Monthly SEO Report Covering December 2017

SEO report covering December 2017

Monthly SEO Report Covering December 2017

Our latest monthly SEO report covering all the changes through-out December 2017. Understand what has changed and how you can help your website perform better. A 2 minutes read.

Stuart Cole

Welcome to the last Juicy SEO report of 2017! There have been lots of changes, good and bad, but we made it through them all.

As per normal here are all the important changes that the search engines have made through-out December 2017 all nicely contained in a 2 minute read.

Did you know I have now been writing this monthly SEO update report for 3 years on this site and longer elsewhere! WOW time fly’s.

Once again we have added a Tip to help with your own SEO work. If you have missed any of the other reports, which will still be relevant, then we definitely recommend you catch up, here is a link to the SEO Report Updates.

Snippets

You may have noticed whilst using Google that the description for the websites entry looks longer? The Search Results Snippets now display up to 320 characters increased from the old 155 characters. This is great news to help explain what your page is about and of course entice people to click to your website.

But before you go updating all your pages Meta descriptions Google have said there is no need as they will automatically add more content to the snippet from the content on the page.
TIP: However, I recommend updating your most important pages and tailoring the descriptions to get the best click through rate.

Algorithms

Around the 13th December 2017 we saw a lot of movement in the search results, this was due to many Google Algorithm updates. Some of the sites we have read about that have been affected were low quality and high advert pages.

Glossary

If you are new to search engine optimisation or just need a little refresh on the phrases used in our report head over to our SEO Glossary page, everything you need to know in one place.

Mobile First

If you have been reading our previous month’s reports you will know that Google will be launching their new Mobile First Index (see our other posts about this here). The problem is Google will not tell you when or if your website is now using their Mobile First Index.

However, there is a way to figure it out and it all lies with your websites log files. Typically you will see Google’s GoogleBot (80%) and GoogleMobileBot (20%) access your site. If you see it swap around and see the mobile bot increase then the chances are your site is included into the Mobile Index.

Rich Snippets

Are now called “Rich Results”. Well that’s nice.

Referral Traffic

For the first in, in, many many years Google refers more traffic to websites than Facebook. This could be to do with recent changes on how Facebook favour personal posts instead of company (pages) posts.

Quality Content

Google once again this month reminded webmasters that copying content or even rewriting the same content on your website is not adding value and therefore will not help your website rank better.
TIP: Think of going a bit further and add more detail.

Written by Stuart Cole

Stuart Cole has been running Internet businesses since 1996 and has been concentrating on SEO and online marketing since 2007. Stuart is a regular SEO author specialising in recent changes that can affect how websites perform in search engines.

Monthly SEO Report Covering November 2017

SEO position rankings go up and down

Monthly SEO Report Covering November 2017

Our latest monthly SEO report covering all the changes through-out November 2017. Understand what has changed and how you can help your website perform better. A 2 minutes read.

Stuart Cole

Welcome to this months Search Engine Optimisation report updating you of all the latest changes that have happened of November 2017.

The aim of this report is to only inform you of changes that WILL affect how your website performs in search engines. This way we keep the read time to below 2 minutes.

If you have missed any of the other reports, which will still be relevant, then we definitely recommend you catch up, here is a link to the SEO Report Updates.

Algorithms

Through-out November there have been many fairly large algorithm updates. Google, of course have not commented on any of these, as expected.

There was a large one at the start of the month and another around the 14th of November, the search industry are not sure what was changed though.

If Google let us in what they are doing I will let you all know.

.co.uk

Country versions of Google like www.Google.co.uk are not used to decide where you are in the World for Google to serve you with local search results.

For example, if you were in London and using Google.co.uk Google would not use the .co.uk to identify if you were in the UK or not, instead they use your IP address to figure out where you are.

Glossary

If you are new to search engine optimisation or just need a little refresh on the phrases used in our report head over to our SEO Glossary page, everything you need to know in one place.

