Google’s John Mueller made a somewhat obvious statement, basically saying that building a good website is often good for SEO. He said on Twitter “A lot of good accessibility practices are also good SEO practices, and generally speaking, improving a site for users often results in indirect positive effects as well.”
Here are those tweets for more context:
I thought that was a general requirement? Do you think this should be a ranking factor?
— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) May 31, 2022
I don’t know what they did specifically, and if the effect resulted. Many accessibility best practices are also SEO best practices, and generally speaking, improving a site for users often results in indirect and overall positive effects.
— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) June 1, 2022
However, in practice, this has not always been the case. Sometimes bad websites rank well – in fact, there have been many cases historically where ugly sites have ranked very well. I don’t think it works that well these days, but back then we often saw ugly and confusing sites rank very well. We even saw some sites mistreat customers for SEO benefits a very long time ago – also, something that is not recommended today.
Danny Sullivan also tweeted something along the same lines:
Good SEO does what good humans would do. If you cite a source because that source was important in helping you create content, link to it as it is fair and deserved credit. And link to them without any follow-ups because that is also, in such a case, just and deserved credit.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 1, 2022
So build a good website for your users and SEO should follow…
Discussion forum on Twitter.