Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a great holiday and ready to make your website perform better than its ever done before!
So, let’s get right to it, enjoy!

Algorithms

Google has confirmed that they released a new local search algorithm update at the start of November 2019 as I reported last month (see our SEO report for November 2019).
They said it was a global update for all languages. The update essentially looks at the language of the query and search results pages, so, not the normal signals we are used to.

There looks to have been a sizable algorithm update by Google at the start of December 2019. Around the 4th/5th days.

Another update looks to have happened around 12th/13th and 15th/16th December too. More information on this as I find out.

BERT

A little more news on the BERT algorithm, Google has confirmed that it does not affect indexing at all.
Just a little tip on BERT, it’s all about content and language, look at your competitor’s pages that are out ranking you and create a better page.

Google also confirmed that BERT now uses more than 70 languages and affects about 10% of searches.
BERT is real folks so get optimising for it!
Oh wait, you can’t optimise for BERT. So you best create the best content you can then.

A little bit more info on BERT and the quality of your content, it doesn’t just mean the quality of the pages content but the sites content. Another thing to consider is that is the design and infrastructure of the site, so make it the best it can be for the type of site you have.
Think about getting the searcher to the content they want as quickly as possible and the minimum amount of clicks.

Links

Google confirmed again this month that they automatically ignore links that look unnatural. They also said you don’t need to disavow the links too.
A reminder not to chase links from unnatural sources!

Google News

This is big news, previously if you wanted your site to appear in Google News you would have to submit your site to be included. It was quite hard to be considered a News source, lots of good content needed to be written regularly.
Now you don’t need to submit your website to Google News, if Google thinks your article is newsworthy they will include into their News section.
Why is this big news? Google News can create serious traffic to your site.
I expect this change is down to BERT, so, again, create the best content. See a theme here? I think I will be saying this all through 2020.

Search Console

It seems that Google has been under-reporting the number of pages that are indexed. Where they have been reporting that pages have been crawled but not indexed was incorrect.
They have made an update which now fixed this so you should see a higher number of pages indexed within Search Console.

Mixed Content

Finally, an important change that will be started to rollout in January 2020. Google will over the next few months either stop non-secure resources of your webpage from loading or change the secure padlock icon to non-secure.
What this means is if you have a website which is using SSL (starts with HTTPS and not HTTP) Chrome (and other browsers) will show a padlock by the URL. However, if your webpage gets data – whether image, scripts or iFrames – from a non-secure source Chrome will not load that part of your webpage.
Initially, they will automatically check that there is a secure version of the resource and use that, but if it can’t find one then it’s a “No Show”.

It is good practise to check all your resources are secure after all if those resources are hacked it will show up on YOUR website too!

Here is the Google announcement.

If you need any help with this just get in touch.

Algorithm updates

6th November 2019 a search local algorithm update looks to have happened. This update has been named Bedlam.
12th November, this update looked to have affected a lot of websites but Google are playing it down. Most of the ranking tools didn’t see much of a change.
In fact it didn’t stop there, there were updates throughout that whole week and the following one.

BERT

Last month I reported on the huge algorithm update named BERT. Google have since the launch of this update provided a little more information about it.
BERT is an AI algorithm that trys to understand human language better. You can not optimise for it as an SEO but instead they said the best thing to do is write great content and forget about BERT.
You may not see much change in your rank monitoring tools as the chances are you are only monitoring short tail keywords.
BERT is trying to understand language so you will most likely see ranking changes for long tail keyword phrases.

Now whilst the BERT news is big news from Google, Bing on the other hand have been using BERT since April 2019. Not only that, they use it on all searches not just around 10% that Google does.

Flash, saviour of the universe!

Well not in the case of the software language Flash as by the end of the year Google will no longer support and try to index content using Flash.
Flash is quite old technology now and to be honest I haven’t seen a Flash website for a long time, this latest news will most likely need the help of Prince Valtan and his Winged men if it is to survive.
That’s it, no more Flash Gordon references.

Links

Last month I reported that links lose their SEO value over time – head over to the SEO report for October for more details on this.
Something to bear in mind with links is that just becase the amount of traffic coming from a link reduces over time the SEO link juice value may not reduce. Remember humans clicking on a link is different to search engine algorithms.

