In a Webmaster Hangout, Google’s John Mueller was asked to define what a good link is and how to get them. John Mueller also made reference to “other signals” that can power up your rankings.

Example of a Good Link

The question asked is a good one. Here is what the publisher asked:

“Could I get an example of… what a good link would be…?”

Google’s John Mueller answered:

“A good link… so I mean the traditional good link is someone who comes across your website and thinks it’s a fantastic website and recommends it to other people with a link.”

John Mueller probably understands that a good link doesn’t happen by itself. He said something interesting, he recommended promoting the website. There are many who feel that website promotion tied to link building is not necessary. But John Mueller acknowledged the obvious, that a ball isn’t going to roll until someone gives it a push.

Here’s what Google’s Mueller said:

“So basically on the one hand that involves some amount of self-promotion from your side like you have to get some people to come and visit your website somehow so that they can recognize that this is actually a good website.

And there are lots of ways that you can do that. And then that also involves one of those people or some of those people going well, this is a really fantastic website and I have another website that I can link, from where I can link to your website.

So it’s not the case that every visitor coming to your website will say it’s a fantastic website and I also have a website and let me link to your website from my website, but some of these people they can.”

The publisher responded that he doesn’t build links and like many, feels that it’s spammy.

He has a point. Many people approach link building like beggars asking for spare change. It’s a nuisance. Others approach it as a transaction and offer to pay for the links.

It seemed like the publisher didn’t like either options and was trying to find a way to build links that didn’t feel spammy to him.

Here is the follow up question:

“It seems like it would be a rarity. I’ve never really engaged in proactive link building but I honestly feel like we’ve kind of fallen behind because of that.

I think other websites maybe in the niche have a lot more inbound links and I’m not sure whether they’re actively reaching out to other webmasters, “Hey, can you link to us?”

I’m not sure… I should really do some more research on that but I think… there’s an importance there, right?”

Google’s John Mueller acknowledged the difficulty of links:

“I think it’s tricky because on the one hand it is sometimes useful to reach out to people and say like, “Hey, look at my website, it’s like you have a great website, I have a great website, take a look at my content, our content kind of aligns… maybe you’d be able to recommend my content if you like it as well.

I mean there are different ways of framing that, there are lots of really kind of more spammy ways of doing it, like you mentioned like people just saying, well look I have this web page that matches five keywords on your other web page. Can you link to it?” Like, that’s not really that useful.”

Other Signals Apart From Links

Here’s where it gets super interesting. I’ve long suspected that the role of links has been shrinking. Natural links seem like they don’t happen often anymore.

If Google is discounting non-natural links, then what else is Google using?

John Mueller seems to acknowledge there are other signals that Google uses:

“The other thing to keep in mind is we use a lot of different things for ranking and it’s not just links.

So especially if you’re active in an area where people tend not to link a lot, that’s something that the other competitors have to work with as well and where we do try to pick up other signals to see like this is actually a pretty good website.”

The “other signals” is an interesting reference. Something that needs an entire article to address. I sure hope someone asks him about that in a future hangout.

Links Are Still Important

John Mueller finished by affirming the importance of links. His answer wasn’t an end to end link strategy, but it’s good that he affirmed that promotion is important and that it doesn’t need to be spammy.

Here’s what he said:

“Links are really important for use to find content initially. So it’s like if nobody links to your website ever then we’re going to have a hard time recognizing that it even exists.”

Links Not Critical

One more insight that bears pointing out. Mueller said that if the content is good, that once it’s found, links aren’t critical.

“But once we found it and started crawling it and started indexing its content and seeing that it’s pretty good stuff then those links are generally not that critical anymore.”

That’s a lot to think about. To get you started, check out How to Super Power Your Link Building 

Watch the Google Webmaster Hangout here.

A problem facing link building today projects is a disconnect between the goals of link building (more links) and the goals of the company (more sales/leads/ad views). Additionally, there are “other signals” that may be playing a role.  This results in link strategies with diminishing effect.

How to Realign Link Building for Success

A few years ago I did a site review session at Affiliate Summit New York. The links pointing to a site I was reviewing were irrelevant and of low quality. The links did not match the high quality of the site itself.

The company had hired an outside link builder. The link builder did what they needed to do to fulfill their contract.

This resulted in links that met agreed upon metrics. Yet despite having an agreement about links, the quality of the links still fell short and the project resulted in no increase in traffic, sales or leads.

