The Ask Google Anything Summary from Casey

The Ask Google Anything panel at the end of SMX is always chockful of useful SEO nuggets. Today`s talk with Gary and Mariya did not disappoint. Here are some great takeaways that most of us knew, some of us suspected, and all of us should review: - The Mobile-First index is months away. At least June or after. - It is confirmed that Mobile Page Speed will be a Ranking Factor in the Mobile-First Index. It will replace Desktop signals. - Google does not have a Domain Authority metric but individual Page/URL Authority does exist. - Authorship is dead. It`s never coming back. - For featured snippets it`s ALL content quality. Relevant and well-structured. (links, structured data, etc, not used) - Wikidata entities are THE most popular source of information for the Knowledge Graph - There is no specific % of 404s that hurt your rankings. None. - Google still has no plans to use Social Signals to rank pages. - Length of content on a page is NOT a ranking factor. Answer the query and move on. - Again, Duplicate Content is NOT a penalty. But you can dilute signals and shoot yourself in the foot. - Google is doing its "best" to automatically discount "bad links" but they make mistakes. So keep disavowing. - The "Fred" update was a Quality Update -- the answers as to what to address are laid out in the Google Webmaster & Quality Rater Guidelines (no other comment than that) Oh, and a funny point today when it was discovered that Google does not rank on the 1st page of Google for "Search Engine." LOL.