Google's John Mueller stated somewhat of an obvious statement, saying basically that building a good website is often good for SEO. He said on Twitter "A lot of good accessibility best practices are also good SEO best practices, and just generally, making a site better for users often results in indirect, overall positive effects too."
Here are those tweets for more context:
I thought it was a general requirement? Do you think it should be a ranking factor?
— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) May 31, 2022
I don't know what specifically they did, and whether the effect was from that. A lot of good accessibility best practices are also good SEO best practices, and just generally, making a site better for users often results in indirect, overall positive effects too.
— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) June 1, 2022
Now, in practice, this has not always been the case. Sometimes bad websites rank well - in fact, there have been many cases historically where ugly looking sites ranked super well. I don't think this works as well these days but back in the old days, often we saw ugly and confusing sites rank super well. We even saw some sites mistreat customers for SEO benefit ages ago - also, something that is not recommended today.
Danny Sullivan tweeted something in a similar vein also:
Good SEO is doing what good humans would do. If you're citing a source because that source was important in helping you create content, link to them because that's fair, deserved credit. And link to them without nofollow because that's also, in such a case, fair, deserved credit.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 1, 2022
So build a good web site for your users and SEO should follow...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