Manual Action Penalty

Google have said that unless you have received a penalty message from them in Search Console you do not need to create a disavow file.

As a reminder the disavow file is used if you have links to your website which are against Google’s guidelines (spammy links) and you can not get them removed.

By adding those links to this file Google will ignore them.

Strong Content

Google once again reminded the SEO community that a few pages with good quality content is better than lots of pages with content that isn’t any good.

It makes sense but some people may not have realised this.

Links to images

For SEO’s and webmasters links are very important, so if you manage to generate a loads of great links that point to a great image you have created that’s great news, well done!

However, these links will only help that images URL to perform better (in Google image search) and not necessarily your website.

TIP: So make sure you add your image to a page and share the page’s URL.

Low Hanging Fruit

Do you want to know how to help your website perform better by helping Google understand what your page is about?

Oh and you have the control and ‘power’ to do this!

Google this month confirmed that they do look at Anchor text when spidering your internal links.

It’s a no brainer, make sure you use Anchor text!

Written by Stuart Cole

Monthly SEO Report Covering October 2017

Welcome to the latest monthly SEO report from Juicy SEO. As regular readers will know we condense a whole months worth of SEO news and important algorithm updates into a 2 minute read. We only report on the things that will make a difference to how your website performs in search engines.

If you have missed previous month’s reports you should have a read as because they are more than a month old it doesn’t mean they are out of date. A lot can be learned from them!

Here is a link to the SEO Report Updates.

Mobile first

A little head of schedule (I think) Google is testing Mobile First out in the wild. Not everyone will see this but they are currently testing ahead of the full launch due early 2018.

If your site has been “chosen” to test mobile first and it falls short of certain areas Google will inform you via Search Console of the things you need to fix.

Spelling

If spelling isn’t your thing, when it comes to ranking in Google’s search results it will not make a difference. Google confirmed once again that spelling mistakes will NOT harm your search positions.

That said Bing have said that it does affect their ranking positions so worth getting sorted.

If you haven’t tried Grammarly – the free automatic online spell checker – I highly recommend it!

Glossary

If you are new to search engine optimisation or just need a little refresh on the phrases used in our report head over to our SEO Glossary page, everything you need to know in one place.

Algorithms

It looks like Google released an algorithm update around the 8th October 2017. Pretty much all monitoring Apps have spotted the update. We are not at the moment (3rd Nov) what it affected.

Additionally, Google have also made a big update to their mobile results algorithm. There is a good chance it is connected to the Mobile First roll-out they are currently testing.

Google confirmed this month that their ranking algorithm is the same for position #1 as it is for position #100. There isn’t different algorithms for different ranking positions.

Around the 26th October we noticed a small algorithm update, we are not too sure what it has affected but as soon as we know we will let you know. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the news.

Sentiments

As far as I can remember Google have never confirmed the following, until now.

Google now uses sentiments from websites and social media as a ranking factor!

So basically if someone has written nice things about your website it will help it rank better. I think this is an area that Google will be using much more of in the future!

Social Media Management

Have you ever thought it’s a shame when you write a Tweet or Facebook post that your great content is wasted as it is never used again?

After all your followers would have to be online at the time to see the post anyway!

Then get more out from your social media posts without doing anymore work!

FIND OUT MORE!

Broken Link Building

Ahh one of the old classic link building “techniques”. In case you are not sure what this is:

1 Find a site that has a broken link to another site.

2 Make sure this site is in the same industry as your site.

3 Write replacement content.

4 Inform the Webmaster that they have a broken link to a resource which is no longer there and ask them to link to your version instead.

It’s an old idea but it works. So much so Google have said this month that it is a good idea to get links to your site and for you to create good quality content.

So, off you go!

Comments V’s Social Media

Which is better?

Allow people to comment about your article on your website or comment about your content on social media?

Well, if you want the comments to help rank your Web page then having them on your site wins hands down!

Speed

We all know how important it is that a page loads as quick as possible. As a rule of thumb you should try and get your page Load under 3 seconds, faster if possible.

