Reading level
Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2025 8:54 am
Many webmasters believed that one of the ranking factors was the reading level. Google reinforced this idea by issuing corresponding statistics for the query "site.ru: website address".
The level could be basic, intermediate or advanced and reflected the reader's readiness. Experts believed that the best level remained the basic one, accessible to the majority of the audience.
How to achieve multiple growth in traffic and sales from your website?
Alexey Boyarkin
Dmitry Svistunov
Head of SEO and Development
Read more posts on my personal blog:
I have always been concerned about the issue of moving to a fundamentally new level. So that the indicators would grow not by 2 or 3 times, but by several orders of magnitude. From a thousand visits to ten thousand or from ten thousand to a hundred thousand, if we are talking about a website, for example.
And I know that such leaps are always the result of painstaking work in five areas:
Technical condition of the site.
SEO.
Collection of site semantics.
Creating useful content.
Working on conversion.
And at the same time, every manager needs an increase in sales and the number of applications from the site at the moment.
To get this growth, download our step-by-step template for increasing sales from the site:
Download template
Already downloaded
153442
But John Mueller debunked the myth during a January 2018 hangout, saying that levels are only used by webmasters to provide users with content they can understand. Google doesn't use reader level recognition in its algorithms.
For example, the owner of a construction portal posts a publication, assuming that its user audience will be wide. But the article includes a lot of professionalisms and complex terms that are unlikely to be used as queries. Hence the poor ranking, which is not the search engine's fault.
Therefore, you need to create content for your audience, which you should study and identify its reading level.
Multimedia
A quality signal for a search engine is the presence of unique images and videos on a resource. Therefore, investing in a strong team of designers with the function of creating unique images, photographs, videos is a recommendation from experts.
Google images will help attract additional traffic. The system takes into account the image if it is accompanied by a tag with the src attribute = image_URL, and in CSS styles are not displayed in the search - this was also reported by John Mueller.
According to him, experiments with image URLs have a negative impact on indexing. If the photo addresses change due to changes on the site, use redirects.
Image optimization is an important ranking factor. Experts recommend the following: include the keyword in the file name and an alt tag filled in the language corresponding to the page language.
Google's Harry Illyes's image optimization workflow:
providing the search robot with access to photos (in robots.txt);
creating an XML sitemap specifically for psychiatrist email addresses images so that the robot can find them faster;
assessment of the correspondence between the content of the image and the text around it, the title and description of the page;
using markup.
Pop-up windows
Google has a negative attitude towards pop-up windows with advertising, invitations to subscribe, etc. The system considers them intrusive, forcing the user to do unnecessary actions (close the window to continue working with the content).
Rel=Canonical
Google can use rel=canonical to identify a particular piece of content as the original source, but it is incorrect to rely on a single tag. The system takes into account not only rel=canonical, but also redirects, internal links, URL parameters, and sitemap.
Markup and rich snippet
Neither structured page markup nor extended snippet are ranking factors. But both work to increase the attractiveness of the site in search results, clickability, and attract traffic. RankMath or Yoast SEO plugins for WordPress can significantly simplify the implementation of markup and increase the chance of getting a special snippet.
The level could be basic, intermediate or advanced and reflected the reader's readiness. Experts believed that the best level remained the basic one, accessible to the majority of the audience.
How to achieve multiple growth in traffic and sales from your website?
Alexey Boyarkin
Dmitry Svistunov
Head of SEO and Development
Read more posts on my personal blog:
I have always been concerned about the issue of moving to a fundamentally new level. So that the indicators would grow not by 2 or 3 times, but by several orders of magnitude. From a thousand visits to ten thousand or from ten thousand to a hundred thousand, if we are talking about a website, for example.
And I know that such leaps are always the result of painstaking work in five areas:
Technical condition of the site.
SEO.
Collection of site semantics.
Creating useful content.
Working on conversion.
And at the same time, every manager needs an increase in sales and the number of applications from the site at the moment.
To get this growth, download our step-by-step template for increasing sales from the site:
Download template
Already downloaded
153442
But John Mueller debunked the myth during a January 2018 hangout, saying that levels are only used by webmasters to provide users with content they can understand. Google doesn't use reader level recognition in its algorithms.
For example, the owner of a construction portal posts a publication, assuming that its user audience will be wide. But the article includes a lot of professionalisms and complex terms that are unlikely to be used as queries. Hence the poor ranking, which is not the search engine's fault.
Therefore, you need to create content for your audience, which you should study and identify its reading level.
Multimedia
A quality signal for a search engine is the presence of unique images and videos on a resource. Therefore, investing in a strong team of designers with the function of creating unique images, photographs, videos is a recommendation from experts.
Google images will help attract additional traffic. The system takes into account the image if it is accompanied by a tag with the src attribute = image_URL, and in CSS styles are not displayed in the search - this was also reported by John Mueller.
According to him, experiments with image URLs have a negative impact on indexing. If the photo addresses change due to changes on the site, use redirects.
Image optimization is an important ranking factor. Experts recommend the following: include the keyword in the file name and an alt tag filled in the language corresponding to the page language.
Google's Harry Illyes's image optimization workflow:
providing the search robot with access to photos (in robots.txt);
creating an XML sitemap specifically for psychiatrist email addresses images so that the robot can find them faster;
assessment of the correspondence between the content of the image and the text around it, the title and description of the page;
using markup.
Pop-up windows
Google has a negative attitude towards pop-up windows with advertising, invitations to subscribe, etc. The system considers them intrusive, forcing the user to do unnecessary actions (close the window to continue working with the content).
Rel=Canonical
Google can use rel=canonical to identify a particular piece of content as the original source, but it is incorrect to rely on a single tag. The system takes into account not only rel=canonical, but also redirects, internal links, URL parameters, and sitemap.
Markup and rich snippet
Neither structured page markup nor extended snippet are ranking factors. But both work to increase the attractiveness of the site in search results, clickability, and attract traffic. RankMath or Yoast SEO plugins for WordPress can significantly simplify the implementation of markup and increase the chance of getting a special snippet.