There were two reasons that the link building project failed:

1. Link building was not coordinated with the content
2. The Link building was focused on meeting quotas and metric benchmarks

How to Make Link Building Work

Coordinating Links with Content

A major reason some link building projects fail is the architecture of the project itself. A company outside of the organization or within the organization itself, is tasked with building links independently and disconnected from everything else going on at the company.

Link building projects are typically treated like an exterior painting project: Here is the paint color we want, get it done.

The best link building should have some degree of integration and coordination with a content strategy. It doesn’t make sense to have a team working on content and another team working in isolation doing their mystery mojo link building.

In an ideal world, there is communication between the content and link building sides, even if the link building is outsourced.

What’s planned for content can help juice up the link building side because it gives the link building something to support. Do it like this and the link building returns the favor by juicing up the content, making it more powerful.

Link building is not really about links. Link building is about putting air underneath the wings of the content, helping it gain altitude and fly, which is a metaphor for attracting traffic and links.

In my experience, link building is not about building links in a vacuum. Link building is about supporting the goals of the content, such as traffic, sales and leads.

Gaining awareness for the content can be a goal of link building. That opens up a wide area of outreach for the purpose of gaining awareness, which includes podcasting, video, interviews… the possibilities are almost endless.

The end result is the gold standard of links which are naturally given links that were not asked for.

Another effect can be what John Mueller cryptically referred to as “other signals.”

“So especially if you’re active in an area where people tend not to link a lot… and where we do try to pick up other signals to see like this is actually a pretty good website.”

He’s making reference to signals that indicate that a web page or website is useful. What those signals are is beyond the scope of this article.

But I will propose that getting the word out about a site and making people enthusiastic about it will make itself known via positive mentions, even if without a link. Could those be used as an alternative to links? Could users typing in your domain name and asking for your web pages also be an “other signal?”

Link Quotas and Metrics

The second reason link building projects fail are monthly quotas and performance metrics that the links themselves must pass.

Link Building Quotas

Monthly quotas sets up a path to desperation where the link builder starts sweating about where they’re going to get this month’s links.

Almost inevitably this leads to link buying, scaling (which is a euphemism for email spamming) , and shortcuts that are not in the interest of the client.

I know for a fact that some companies that sell themselves on “genuine outreach” are really just mass spamming in advance to build link inventory that is then purchased from the publisher and sold to the user.

In addition to being in violation of FTC guidance about telling users about paid advertising, it’s also against Google’s guidelines.

When a link building strategy broadens it’s focus beyond links and thinks in terms of awareness building, the kinds of projects available opens up to projects that can result in naturally given links.

For example, an article without a link in it, or with a nofollow link, can help build awareness. It can also create the opportunity where other sites may give a natural link to the author.

Another benefit is that it can cause people to search Google with the company name, thereby providing a signal that people want to see this site in the search results. That, in my opinion, might be a ranking signal and at the very least could serve to help it be found in the Google Suggest results.

Link Building Metrics

Link building metrics have consistently been arbitrary or based on bad SEO information.

For example, when Google used to show a PageRank metric on the Google Toolbar, it was common practice to seek links that were a minimum of PageRank 4.

The reason for this practice is that when you searched Google for backlinks using the link: advanced search operator, Google used to show links from sites that were PageRank 4 and above.

The SEO industry inferred that the reason for this was because PageRank 4 sites were more important.

The reality was that Google never intended to show all backlinks. Google intended to only show a sample of links. When creating the link search operator, the engineers randomly chose the PageRank value of 4.

Google search engineers had no idea that this would cause the SEO industry to wrongly infer importance to the PageRank value of four.

And thus began an erroneous SEO practice, the refusal to accept any link that was less than a PageRank of four. As silly as that might sound, the SEO industry is behaving even worse today than back then.

At least in the past the SEO community was mistaken about an actual Google metric, PageRank, which could be seen on their toolbar.

Today the SEO community is fixated on an arbitrarily chosen Moz Domain Authority metric threshold.

Low PageRank links were always valuable and the most sophisticated black hat spammers along with a few smart SEOs understood the power of quantity and relevance mattered more than the PageRank number.

Those days are over, of course. Ranking with links is significantly harder and more nuanced today than in the past.

But one thing that hasn’t changed is that applying a minimum threshold of Moz Domain Authority or any other metric is a mistake because all links matter.