This month Google confirmed that they measure how long it takes for the server to respond. This news will put a little pressure on hosting companies to provide a fast server!

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/NewsArticle"><!– –> <meta itemscope itemprop="mainEntityOfPage" itemType="https://schema.org/WebPage" itemid="https://google.com/article"/><!– –> <h2 itemprop="headline">Stuart</h2><!– –> <h3 itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><!– –> By <span itemprop="name">Stuart Cole</span><!– –> </h3><!– –> <span itemprop="description">A most wonderful article</span><!– –> <div itemprop="image" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/ImageObject"><!– –> <!–<img src="https://www.juicyseo.co.uk/jg/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/logo.png"/>–><!– –> <meta itemprop="url" content="https://www.juicyseo.co.uk/jg/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/New-Google-Logo.jpg"><!– –> <meta itemprop="width" content="521"><!– –> <meta itemprop="height" content="199"><!– –> </div><!– –> <div itemprop="publisher" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Organization"><!– –> <div itemprop="logo" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/ImageObject"><!– –> <img src="https://google.com/logo.jpg"/><!– –> <meta itemprop="url" content="https://www.juicyseo.co.uk/jg/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/logo.png"><!– –> <meta itemprop="width" content="389"><!– –> <meta itemprop="height" content="85"><!– –> </div><!– –> <meta itemprop="name" content="Juicy SEO"><!– –> </div><!– –> <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2015-02-05T08:00:00+08:00"/><!– –> <meta itemprop="dateModified" content="2015-02-05T09:20:00+08:00"/><!– –></div>

Monthly SEO Report Covering September 2017

SEO position rankings go up and down

Monthly SEO Report Covering September 2017

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly roundup of all the most important changes by search engines like Google and Bing.

We only report on changes that will affect how your website will perform so make sure you read everything!

Although SEO is constantly changing previous monthly SEO reports will still be valuable, I highly recommend that you read those too. Here is a link to all our SEO monthly reports.

Links

As you may know creating links to your website from large international news websites can often push your websites rankings up considerably. In fact you may have received an email from someone selling links from the likes of Forbes, INC and Entrepreneur. We all know that you shouldn’t pay for links but I can understand why these emails are tempting.

News this month though is that all three of these websites will now make all the links from of their contributors articles “nofollow”. This means you will not get any SEO value from having links from these sites.

So, you can ignore those emails now!

Something that was interesting that Google said this month was that there are many websites that rank within the top 3 of their search results which do not have any links to it. I would think that this is low competitive long tail keywords but interesting to hear Google say this.

Algorithms

Around the 8th September there looks to have been a small algorithm update from Google. Most if not all of the monitoring tools have noticed this, we have yet to get confirmation from Google.

Additionally, we noticed another algorithm update around the 16th and 20th September as well as a larger update around the 26th. We know that Google are continuously making changes but I know that they like to make a big change at the end of the year so could this be some testing??

Glossary

If you are new to search engine optimisation or just need a little refresh on the phrases used in our report head over to our SEO Glossary page, everything you need to know in one place.

Spammy Content

Google this month mentioned that just because your website is whiter than white (hat) compared to your black hat competitor it doesn’t mean your site should rank high than theirs. If their website provides a better result for the search term Google could still rank it higher.

So, our takeaway from this is to make sure your website provides better content than your competitors.

G+

“If your web page receives a lot of G+ (Google+) ‘likes’ will the website rank higher?”

That is a question that was asked of Google, they replied with a very simple, No.

Tip: That said we have found that if you do G+ a new published page Google will more than often index the page faster.

Publish Date

When you create a new piece of content a publish date is also created with it. In most CMS platforms you can change these dates. Some content writers believe that if you change the date it will look more recent therefore search engines like Google might value it more (We all know Google likes recent content).

Before you go and change the date on all your posts Google know about this little ‘Trick’, so the chances are you won’t get any benefit from changing the date.

However, that said why not try it for yourself?

