roundup
25, Oct 2021
Craig UptonThe end of October is fast approaching, making now the perfect time for a brief roundup of what has been taking place this month. As usual, it has been the classic case of Google’s handy work arriving with plenty of fanfare, while other tweaks have been rolled out silently.
Earlier in the month, Google informed webmasters of its plan to start using MUM in more places in Google search. As a reminder, MUM is essentially a continuation of Google’s BERT algorithm – Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers – though is apparently at least a thousand times more powerful. MUM can also use images as an input instead of keywords, opening the door to far more accurate and intuitive image search.
The past month has also seen an endless array of Google algorithm updates make their way into the mix; none of which have been formally confirmed by Google, but have nonetheless dealt a hammer blow to many thousands of online businesses. Then there was Google’s title change tweak to show title tags more often, along with a few choice snippets of information from John Mueller on important ranking factors.
We now know that some WordPress themes pack a bigger SEO punch than others, and that strategic internal linking can be used to ‘manipulate’ Google into focusing on certain high-quality areas of your website.
We also now have confirmation from the same proverbial horse’s mouth that linking to a lower-grade website will not drag down the SEO value of your own page or site.
