Last Updated on January 28, 2019

In this week’s SEO roundup, we will cover some of the important revelations made by Google’s John Mueller during the hangout sessions with SEOs.

First one is the upcoming changes in Google Image Search that will force you to think differently.

Google Image Search Changes Are Coming

During a session with webmasters on 24th January, John Mueller told that there are some really big changes coming to the Google Image Search this year. These changes will force you to think differently about image optimization than you have been doing for the last two decades.

These changes will be based on the introspection that people will be using images at a much larger scope in a more transactional and educational manner rather than to just search images to be included in presentations. It will be hard to say what these new changes will bring in. Here’s a tweet by Barry Schwartz on John’s statement:

Moving on to the next update, Google states that the last 50% of the Mobile-First Indexing migration will be harder.

Till not Google has migrated 50% of the search results towards the mobile-first indexing mechanism that evaluates the value of web results based on their mobile friendliness. But the last 50% is still left to be migrated and it is going to be much harder for Google to migrate over.

According to John Mueller, the problem is between the mobile and desktop versions parity that is causing issues with migration. The challenge is to fix the mobile pages that have a difference in terms of content, structure data, links, etc. as compared to their desktop versions.

Google is planning to communicate with the webmasters via Google Search Console regarding the issues that need to be fixed for successful migration of their websites. Still, John believes there will be a number of websites that will never be mobile-first.

This last one is a tip that can help you improve trust value of your website for Google.

Disavow Bad Links to Make Your Links More Trustworthy for Google

In another webmaster hangout session this week, John Mueller told webmasters that cleaning up or disavowing bad links to your site can help Google algorithmically trust other links to your website. One of the webmasters asked Mueller that after disavowing some links on their site they saw improvement. She asked if bad links can hurt websites algorithmically, to which Mueller replied:

    That can definitely be the case. So it’s something where our algorithms when they look at it and they see oh there’s a bunch of really bad links here, then maybe they’ll be a bit more cautious with regards to links in general from the website. So if you clean that up then the algorithms look at it and say oh there’s kind of it’s okay, it’s not that bad.

I think if you’re in the case where it’s really clear that the webspam team you would give you a manual action, then based on the current situation then that’s what I would disavow.

You can check the complete discussion in the video above.