The first object of a successful link building project is to coordinate link building with content strategy. This is based on how search engines rank pages today.

In the past it was enough to “build” links to the home page and let the PageRank trickle through to the pages below.

Today it is imperative for pages to stand or fall on their own. The more links an individual page receives the more important it will be perceived.

Yet, the content of the page also matters. You can’t just throw thousands of high quality relevant links at content that is not relevant in the way users want it and expect it to rank. The relevance of content to users still matters.

So in my opinion, link building/awareness building and content creation should ideally work together because that’s how Google appears to be ranking pages, increasingly because of the relevance of content to users.

A study of top marketing agencies in the UK reveals the most common mistakes made when it comes to SEO.

Reboot Online audited the top 30 ranking marketing agencies in the UK, including itself, to discover the marketing and SEO mistakes being made.

The 5 most common SEO issues found were:

• 70% of agencies had a poor page speed- the average score given was 41
• 63% of agencies had a lack of internal linking
• 57% of agencies had undesirable pages indexed by Google.
• 52% of agencies had pages containing thin content.
• 47% of agencies had pages poorly optimized for keywords

Other honorable mentions, so to speak, include:

• 33% of agencies have a poor backlink profile.
• 27% of the firms were revealed to have copied content from other parts of the web.
• 20% of digital marketing agencies had poor meta titles (especially for service landing pages).
• 20% of agencies hadn’t updated their blog in over 6 months.
• 17% of agencies had no ‘about us’ page.

After analyzing all the mistakes made by agencies, the study included a brief section on the things they’re doing well.

Agencies are doing exceptionally well when it comes to E-A-T, the study finds. That assessment is based on the following factors:

• 100% had a marketing blog.
• 100% had HTTPS.
• 29 of the 30 agencies had a social media presence.
• 100% had displayed their contact information.
• 83% had an “about” or “meet the team” page.

For further analysis of these findings, read the full study here.

Beyond search Google controls the leading distributed ad network, the leading mobile OS, the leading web browser, the leading email client, the leading web analytics platform, the leading free video hosting site.

They win a lot.

And they take winnings from one market & leverage them into manipulating adjacent markets.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

Imagine taking a universal open standard that has zero problems with it and then stripping it down to it's most basic components and then prepending each element with your own acronym. Then spend years building and recreating what has existed for decades. That is @amphtml— Jon Henshaw (@henshaw) April 4, 2019

AMP is an utterly unnecessary invention designed to further shift power to Google while disenfranchising publishers. From the very start it had many issues with basic things like supporting JavaScript, double counting unique users (no reason to fix broken stats if they drive adoption!), not supporting third party ad networks, not showing publisher domain names, and just generally being a useless layer of sunk cost technical overhead that provides literally no real value.

Over time they have corrected some of these catastrophic deficiencies, but if it provided real value, they wouldn't have needed to force adoption with preferential placement in their search results. They force the bundling because AMP sucks.

Absurdity knows no bounds. Googlers suggest: "AMP isn’t another “channel” or “format” that’s somehow not the web. It’s not a SEO thing. It’s not a replacement for HTML. It’s a web component framework that can power your whole site. ... We, the AMP team, want AMP to become a natural choice for modern web development of content websites, and for you to choose AMP as framework because it genuinely makes you more productive."

Meanwhile some newspapers have about a dozen employees who work on re-formatting content for AMP.

Feeeeeel the productivity!

Some content types (particularly user generated content) can be unpredictable & circuitous. For many years forums websites would use keywords embedded in the search referral to highlight relevant parts of the page. Keyword (not provided) largely destroyed that & then it became a competitive feature for AMP: "If the Featured Snippet links to an AMP article, Google will sometimes automatically scroll users to that section and highlight the answer in orange."

That would perhaps be a single area where AMP was more efficient than the alternative. But it is only so because Google destroyed the alternative by stripping keyword referrers from search queries.