Shopping Cart

Google have confirmed that shopping cart abandon rate is not a ranking factor. So don’t worry if people do not complete their order on your website as your ranking will not change but DO worry because they didn’t buy something!

Monthly SEO Report Covering August 2017

SEO position rankings go up and down

Monthly SEO Report Covering August 2017

Welcome to August’s SEO report update. Traditionally search engines like Google and Bing tend not to make too many updates over the summer holidays so this month’s report might be shorter than our normal 2 minute read time.

But it will still be packed with useful information on how to help your website perform better so enjoy!

Search Console

The new version of Googles Search Console is nearly here. Currently in private Beta it sounds like it will be a considerable improvement to the current version. Most notably there might have extra data in the history area of the tool. Currently Google Search Console only shows 90 days worth of historical data, there is a chance this might increase to 1 years worth.

Fingers crossed!

Crawling

Google this month shed a little light on how they crawl websites. It has been often thought that when Google crawls your Web page and find a link to another page, it would ‘click’ that link to crawl that page also. This is not the case though.

When Google finds a link on a page it adds that URL to a list which they will crawl at a later date.

Glossary

If you are new to search engine optimisation or just need a little refresh on the phrases used in our report head over to our SEO Glossary page, everything you need to know in one place.

Internal Searches

Google once again this month reminded the Webmaster community to use ‘noindex’ internal search results within your website.

These often use the URL www.domain.com/?s=searchWord

The main reason for this is that Google doesn’t want to list internal search results as Google search results as they often don’t provide any quality content.

Links

Google in a roundabout way confirmed something that most SEO’s already think when comparing the link juice value between internal and external links. Basically they said that Google does treat these two types of links differently.

We would assume Google values links from external websites that you don’t control to be more valuable than internal links that you do control.

Not Secure

Back in April of this year Google informed us that a new version of Chrome will be released in October 2017 which could affect a lot of websites.

This month Google sent out emails to webmasters that currently have forms which request security questions – like a password – and don’t have a SSL certificate. When the new version of Chrome is live it will label these pages as NOT SECURE.

This could drastically affect the amount of people using your form therefore we suggest making your website HTTPS instead of HTTP.

Last Mod Date

Google confirmed this month that they do look at the last modified date and the URL of a page but not within the sitemap.

(I’m not so sure myself that they don’t look at the modified date in the sitemap).

Either way it does confirm again that it is beneficial to update older content to help it rank better.

Tip: We like to add ‘Updated September’ in the page title also to highlight that it is up to date in search results.

Algorithm

At the tail-end of August there looks to have been an algorithm update which, as per normal hasn’t been confirmed by Google. At the time of writing we have not learned what has been affected. Once we know we will let you know either on Twitter, Facebook and of course in next months SEO report.

Private Images

If you prefer to block Google from using your images using the HTML tag “noindex” it will not negatively affect how your website performs in the main search results. This is good news if your create images yourself and prefer to keep complete control of them.

Monthly SEO Report Covering July 2017

SEO position rankings go up and down

Monthly SEO Report Covering July 2017

Welcome to July’s 2017 edition of our monthly SEO update report.

Each month we inform you of the latest and most important updates from search engines like Google and Bing that could affect your websites ranking positions.

Before we get going if you have missed previous update reports we recommend quickly having a look at those too as they will still be relevant. Here is a link to all our SEO update reports.

In a rush? No problem our SEO update report is designed to be read in 2 minutes, so you get the important information you need without taking up much of your time.

So, let’s get going…

Indexing

Google confirmed this month that if you have a lot of pages that need to published and therefore indexed within Google’s search results, you should not artificially slowly publish them but publish them all at once.

They mentioned even if you have 100,000’s of pages it won’t matter. One word of warning is to make sure your server can handle the crawl from Google.

Videos

Adding a video to your page does not provide you with any advantage in Google’s search results or make it a quality piece of content.

Glossary

If you are new to search engine optimisation or just need a little refresh on the phrases used in our report head over to our SEO Glossary page, everything you need to know in one place.

EMD (see Glossary for explanation)

Google have said, again, that Domains that exactly match keywords do not get an advantage in their search results.

Geo-targeting

If you are targeting a certain country Google have said it will not make a difference if your website is using a server which is not located in that country. Instead you should either have a domain with the correct TLD (see Glossary for explanation) or use Google Search Console to inform Google.

Search Console

In July Google made a change to how they calculate the average ranking positions within their Search Console software. Many people have seen a large drop in rankings and are quite worried. Google have said not to worry as nothing has changed only the way they report on the average positions.

Seals

No not the type that swim but Trust Seals. Someone asked Google this month if by having a seal from an trusted organisation on your website, does it help the page to rank better. In a word, No.

It is however good to show that you are affiliated to the company behind the seal but not for SEO.

Tip: a link from a trusted organisation to your website will however help your website SEO wise.

Meta Keyword

I’m including this into our report this month purely for readers who are new to SEO. Each Web page can use the META tag ‘Keyword’. A long long long time ago this was used to help search engines learn more about the page. However, this hasn’t been used by search engines for a very long time.

You will not get penalized for using it but if you do you are only telling your competitors which keywords you are targeting, you don’t want to do that now do you?

Google Instant

Have you noticed recently that when you start typing into Google’s search bar the suggested end of your search query is now not there?

Google have decided to remove Google Instant as it doesn’t fit within the way mobile devices use their search engine interface.

This, for me is a shame for two reasons, one personal and one professional.

1: Professional: Google Instant used to be a good way to find new keywords that were being used.

2: Personal: It used to be a fun way to waste some time seeing what silly things people have entered into Google.

Sticky Footers

These are footers that stay on the page at the bottom of your window whilst you scroll up or down the page. These are completely OK to use and are within Google’s guidelines, they are particularly useful on mobile devices to quickly find important content.

Monthly SEO Report Covering June 2017

SEO position rankings go up and down

Monthly SEO Report Covering June 2017

Welcome to June’s SEO update report, if you are a regular reader you will already know that each month we create a rundown of all the important changes within the search engine industry and squeeze it all into a 2 minute read.

We only report on changes that could affect your website in search engine results and provide tips on how to help your website to perform better.

If you have missed any previous month’s reports don’t forget to read the last few as they will still be of use. Here is a link to ALL the latest SEO Updates for 2017.

Algorithms

As we all know Google and in fact, all search engines are continuously updating their algorithms, we know that there are many updates every day. However, these are mostly small tweaks and do not affect too many websites. When Google updates an algorithm in a big way which affects a large percentage of websites in the past they haven’t always confirmed that they have actually done anything. This makes SEO’s and webmasters see the rankings change for their sites without knowing why.

Google this month have said that they will communicate large algorithm updates in the future (only large ones mind!), so we might know a little bit more on why our websites move on certain dates.

Make sure you are following Juicy SEO on either our Newsletter, RSS feed or Facebook and we will keep you informed.

There looks to have been a Google algorithm update on the 25th/26th June 2017, we are unsure at the moment what has been updated by Google but it looks like it has affected a lot of websites. As soon as we know more we will let you know.

Fred

At the start of March 2017 (7th or 8th) Google released the algorithm Fred into the World. Fred scores the quality of the content on your pages. As you would expect the quality score affects your ranking positions. If you think you have been affected by Fred we recommend you heading over to Google’s Fred Guidelines to find out what you need to do to help your website.

Glossary

If you are new to search engine optimisation or just need a little refresh on the phrases used in our report head over to our SEO Glossary page, everything you need to know in one place.

Voice Search

A new aspect of SEO is to now think about voice search. Over the last 12 months, users using their voice to make search commands (mainly on phones) on Google has increased drastically Therefore, it makes sense to optimise your website to cater for these types of searches. Think about how you speak and the type of questions you might ask about your industry.

That said, Google will be helping us all out soon with voice search by adding voice analytics to their tools like Search Console and Google Analytics. We don’t know when yet, but it’s coming.

Mobile First Index

A few months ago Google confirmed that they are working on a search index purely for mobile devices. Initially, they thought this new index would be launched in 2017 however it now looks like it will be 2018. We will keep you posted.

If you are currently running a mobile version of your website like: http://m.mydomain.com and you are thinking of changing the site so it uses the standard URL like: http://mydomain.com for mobile devices too, then it is advised to make this change before the new Mobile First Index is rolled out. We recommend making sure it is all done and re-indexed before the end of 2017.

Whilst we are on the mobile index subject it is advised that you should make sure the content on your mobile version of your website is equivalent to the content on your main desktop version. It doesn’t provide a good experience if the mobile version only shows a small percent of the content of the main desktop version.

Google Test My Site

Google launched their “Test My Site” tool around 18 months ago, it’s a tool that analyses your website to check that it is mobile friendly and offers advice on how to improve it. This month Google has made an update to this tool which now offers more information. If you haven’t tried it you should give it ago, here is a link to the page.

Competitors Spammy Links

We have all been there, when analysing why your competitors are performing better than you for certain keywords you look at their link profile. Low and behold you find a tonne of spammy links to their website.

Is it helping them?

Should I also create links from those spammy sites?

Well, the answer is no. Google is a very clever bit of kit, it knows which sites have spammy links and will simply ignore them. In fact, they often penalise sites for having spammy links. That said, you should certainly try and get links from the sites which are not spammy! 🙂

Google includes Adwords CPC prices in search results

Is Google testing something new here?

We think so, this morning we entered in the following search term into Google.co.uk (UK version): tree protector from cats

At the time we were not logged into any Google account so there shouldn’t be any connection to any of our Google accounts, including the Adwords accounts.

Upon entering the phrase we noticed an extra line under the search box that shows the cost per click, the volume of searches and competition for Google Adwords.

We have not seen this before and the fact we were not signed into Adwords surprised us.

Thinking that was enough, a few seconds later this extra line disappeared!

Thankfully I managed to get a screen grab of it as above.

A couple of minutes later it was back. Exciting times I thought to myself. This time, however, an additional button was also displayed. It was (I use past tense for a very good reason) located at the bottom right of the screen, – oh, by the way, I was using a desktop PC not mobile, tablet, smart watch, smart TV, games console, in-car browser… – initially it’s star was empty but I simply couldn’t resist pressing the button, it had to be done!

At that point, the star went gold. ooh!

What the button did I am not sure as I wasn’t logged into Adwords so it couldn’t add the keyword to a campaign or something.

The button and line (I have named the line in question “Line”, seems like a nice name to call it. It’s not as good as Penguin or Panda but I like it) have been coming and going after searching for other keywords.

In the interest of learning, I signed into my Adwords account and tried these searches again. I pressed the “Add All Keywords” button and you never guess what happened!?

Well, nothing really, nothing in Adwords, nothing at all.

Anyone else seen this?

I would love to hear what you think, let us discuss on the new big blue, FACEBOOK.

Juicy SEO Newsletter

Each month we produce our SEO newsletter where we identify all the latest changes in the world of SEO.
We only comment on changes that will actually make a difference to how your website performs in search engines.
Help your website!

ADD ME!

We really enjoy working with our clients and most of all providing them with great results! If you would like to read about some of our successes head over to the Juicy SEO Portfolio page.

If you would like your website and business to benefit from our experience and technical skills please get in touch!

We look forward to hearing from you.

Monthly SEO Report Covering May 2017

Welcome to this month’s edition of Juicy SEO’s month SEO report. We condense all the important updates made by search engines like Google and Bing into a short easy to read blog post. We try and keep it under a 2 minute read so you can be informed and continue on your day.

If you missed last month’s SEO report covering April 2017 even though it is now a month old almost all the information is still relevant, so, head over and have a read as there would have been something there you would have missed in the news and will benefit your website in performing better in search engines.

Owl

Fake news is, well, all the news lately and search engines and social media platforms are under a lot of pressure to remove, or at least not promote fake news. Google last month released a new algorithm called Owl (What a Google algorithm which doesn’t start with a ‘P’!). Owl is designed to target fake news in their search results and remove them. We touched on this in last month’s report.

Featured Snippets

If you have managed to get your website to the top, or very near the top of the first page of Google search results then your websites data might have been included in their featured snippet section. What we have learnt this month is that Google can sometimes display the content ‘snippet’ from one website, but also display the image next to the text from a completely different website. Google News have been doing this for a long time but now we are seeing it in the main search results.

Our monthly SEO report isn’t interested in search engines testing colours or shapes of buttons, we only report on changes that will affect your website to perform well in search engines!

Affiliate Source

A technique that is getting quite popular to help with generating new and useful content is to combine two or more pieces of content from other sources and present them all together in one single page. Some could see this as creating useful information in one place.

Google, however, does not see this content as adding value as you are not actually providing any new data. If this is something you like doing or works well for your industry we recommend adding extra content in the form of text, images, infographics, videos and even animation to make the page unique.

Google doesn’t forget!

Google this month answered a question on their forum on if the search engine ever forgets URL’s, namely pages that have been in their index for a long long time. Google simply said, “No, we have a lot of storage”.

We believe them.

Algorithm’s

It looks like there was a Google algorithm update around 17^th May (US), 18^th May (UK), however, as I write this we are unsure what was updated by Google.

All the monitoring Apps lit up like a Christmas tree where they have seen many ranking changes over many websites. We have seen a lot of ranking movements over a considerable amount of domains ourselves, we look forward to finding out what has changed. We will let you know as soon as we know. Follow us on Facebook if you can’t wait until next month’s SEO report.

Widgets

Google are considering ignoring links that originate from website widgets. Back in the day, I’m starting to sound old here, when SEO was just starting out, a technique used to create links was to simply add links to sidebar widgets. They would normally be site-wide and give loads of link juice. Those days are well and truly gone and Google are now considering ignoring those links because they are not providing any SEO benefits.

Adwords

This month Google have updated their Ad Rank figure within Google Adwords. If you are currently running an advert using Adwords we recommend having a look at your CPC figures.

Links

Over the last 12 month’s or so there has been an increase in spam emails being sent out selling space on high domain authority websites (DA) with a link to your own website. It maybe because of this increase in these emails that Google this month have commented that these types of links are against Googles guidelines and are currently looking into it.

We are not sure at the moment if Google will penalise any sites which have used these sites for links or not, but something you should think about before hitting that ‘Buy’ button.

Over Optimisation

Google confirmed that you can over optimise your website to a point where it starts hurting your website ranking potential. We think, hmm!

Finally, if you know of someone who you think would benefit from being informed of the latest updates from search engines share this page with them, they will thank you forever!

Facebook

Twitter

RSS

Glossary

Panda: The Google Panda update concentrates on the quality of the web page content, if the algorithm thinks the page is of low quality it might penalise it in Google’s search results.

Penguin: Google has an algorithm called Penguin which analyses links to web pages and identifies which ones are valuable or spam links. An example of a spam link would be a paid link to your site. Since 23rd Sept 2016 this has joined the core search updates and is now real time.

Pigeon: Google’s Pigeon algorithm concentrates on Local SEO, if you have a bricks and mortar business this is something you should take note of.

Phantom (Quality Update): This algorithm rewards website pages for good content.

TDL: A TLD means Top Level Domain like .com or .net or .co.uk.

AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages. A way to increase the speed your mobile version of your website loads.

EMD: Exact Match Domains. Matching the domain name exactly with the search term used.

Monthly SEO Report Covering April 2017

Google Owl Algorithm Update

Monthly SEO Report Covering April 2017

Welcome to this month’s edition of our monthly SEO report updating you with the most important changes in SEO and online marketing. As per normal we will try and keep under a 2 minute read.

