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Impact of Broken HTML on Search RankingsHe answered first about broken HTML, explaining that HTML has to be so broken that Google can’t make sense of it.

“With regard to spelling errors, grammatical errors, I think that’s something that’s a bit more of almost like a gray zone in that on the one hand we have to be able to recognize what a page is about.And if we can’t recognize that because there’s so many errors on the page in the text, then that makes it harder.The other aspect is also that we try to find really high quality content on the web and sometimes it can appear that a page is lower quality content because it has a lot of …kind of… grammatical and technical mistakes in the text.So that’s something where from my point of view if you’re aware of these kinds of issues I would just fix that.I would almost say …like… spelling and grammar is probably for most websites a higher priority than broken HTML.

<loc> and <lastmod>. These two tags are very important, so make sure you add them to your sitemap!

You can differentiate via the user agent and show an HTML sitemap instead if a real person visits the page.   Yoast SEO already does this. Visiting a /sitemap_index.xml file on a WordPress website will return an HTML sitemap, while hitting CTRL + U to view the source will return the actual XML sitemap.

Google limits that to only 10MB so make sure your file doesn’t have more than 50,000 URLs and 10MB

To identify which URL deserves a featured snippet treatment, Google’s featured snippet algorithm uses content structure almost exclusively.

SEO Tips for H2 Headings An H2 tag should always be included in content. Include the primary keyword for the content in the tag. Don’t put too many keywords in the tag (One keyword per a heading is enough). Make sure that users can read the H2 tag easily. Try to use no more than 70 characters in the heading: Keep them concise Make sure the headings catch an eye and grab attention When taken out of context, your H2 headings should give some understanding of the content. You want them to act as clear concise takeaways.

You should also understand that the page title (<title>) is different from the <h1> tag, although they should be similar (and even identical).

We may take manual action, in particular if it ends up as low-quality machine-generated gibberish'y content. A lot of times, we just rank it the way we'd rank similar content

I don't think that would trigger manual actions, but if the translations are bad, then it's bad content in general :). However, machine translation is much much better than it used to be. Another option: noindex until reviewed by local users / speakers

Sites that use nofollow for crawl control. For sites with large faceted navigation, nofollow is sometimes an effective tool at preventing Google from wasting crawl budget. It's too early to tell if publishers using nofollow this way will need to change anything before Google starts treating nofollow as a crawling "hint" but it may be important to pay attention to.

Nofollow has always been a very, very poor way to prevent Google from indexing your content, and it continues to be that way.

Based on Google statements, it seems you can still attempt to use nofollow in this way, but after March 1, 2020, they may choose to ignore this. Any SEO using nofollow in this way may need to get creative in order to prevent Google from crawling unwanted sections of their sites.

2. Use “how-to” structured data Google has recently added the opportunity to properly mark up how-to content that lets you appear in rich results on Search and Google Assistant. Using HowTo structured data can distinctly tell Google that your content is related to a how-to and reaches the right users.  The best thing about implementing HowTo structured data is the ability to get users through a gang of steps to finish a task successfully. Moreover, you can also feature text, images, and video. If you want to focus on the how-to on the page, HowTo structured data can help you add value to your content. Here’s how it looks like in the search:  To find out more about adding the markup to web pages that have step-by-step directions on, you can visit the developer docs for Google Search and a “how-to” action with markup for Google Assistant. Notice that you don’t need to create a separate web page to implement this structured data. You can do it without a page.  Once Google marks up your page, you can visit a new enhancement report in the Search Console to track all issues, warnings, and errors related to your how-to pages.

To enable your business Knowledge Graph card, you need to add the necessary Corporate Contact markup on the homepage of your website.

The easiest way to add a micro-markup to the site is to use the Schema plugin. It works with any available schema options and is embedded in the Yoast SEO plugin.

If the above-mentioned plugin doesn’t suit you, you can choose from a large number of WordPress plugins alternatives for schema markup. Here are some of them: All In One Schema Rich Snippets Schema JSON-LD Markup Rich Reviews WP SEO Structured Data Schema Markup (JSON-LD) structured in schema.org

in HTML, the order of the attributes doesn't matter.