The power dynamics of AMP are ugly:

"I see them as part of the effort to normalise the use of the AMP Carousel, which is an anti-competitive land-grab for the web by an organisation that seems to have an insatiable appetite for consuming the web, probably ultimately to it’s own detriment. ... This enables Google to continue to exist after the destination site (eg the New York Times) has been navigated to. Essentially it flips the parent-child relationship to be the other way around. ... As soon as a publisher blesses a piece of content by packaging it (they have to opt in to this, but see coercion below), they totally lose control of its distribution. ... I’m not that smart, so it’s surely possible to figure out other ways of making a preload possible without cutting off the content creator from the people consuming their content. ... The web is open and decentralised. We spend a lot of time valuing the first of these concepts, but almost none trying to defend the second. Google knows, perhaps better than anyone, how being in control of the user is the most monetisable position, and having the deepest pockets and the most powerful platform to do so, they have very successfully inserted themselves into my relationship with millions of other websites. ... In AMP, the support for paywalls is based on a recommendation that the premium content be included in the source of the page regardless of the user’s authorisation state. ... These policies demonstrate contempt for others’ right to freely operate their businesses.

After enough publishers adopted AMP Google was able to turn their mobile app's homepage into an interactive news feed below the search box. And inside that news feed Google gets to distribute MOAR ads while 0% of the revenue from those ads find its way to the publishers whose content is used to make up the feed.

Appropriate appropriation. :D

Each additional layer of technical cruft is another cost center. Things that sound appealing at first blush may not be:

The way you verify your identity to Let's Encrypt is the same as with other certificate authorities: you don't really. You place a file somewhere on your website, and they access that file over plain HTTP to verify that you own the website. The one attack that signed certificates are meant to prevent is a man-in-the-middle attack. But if someone is able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack against your website, then he can intercept the certificate verification, too. In other words, Let's Encrypt certificates don't stop the one thing they're supposed to stop. And, as always with the certificate authorities, a thousand murderous theocracies, advertising companies, and international spy organizations are allowed to impersonate you by design.

Anything that is easy to implement & widely marketed often has costs added to it in the future as the entity moves to monetize the service.

This is a private equity firm buying up multiple hosting control panels & then adjusting prices.

This is Google Maps drastically changing their API terms.

This is Facebook charging you for likes to build an audience, giving your competitors access to those likes as an addressable audience to advertise against, and then charging you once more to boost the reach of your posts.

This is Grubhub creating shadow websites on your behalf and charging you for every transaction created by the gravity of your brand.

Shivane believes GrubHub purchased her restaurant’s web domain to prevent her from building her own online presence. She also believes the company may have had a special interest in owning her name because she processes a high volume of orders. ... it appears GrubHub has set up several generic, templated pages that look like real restaurant websites but in fact link only to GrubHub. These pages also display phone numbers that GrubHub controls. The calls are forwarded to the restaurant, but the platform records each one and charges the restaurant a commission fee for every order

Settling for the easiest option drives a lack of differentiation, embeds additional risk & once the dominant player has enough marketshare they'll change the terms on you.

Small gains in short term margins for massive increases in fragility.

"Closed platforms increase the chunk size of competition & increase the cost of market entry, so people who have good ideas, it is a lot more expensive for their productivity to be monetized. They also don't like standardization ... it looks like rent seeking behaviors on top of friction" - Gabe Newell

The other big issue is platforms that run out of growth space in their core market may break integrations with adjacent service providers as each want to grow by eating the other's market.

Those who look at SaaS business models through the eyes of a seasoned investor will better understand how markets are likely to change:

"I’d argue that many of today’s anointed tech “disruptors” are doing little in the way of true disruption. ... When investors used to get excited about a SAAS company, they typically would be describing a hosted multi-tenant subscription-billed piece of software that was replacing a ‘legacy’ on-premise perpetual license solution in the same target market (i.e. ERP, HCM, CRM, etc.). Today, the terms SAAS and Cloud essentially describe the business models of every single public software company.

Most platform companies are initially required to operate at low margins in order to buy growth of their category & own their category. Then when they are valued on that, they quickly need to jump across to adjacent markets to grow into the valuation:

Twilio has no choice but to climb up the application stack. This is a company whose ‘disruption’ is essentially great API documentation and gangbuster SEO spend built on top of a highly commoditized telephony aggregation API. They have won by marketing to DevOps engineers. With all the hype around them, you’d think Twilio invented the telephony API, when in reality what they did was turn it into a product company. Nobody had thought of doing this let alone that this could turn into a $17 billion company because simply put the economics don’t work. And to be clear they still don’t. But Twilio’s genius CEO clearly gets this. If the market is going to value robocalls, emergency sms notifications, on-call pages, and carrier fee passed through related revenue growth in the same way it does ‘subscription’ revenue from Atlassian or ServiceNow, then take advantage of it while it lasts.