Bing Penalties

It makes a nice change to write about another search engine other than Google in my monthly report.
Bing have announced they will be rolling out a new set of penalties aimed at targeting link building networks.
Bing have yet to say when the penalties will be sent, I will let you know as soon as I know.

Speed

My favourite SEO subject.
Google have added a new speed report facility to search console. It helps you see which pages are slow in an easy to use UX.
There isn’t a date yet for an API for the speed report.
Remember, speed of your website is a ranking factor, so this report might help you understand why some pages are not ranking well.

Page Titles

By now you should know how important page Titles (META) are for SEO.
Google have said they only change the page title in their search results for a very few websites.
So, keep adding them!

Algorithm

4th October
24th October – Small update
25th October – Big update, BERT, more on this further down this report.

If you were hit by a Core algorithm update – as seen last month in our SEO Report for September –  and rankings have changed it is not down to your links but other signals on your website. This good news as these are the signals you can control, like the quality of content.

HTML Sitemaps

Google have said that there isn’t any benefit to having a HTML sitemap for SEO. They use your XML sitemap but will not use a HTML sitemap.
I’m not 100% this is correct so I have started an experiment to test an aspect of this and will report back in next months SEO report.

H1 tags

There has been a lot of talk online about H1 tags, how many to use and are they used by Google as a ranking factor recently.
Google have gone on record that they no longer use H1 tags as a ranking factor, however, I would still use them as Google have a habit of changing their minds.
They also said that they don’t mind how many H1 tags you have on a page and will not affect your SEO on the page.

M dot websites

We mention this in previous SEO reports but Google have mentioned it again this month.
If you are creating a brand new website do not use M. URLs.
Example being m.juicyseo.co.uk

EAT

No, I’m not telling you to munch on something. If you are a regular reader of my SEO report you will already know about EAT and how Google uses it to identify the “Experness” of the content on your page. EAT stands for:
Expertise
Authoritativness
Trustworthiness
This month someone asked Google if there was a EAT score, Google replied No.
Google doesn’t need a EAT score as they have plenty of other algorithm scoring systems already in place to help them rank your websites page.

Is Bing getting Lazy?

Back at the start of the year Bing announced that they are no longer crawling new URLs and instead you need to submit them instead.
Now it looks like they might be going one step further by asking you to submit the content so they don’t even have to crawl the URL you have given them.
It is currently on trial but this all seems mad to me.

Links

Links to your website do not expire for SEO link juice. However, they do become less “powerful” over time so it is important to keep topping up your links.

If you change the destination of an internal link, the target URL, then the value of that link will most likely change too.
This makes common SEO sense.
Still nice to hear from Google how valuable internal links are to a website.

BERT

This month (around 25th October) we saw the release of the BERT algorithm update which affected 10% of all Google searches and is one of the biggest algorithm updates Google have ever done.
BERT is very similar to RankBrain in that it trys to understand more about search queries and website content in a more human like way.
From what I understand it doesn’t look like you can optimise for BERT just like RankBrain, so just keep creating that great content!

Recent Study

Growth Badger did a survey recently about Google, Social Media platforms and search in general, here are some of the nuggets I thought were interesting:

• The niche that is most reliant on Google is Health and Medical, with 87.85% of its traffic coming from search.
• The niche that is least reliant on Google is Crypto, with 45.74% of its traffic coming from search.
• Facebook delivers 65.36% of all social media traffic: more visits per month than all other social networks combined.
• Instagram drives very little traffic: under 1% overall across all niches. Even fashion and beauty brands that were launched by Instagram influencers (e.g. Kylie Cosmetics) receive less than 5% of their monthly visits from Instagram — while search brings in about 10 times as many.
• The niche that is most reliant on Facebook is Business and Marketing, which gets 13.52% of its traffic from the network.
• Facebook is the most important social network for every niche except two: Design and Development (for which the top network is YouTube) and Crypto (for which it is Twitter).
• Google drives 8 times more traffic than all social media networks combined.
• Search is the single largest traffic source for every niche, and in most industries it drives the majority of the web traffic.
• The average top blog gets 66.47% of its traffic from search, of which 99.77% is organic and only 0.23% is paid.
• Reddit drives over 3 times as much traffic to blogs as YouTube.

If you would like to see the whole study here is a link to their site.

Algorithms

M Dot

Human Quality Raters

New Link Attributes

Reviews Rich Results

Google Search Console

Image Theft

Migrating to a new server

And Finally…

That’s it for this month, please share to anyone who you think would benefit from keeping up to date on SEO and online marketing in a brief easy to read report.

Lots to discuss this month so let’s get straight to it.

Algorithms

As per previous reports we report on the search engine algorithm updates that could affect your websites ranking positions. If your rankings have changed around these dates it could be due to these search engines updates:

1st August
30th August
Bookending the month! 🙂

LSI

Google this month have said that there is no such thing as LSI keywords. Hmm
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. Essentially words that are connected to each other.
So, for example, if you were targeting the keyword “Cheltenham SEO” an LSI keyword could be “search engine” or “rankings”.
I say, don’t always believe what you have been told from Google.

Podcasts

If you create podcasts here is some interesting news. Google will index your podcasts for keywords that it finds within the content of your podcast.
Not only from the META data but from the words spoken.
That’s pretty cool!

Indexing

Google provided a little bit of information about when they index pages. They don’t split up a page and index different parts separately, say, for example, index the images and then index the words and then PDF’s.
But instead, they index the whole page as one with one URL. Afterwards, they might tag segments with they use in different parts of their systems like image search.

Words

It seems every month Google has to remind people of some old outdated thoughts on how SEO works.
This month it was the time for the number of words on a page. Google confirmed that the amount of words on a page is NOT a ranking factor.

Image Links

If you use images with Hyperlinks, ie: making an image clickable to take you to another page and wish to provide search engines with information on the linked page, then use the ALT tag.
This is quite basic and is something you should be doing anyway, whilst you are there I recommend using the Title tag for the image or link as well.

Mobile

65% or all searches on Google are from mobile devices, up from around 50% 3 or so years ago.

Instagram Images

If you embed Instagram images into your content, search engines will not use those images in their image search. Instagram has a clause in their embed code which stops this.
It is much better to upload the image directly to your site instead.

Medical

If you or your client is in the medical industry and you create content which gives advice about medical-related queries this one is for you.
It would help your site if you could show that your content was written by a Doctor or professional in their field. It adds strength to the reputation of the content and search engines will reward you for it.
The best way to do this, I think, it to link out to the Author/Doctors profile page on their own site, their page on their employee’s site or if not possible maybe their Twitter page.
This is even the case if the content was written by someone else but a Doctor reviewed it and agrees with what the content says.

Leasing Sub-Domains

You may remember last month me telling you about companies leasing sub-domains, here is a link to the SEO report for July for you to remind yourself.
Well, guess what?
Google is now starting to crack down on these domains and penalising websites for doing this.
I personally don’t think Google should do this as it is not part of their guidelines so no one is breaking any rules, but hay, Google can do what they like.

Manual Action Penalties

If you receive a penalty from Google and decide to not try and fix the bad links there is another option.
You could create a new website, move the content over and ask people who have linked to you to change their links.
Obviously, this is a bit of work and you would be in the hands of all the sites linking to you.
Something to think about is that the manual action penalty might also follow you to the new site.
Think long and hard before deciding to do this!

That’s it for this month, please share if you think someone else would benefit from the latest SEO news! Thanks!

Sub-Domains

An increasing “service” has been highlighted this month whereby webmasters that own high authoritive websites lease out sub-domains of the site. The idea is that you can rent a sub-domain and use to sell your product whilst ranking well due to the main domains authority.
I guess you could also just route the traffic directly to your own website too if you wanted.
You might think this is playing the system, benefiting from search engines rankings positions. But, to be honest, it’s no different than any other advertising, you rent advertising space to show your product, same with this idea.
The only difference is that Google is not making any money from it, so, as you can guess, they are looking into this.

No Joke

What do Hotels, Flights, Car Rental and now Jokes have in common?
Google now answers your queries from with in the search results without you having to click to someones website.
Joke websites are the latest vertical to be affected with the new’ish aggressive rollout of Google services.
How will it affect joke websites?
When someone searches for a joke Google will provide you with lots of jokes without you clicking to another website.
Google wants you to stay on their websites for as long as possible, so as they have done for hotel rooms they are trying to take the business.
This will not be the last industry, sadly. 🙁

Grouped Snippets

Have you seen when you enter a search query into Google it sometimes groups up a few websites with very similar content so you can easily open several websites to help find what you need?
It has been used by Google for a number of years.
Until, now.
Google has decided not to group results up anymore but instead just show a single website per entry in the search results.
This rolled out at the start of July 2019.
How will this affect you?
If you were ranking within these groups and now not, you will lose traffic because of this change. Check your stats to see if any traffic volume drops around this date.

Algorithms

If you are a regular reader you will know that each month we list the major search engine algorithm updates so you can check your ranking positions with them to help identify if these changes have affected your website.
This month we have seen a few updates, but, one was very large!
12th July – small’ish
13th – Medium-sized update
16th and 18th have been called the Maverick update, this one was very large.
Sadly Google is not helping us by telling us what area these updates are working on, as soon as I know I will update the post.

Tip

When people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them I am an SEO they almost always want a tip on how to help their websites perform better.
So, I thought I would add the tip I often give to this month’s blog post. It is easy to implement and understand so no excuse not to use!

Here it is:
Have a look at the top 5 ranking websites for your keyword.
Write down all the types of sections these pages have. So, for example: Do they have headings (H1,H2), images (how many and what are in their ALT and Title tags), tables, bullet points, lists. Some pages might just show a table and others might present their content in an ordered list.
Combine all this data into one document removing any duplicates. So, you should have a page of content using all the different types of sections previously mined from your competitor’s websites.
There you have it, the perfect content for your page.*

You see Google has ranked them well because either the content is good, the content is easy to read or more importantly easy for Google to display in a rich snipper or people like the content.

*Please don’t copy other websites work and don’t just add a load of words about the subject, make it interesting and informative.

Titles

I thought it would be interesting to research the best type of titles used for different types of posts, why not try including these in future blog posts and see how they perform.

Let’s start with a generic posts title which could be used on all platforms.

The successful keyword phrase used in titles is: “… will make you …”.
For example “5 SEO tips that will make you out perform your competition”.

If you are writing a social media post try “This is why…”.
For example: “This is why links help your website“.

Ok, what about for Quizes?
Try “Only x in ….”.
For example: “Only 1 in 10 can spot the mistakes“.

Finally for list posts how about “x things only…”.
For example: “10 things only SEO experts know“,

Try them out for youself, let me know how you get on. Here are my Twitter and Facebook accounts!

Algorithm

Google were very kind to us this month as they informed us in advance – albeit 1 day in advance – that they will be releasing a core update on the 3rd June – finished on the 8th.
Why did they tell us this time? Quite simply they couldn’t hide the fact that an update was coming as it will affect so many websites.
If your website was affected there isn’t a set job for you to do, it’s not like if you have bad links to your site and you should get them removed.
The core update is more like a refresh of the algorithm which happens around twice a year.
Just make sure you are within their guidelines and follow my tips. 🙂

Tip: Speaking of tips, make sure your website looks modern, none of the 1990’s styles. Do you use author photos – hint you should! – are they of the author or something else.
Make sure your website looks trust worthy.

Just like buses – British saying – at the very same day on the 3rd June Google also released a completely different algorithm update focusing on domain diversity.
What this means, before this update a single domain like juicyseo.co.uk could rank for a single keyword with more than one page therefore maybe taking up several of the first pages positions.
Google have made this change which will stop this so the same domain can not rank lots of times for the same keyword – now only a maximum of two results per domain including sub-domains.
It makes sense and should help more webmasters as well as searchers.

Another Google algorithm update looks to have rolled out on the 19th and 27th June, lots of people reporting big changes. I haven’t seen anything myself.

Expandable Tabs

In recent SEO reports, I mentioned that Google will not include content hidden in expandable tabs that are not displayed on page load in featured snippets. It seems this has moved on a bit now as Google now does.
Still, I would stick to what I said before to keep your most important content visible on page load if possible.

Bing and Disavow

Please don’t forget that there are other search engines out there other than Google. Bing this month reminded everyone to use their disavow file for penalties too for links you think are spammy.

Schema

I mentioned recently in the post SEO Update Report Covering May 2019 that there is a new FAQ schema that you could add to your website. This will basically display your FAQ results directly in Google’s search results.
Well as it turns out – no shock here – for a lot of the people that added this schema the traffic to their website reduced. After all, why would searchers click to your website when they already know the answer to their query.

Tip: PLEASE bare this in mind!

Favicons

Last month in our SEO Update Report Covering May 2019 I spoke about the new Favicons which you can add to your search results listings.
Here is something that might not shock you too much, I think Google have allowed us to add our Favicons to help hide the AD sign. Let me explain.

Google are not making as much money as they used too with their Adwords network, mainly because people are too clever to notice which entries in the search results are adverts and which are real organic results. So, we all just scroll down to the organic results and select the entry. This is easy because the AD sign is easy to spot. Now with the addition of the website Favicon those AD signs will not be as obvious and might just fool you to click on an advert.

Algorithm Update Dates

Disavow Links

Schema

Speed

Audio

Tabs and Expandable Sections

Deleting Pages

Bugs

Crawl Budget

Split Up Your Site  ..not!

Favicon in Search Results

Hidden Adverts

Algorithms

As per every month here are the dates that we think Google made a significant algorithm updates.

2nd March

5th March

12th March – Core update

20th March

22nd March

26th March

If you read our monthly SEO report regularly then you will know that Google updates their algorithms all the time, we only mention the big updates in this report. This month however we saw a core algorithm update which means they are not fixing a bug or something like that but improving their algorithm.

Because it is a core update it will be global and will affect pretty much all websites, so check your rankings!

Ecommerce

Google this month have advised not to stuff keyword content at the bottom of your ecommerce product category pages to try and get them to rank.

Instead they say it would be better to have the content throughout the page and not just all at the bottom.

That is all very well saying that but many ecommerce platforms do not offer the flexibility of adding content within the products of a category page.

Links to Images

Links to images aren’t counted if you redirect the image to a page. Google’s image index is different to its webpage index.

Redirecting links

If you were thinking of buying a domain and then redirect all the pages to another domain to help with your ranking – due to the links from the new domain – Google have said, don’t bother, it won’t help.

I believe them on this, this is old sammy techniques that just don’t work anymore.

Happy New Year!!!

Welcome to another SEO update report from Juicy SEO. January was quite quiet this year so not so much to report on, so, here goes!

Algorithms

This we have seen algorithm updates – which have not been confirmed by Google so we are not sure what was involved – for the following date:

6th January

9th January

16th January

Remember though just because an algorithm update happened at a certain date it might take a little while for it to affect your website. These dates are just to give you a heads up if you saw some changes “around” them.

Consolidate

An area of SEO that often scares webmasters and SEO’s is consolidating pages. This is when more than one page which are very similar are basically targeting the same keywords. By consolidating the pages it could strengthen you content as a whole and rank better. Don’t be afraid of change.

Tip: Write down everything you try and always think of a back out plan. So, in this case maybe make the now defunct page a DRAFT page so not to be in the index but you can use later on if the experiment didn’t work.

Unnatural Links

Or often called “spammy links”. It doesn’t matter if you created the links yourself, someone else creates them with you knowling or a robot without your permission generates links to your website. It is still your job to manage and fix if spammy links are created. Keep an eye on your links!

Brexit

Before you say anything I am not going to discuss the big B word. However, Google this month have said if Britain leaves the EU their search results relating to Britain and EU will be blank. Interesting, worth a search if it happens.

Search Console

Google have said they are aiming to close down the old version of the Search Console in March 2019. Not all the tools will be carried over though.

Domain Name Change

This month Google have said that they know when a domain has changed ownership and that the website might not perform as well under the new owner as it once did with the old owner. Interesting.

Many people including SEO’s look for domain names that have not been renewed to get the SEO benefits it had and use for something else. This comment might see the end of that.

Tip: Sometimes it is still worth buying these domains just for the links traffic, if the domain has a link from The Times newspaper it might provide a lot of valuable traffic.