Guess what – in 2019 – it turns out that links and title tags still matter to doing well in Google’s search results. We had John Mueller from Google said links matter for PageRank and thus building trust. Gary Illyes from Google say that HTML title tags also matter for SEO.
Here are those tweets:
Links are a bit easier – from one page you’ll have links to other pages. That helps to crawl the rest of the website, and helps to spread signals like pagerank through the site.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 11, 2019
If you mean HTML titles, they can help a lot. We’ve been saying since 2006 or so to write proper titles, but no one’s listening 😒
— Gary “鯨理” Illyes (@methode) June 11, 2019
Truth is, I honestly never met an SEO that told me that title tags are not important – so I am not sure why Gary thinks no one is listening about that. But maybe he is talking about non-SEOs that know nothing about SEO basics.
Why am I covering such a basic topic? Three reasons; (a) we had two different Googlers mention two really basic SEO concepts within 24 hours of each other, (b) Gary implied that no one believes him when he says titles matter, which is confusing to me and (c) I can use this GIF above.