Large platforms offering temporary subsidies to ensure they dominate their categories & companies like SoftBank spraying capital across the markets is causing massive shifts in valuations:

I also think if you look closely at what is celebrated today as innovation you often find models built on hidden subsidies. ... I’d argue the very distributed nature of microservices architecture and API-first product companies means addressable market sizes and unit economics assumptions should be even more carefully scrutinized. ... How hard would it be to create an Alibaba today if someone like SoftBank was raining money into such a greenfield space? Excess capital would lead to destruction and likely subpar returns. If capital was the solution, the 1.5 trillion that went into telcos in late '90s wouldn’t have led to a massive bust. Would a Netflix be what it is today if a SoftBank was pouring billions into streaming content startups right as the experiment was starting? Obviously not. Scarcity of capital is another often underappreciated part of the disruption equation. Knowing resources are finite leads to more robust models. ... This convergence is starting to manifest itself in performance. Disney is up 30% over the last 12 months while Netflix is basically flat. This may not feel like a bubble sign to most investors, but from my standpoint, it’s a clear evidence of the fact that we are approaching a something has got to give moment for the way certain businesses are valued."

Circling back to Google's AMP, it has a cousin called Recaptcha.

Recaptcha is another AMP-like trojan horse:

According to tech statistics website Built With, more than 650,000 websites are already using reCaptcha v3; overall, there are at least 4.5 million websites use reCaptcha, including 25% of the top 10,000 sites. Google is also now testing an enterprise version of reCaptcha v3, where Google creates a customized reCaptcha for enterprises that are looking for more granular data about users’ risk levels to protect their site algorithms from malicious users and bots. ... According to two security researchers who’ve studied reCaptcha, one of the ways that Google determines whether you’re a malicious user or not is whether you already have a Google cookie installed on your browser. ... To make this risk-score system work accurately, website administrators are supposed to embed reCaptcha v3 code on all of the pages of their website, not just on forms or log-in pages.

About a month ago when logging into Bing Ads I saw recaptcha on the login page & couldn't believe they'd give Google control at that access point. I think they got rid of that, but lots of companies are perhaps shooting themselves in the foot through a combination of over-reliance on Google infrastructure AND sloppy implementation

Today when making a purchase on Fiverr, after converting, I got some of this action

Hmm. Maybe I will enable JavaScript and try again.

Oooops.

That is called snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

My account is many years old. My payment type on record has been used for years. I have ordered from the particular seller about a dozen times over the years. And suddenly because my web browser had JavaScript turned off I was deemed a security risk of some sort for making an utterly ordinary transaction I have already completed about a dozen times.

On AMP JavaScript was the devil. And on desktop not JavaScript was the devil.

Pro tip: Ecommerce websites that see substandard conversion rates from using Recaptcha can boost their overall ecommerce revenue by buying more Google AdWords ads.

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As more of the infrastructure stack is driven by AI software there is going to be a very real opportunity for many people to become deplatformed across the web on an utterly arbitrary basis. That tech companies like Facebook also want to create digital currencies on top of the leverage they already have only makes the proposition that much scarier.

If the tech platforms host copies of our sites, process the transactions & even create their own currencies, how will we know what level of value they are adding versus what they are extracting?

Who measures the measurer?

And when the economics turn negative, what will we do if we are hooked into an ecosystem we can't spend additional capital to get out of when things head south?

A study on the effect of Google’s diversity update concludes smaller sites have a greater chance to rank for competitive keywords.

Google’s diversity update, rolled out earlier this month, aims to limit the number of times a domain can appear in a single SERP. According to Google, no more than two URLs from the same domain should appear in a single SERP.

Searchmetrics analyzed the SERPs since the diversity update rolled out to discover whether it’s working as promised.

In conducting this study, Searchmetrics compared the results for a set of thousands of keywords from March 2019 with results from June 2019.

Here’s what was discovered:

• Zero results were found containing more than 3 URLs from one domain.
• 3.5% of searches contain 3 URLs from one domain, down from 6.7%.
• 44.2% of searches contain two URLs from the same domain, which is up by less than 1% from before the update.
• 52.3% of searches return unique domains for all positions.

Google will still return multiple results from the same domain when the name of the domain is included in the query. This shows Google is not sacrificing relevance for the sake of diversity.

