1. Tweet View Counts Now Available On Twitter - On December 22, Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter will now show view counts (impressions) on tweets, providing everyone with more information about the reach.

Previously, the account that published the tweet was the only one with access to the number of tweet views, also known as impressions, on Twitter. In my opinion, this is a double edge sword - First, it will give outside observers a better understanding of the potential reach and impact content can have on Twitter. For brands and businesses, view counts will be a helpful way to measure the reach and engagement of sponsored content on the platform. Knowing how many impressions other peoples’ tweets get can also help businesses identify genuine influencers in their niche, as engagement numbers don’t tell the whole story. Also, public view counts can potentially expose accounts that artificially inflate their engagement and follower numbers.

On the other hand, public view counts may be demotivating for new users because they are just starting out.

2. GA4 Migrator Will Recreate Audiences From Universal Analytics In A GA-4 Property - In Google Analytics, audiences are groups of website visitors with shared attributes, for example gender, device type, country, or browsing behavior. For example, you can quickly lookup the locations of your best-converting using the audiences report and thus better allocate your time and marketing budgets.

One of the big hurdles to GA-4 migration was the need to manually recreate audiences from Universal Analytics (UA). Now Google has rolled out a GA4 Migrator tool that will let you recreate many of your UA properties into a GA4 property, thus lowering the obstacle.

Audiences based on dimensions and metrics that are the same in UA and GA4 can be recreated just as they are. When the audiences use dimensions or metrics that differ between UA and GA4, you can edit the audience definitions in the spreadsheet to use the relevant GA4 dimensions and metrics. For each audience, the spreadsheet includes information about whether the audience is available for recreation; if it isn’t, the spreadsheet has information about why. Editable audience conditions are included so you can modify them before recreating them.

More information on the Migration tool can be found here. If you haven’t implemented GA4 yet, this is your sign. And if you are unsure or need additional assistance, you can always contact us. 

3. Google: Sitemaps Are Hints - Gary Illyes from Google wrote on LinkedIn that sitemaps are hints, not orders. Meaning just because you submit an XML sitemap file to Google, it does not mean Google will index and rank that content. 

Gary explained, "A sitemap file, as defined by sitemaps.org, is a great way to tell search engines about your site's URLs. But that's where it ends: you tell Steve to read your sitemap, but if Steve doesn't trust your site will delight users, it won't bother reading your sitemap." In this example, Steve is a hypothetical search engine. 

P.S: This is not a new statement. We have covered this in the past that Google does not have guaranteed crawling, indexing, or ranking of your URLs.

4. Google: WordPress Is Just One Of The Many Options For SEO - A thread in the r/SEO reddit forum asked if “WordPress better for SEO than coding your own website?” In reply to this question, Google’s John Mueller wrote: “Not for SEO, but you can focus more on the content if you don’t spend all your time creating a new CMS for yourself. (some people prefer making a CMS, so YMMV).”

The most significant advantage WordPress offers is the ease of use compared to manually writing code, specially when it comes to publishing regular blogs. To Google or any search engine, it makes no difference if a website was custom built or WordPress was used in the backend as long as site loads faster, have good content following the (E-EAT model), and have the necessary structured data. 

5. Google: Word Count Is Not A Ranking Factor - After user Cosmic Dash complained on Mastodon that the popular SEO tool Yoast is yelling at him for having more than 300 words in a section, Google's John Mueller replied that, "FWIW there's nothing in Google's algorithms that focus on a certain number of words per section. It can make sense to help with readability (which I suspect Yoast focuses on, and which is a good thing), but it's definitely not an #SEO factor."

This is not the first time Google is stating that word count is not a ranking factor. Back in 2019, the same John Mueller wrote in a Reddit post that “Word count is not a ranking factor. Save yourself the trouble.”

This proves again how much fad and bad advice is floating around the web when it comes to SEO. And who do you want to listen? Google’s Search Advocate John Muller or that self-proclaimed SEO expert?