Two things I recommended in most of my audits, and have stopped recommending

I went back through eleven audits I have written since 2021 to count what I actually find, rather than what I remember finding.

Two recommendations show up in most of them that I would no longer make. One is out of date because Google changed something. The other was never right, and I repeated it for years because everyone repeats it.

Publishing this is mildly uncomfortable and I think it is the most useful thing in the whole exercise, because if you have had an audit from anyone in the last few years there is a good chance it contains one or both.

One: add FAQ schema

Recommended in 7 of my 11 audits, including one written in 2026.

The reasoning was that FAQPage markup earns you an expandable FAQ block in the search result, taking up more space and pushing competitors down. For a while that was straightforwardly true and it was one of the cheapest wins available.

Then it stopped, on a date, in writing. Google announced on 8 August 2023 that FAQ rich results “will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown regularly.” The same post was updated a month later to deprecate HowTo rich results on desktop as well. Then in May 2026 the feature went entirely. Google has since removed the FAQ documentation altogether, on the grounds that it “is no longer shown in Google Search results.” Search Console’s reporting for it is being switched off through this summer.

So the visibility argument is gone. Not diminished. Gone. If somebody sells you FAQ schema in 2026 as a way to get more space in the result, they have not read the release notes.

What is still true: Google has said it continues to read FAQPage markup to help understand a page. The markup is not harmful and if it is already there I would leave it. Marking up genuine questions and answers is a reasonable way to describe your content unambiguously.

What has changed is that it cannot be sold as a visibility win, and it should not be near the top of anyone’s priority list. In my own audits it sometimes was.

Two: nofollow your outbound links to stop link equity leaking

Recommended in 8 of my 11 audits. Every ecommerce and B2B one.

The wording varied but it amounted to: you are leaking PageRank through outbound links and social icons, so add rel="nofollow" and keep that authority inside the site.

This is PageRank sculpting, and it has not worked since 2009.

And the mechanic underneath it was formally retired years ago. Google’s September 2019 announcement states it plainly: “All the link attributes, sponsored, ugc, and nofollow, are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search,” with nofollow becoming a hint for crawling and indexing as of 1 March 2020. You cannot sculpt anything with a hint.

Google changed the handling that year specifically to stop it. A nofollowed link still consumes its share of the page’s outgoing PageRank. The share is simply discarded rather than passed. You do not redirect it inward. You throw it away. Nofollowing your own Instagram icon achieves nothing except deleting a small amount of value.

Since March 2020 nofollow has been a hint rather than a directive, so even the discarding is now uncertain, which does not make the tactic work. It makes it less predictable while still being pointless.

I kept recommending it because it appears in a great many audit templates, mine included, and because it sounds mechanically plausible. Neither is a reason.

The instinct underneath it was sound, and this is the part worth keeping. Sending site-wide links to low-value destinations is genuinely worth avoiding. A footer with forty links in it, a sidebar of unrelated partner sites, a header carrying every page you have ever made. Those are real problems, because they dilute the internal signal about what matters and they appear on every page.

The fix is to have fewer links, not to nofollow the ones you have. Remove the link, do not neuter it.

Why I am posting this rather than quietly updating the template

Three reasons.

The first is that both recommendations are still in circulation. FAQ schema advice from 2022 is all over the web and reads as current. PageRank sculpting has survived seventeen years past its expiry because it sounds like it ought to work.

The second is that if you are holding an audit of mine from the last few years, you should know which two lines to ignore. That seems like the minimum.

The third is that this is what auditing anything honestly looks like. I count what I find rather than trusting my memory, and occasionally the count tells me something I did not want to know. An audit that only ever confirms the auditor’s priors is not an audit.

What did hold up

For completeness, since two out of a long list is a decent hit rate: everything else in those eleven audits stands. The internal linking findings, the thin content findings, the heading structure problems, the schema gaps, the location strategy questions: all still what I would say today.

The two that failed both failed the same way. They were mechanisms I had inherited rather than things I had checked.

The short version

If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Technical SEO covers the crawling and indexing layer, and SEO consulting is where I get asked for a second opinion on somebody else’s recommendations.