The study also found that the diversity update impacts transactional searches to a greater degree than informational searches. As a result, searchers are seeing a wider variety of domains when looking for a product to buy.

This is good news for smaller retailers who now have an opportunity to show up for keywords that were once dominated by giants like Amazon.

When it comes to informational searches, Google is more likely to return up to three URLs from the same domain. For example, searches for recipes will likely contain multiple results from Allrecipes.com.

For more information about the impact of Google’s diversity update, see the full study here.

According to eMarketer’s latest figures, paid search spend in retail is expected to grow by 22.5% this year.

In total, retailers are expected to spend $13.12 billion on search advertising in 2019.

Retail spend will account for the largest share of search dollars this year at nearly one-quarter of the total US search market.

Oscar Orozco, a senior forecasting analyst at eMarketer, predicts this level of spending will continue with the rise of voice search:

“… search advertising has increasingly become a vital strategy for retail marketers to focus their budgets on. With the growth of voice search, we should also expect to see a continued emphasis on search in the foreseeable future.”

Here are some other figures included in the report related to retail advertising:

• Retailers’ digital ad spend across all channels is growing by 19.1%.
• Retailers are expected to spend $28.33 billion on digital ads in 2019.
• More than two-thirds of retailers’ digital ad spend will go toward mobile advertising.
• Mobile purchases will grow 28.9% this year and account for 37% of overall retail sales growth.
• Retail sales made via desktop/laptop will grow 4.3% this year, accounting for just 8% of total retail sales growth.

AMP pages can now more closely mirror the behavior of regular HTML pages with autocomplete for search and forms.

An autocomplete-enabled input field suggests completed results corresponding to what the user is typing.

As you likely know from this being a common feature in regular pages, it can greatly speed up the time it takes to complete a task.

AMP-autocomplete can be used to power on-site search experiences, or in forms to help ensure inputs yield more predictable results.

When a user types into an input field with amp-autocomplete, relevant suggestions will automatically appear below the input field.

This feature can also be used to generate a list of suggestions for a particular input field.

For example, a search bar on an e-commerce site can automatically suggest the most popular products with amp-autocomplete.

Data can either be fetched from a JSON endpoint or locally from amp-state.

For more on the technicalities of how this feature works and how to set it up, see the official documentation here.

Microsoft Advertising, formerly Bing Ads, is rolling out a series of new features designed to help pages load faster after an ad click.

One of those features is parallel tracking, which has been supported by Google Ads for over a year.

Parallel tracking is finally being supported by Microsoft Ads, which means click-measurement processing will be done in the background while users are taken directly to the final URL.

Without parallel tracking, the consumer is taken through a series of redirects before landing on the final URL.

Microsoft emphasizes the importance of speeding up this process:

“Based on our measurements, even milliseconds of delay can result in leads being lost due to consumers dropping off before advertiser’s websites can load after an ad click.”

Parallel tracking is considered so important that all Google Ads accounts are required to use it.

With parallel tracking in place, advertisers can expect to see increased conversions due to reduced load times.

Microsoft isn’t going as far as to make it a requirement. At this time it is just optional. It’s still in beta right now, but will eventually be rolling out to all advertisers.

Other new features

In addition to parallel tracking, Microsoft Ads announced other useful new features:

• Final URL suffix: Specify parameters you want to be attached to the end of your landing page URL.
• Custom parameter expansion: Define up to eight pairs of custom parameters with an increased character limited of 250 characters.

Microsoft says support for these features is coming soon.

Google’s John Mueller recently offered advice on migrating to a different web platform with minimal impact on SEO.

More specifically, Mueller added his knowledge of how Google works to a conversation about the web platform Wix.

In a thread titled “Is WIX really that bad?”, a user left a comment saying:

“Yeah, because if and when you decide to move away from Wix, you’re basically going to have to start over.”

Mueller replied saying a site isn’t truly starting over if it keeps the same domain name.

A site can continue to build on the value it has collected as long as the domain name doesn’t change.

“You don’t start from zero again,” Mueller says.

He goes on to add that redirects may be required in some cases, but the site will not be starting from scratch as far as SEO is concerned.

Here is Mueller’s full quote:

“If you use your own domain name for your site, even if you move to another provider you can continue to build on the old site’s collected “value”. You don’t start from zero again. You might need to set up redirects or rebuild individual pages, but that’s still a lot easier than growing a site from the ground up.”

Additional resources: