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Google's John Mueller said Google does not have manual action penalties for building sites that are missing logos, or missing the menu links at the top or even the footers at the bottom.
John said on Twitter "I'm not aware of any manual actions / penalties that we'd apply for lack of those items. Sometimes minimal, old, simplified, or even ugly pages rank well, sometimes that also changes over time."
Missing these items is not a great thing, as John pointed out, he said "it feels like you'd be leaving open room for competition by being suboptimal."
John added that "badly made pages can appear in search, sometimes even without us seeing the content (eg, blocked by robots.txt). That doesn't mean it's optimal though. I don't think there's a single "optimal" either, so you may have to try out what works well for your particular site."
Here are those tweets:
Badly made pages can appear in search, sometimes even without us seeing the content (eg, blocked by robots.txt). That doesn't mean it's optimal though. I don't think there's a single "optimal" either, so you may have to try out what works well for your particular site.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 9, 2021
I'm not aware of any manual actions / penalties that we'd apply for lack of those items. Sometimes minimal, old, simplified, or even ugly pages rank well, sometimes that also changes over time (it feels like you'd be leaving open room for competition by being suboptimal).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 10, 2021
Back in the old days, ugly sites earned more with AdSense, because it was hard to tell the site from the ads. But in terms of rankings, ugly sites didn't tend to benefit in search.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