If you missed last month’s report it is well worth a read as there are loads of great insights for you to learn, SEO report covering March 2017.

Mobile

If you are a regular reader of our monthly update report you will know that Google are working on a new Mobile First index, it looks like it will take them a little longer than they first thought as they have now delayed the launch until 2018. If you were not sure what the mobile first index is we recommend quickly reading the last few reports for a catch up.

Algorithm’s

At the start of March Google updated their algorithm that scores the quality of the content on pages, it was named Fred. Google have confirmed that at the same time Fred went live other algorithms were also updated therefore your website might have been affected by them and not Fred if you saw a drop in rankings.

Advanced SEO Audits

Understand why your website is not performing well with our advanced SEO audit, your website will not thank you enough!

FIND OUT MORE

Disavow

If you are new to SEO you may not know about Disavow files, this is a file that you can add websites that link to yours which you would like the search engines to ignore. A reason you would do this is if you have spammy links to your site and it is harming your site in the search results.
If you add some links to this file and then see your website drop in the search engine rankings we recommend that you remove some of those links in case they are actually helping your website perform better. It is a little trial and error with this.

Domain Age

Just a quick reminder that the age of a website or the length a domain has been registered does not affect how your website performs in search ranking results.

CAPS PAGE TITLES AND DESCRIPTIONS

GOOGLE HAVE CONFIRMED THAT THERE ISN’T A PENALTY IF YOU USE UPPERCASE CAPS IN YOUR TITLE AND DESCRIPTION META TAGS. WE DON’T USE THEM OURSELVES BUT IT MIGHT GET A FEW MORE EYES LOOKING AT YOUR LISTING IF YOU DO.

Updates

Like previous years this time of year sees a lot of big algorithm updates, we saw “Fred” in March and there was an another update around 18th April as well. At this time we are unsure exactly what that update was targeting. We will update you once we know.

Owl – Hoot hoot!

An Owl has flown into our lives this month targeting “fake news”. Google’s latest algorithm called Owl rewards authoritative content and penalises fake or bad quality content. It is targeting offensive and misleading pages.

Links

Google have confirmed this month that links from higher ranking websites do not provide any more link juice than links from lower ranking websites. So, if you were ranked number 5 and you got a link from the website at position 1, it will not provide any more “power” than if you got a link from the website ranking at number 10.

Don’t get this confused with links from higher Pagerank websites as this is certainly still the case.

Glossary

Panda: The Google Panda update concentrates on the quality of the web page content, if the algorithm thinks the page is of low quality it might penalise it in Google’s search results.

Pigeon: Google’s Pigeon algorithm concentrates on Local SEO, if you have a bricks and mortar business this is something you should take note of.

Phantom (Quality Update): This algorithm rewards website pages for good content.

TDL: A TLD means Top Level Domain like .com or .net or .co.uk.

AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages. A way to increase the speed your mobile version of your website loads.

EMD: Exact Match Domains. Matching the domain name exactly with the search term used.

Monthly Online Marketing Report Covering March 2017

SEO position rankings go up and down

Monthly Online Marketing Report Covering March 2017

Welcome to this month’s review on all things Search Engines, yep, it’s the Juicy SEO Monthly SEO Report!

First off before we start if you missed last month’s treat then you really should have a read there are some relevant news tips in there! SEO Report Covering February 2017.

Fred Algorithm Update

The big news this month was the ‘Fred’ algorithm update which occurred around the 8th March. The name of the update was called Fred because the person at Google who helps SEOs understand what is going on couldn’t think of a name, so, he called it Fred.

This affected many many websites and as yet we are unsure what the algorithm was targeting. Many SEO’s thought it was targeting websites with lots of adverts however our tests showed it was targeting low quality content. If your websites rankings dropped around that time have a re-look at your content and try and make it better.

UPDATE: Google this week confirmed the above that it was a quality update.

Adverts

Google this month also re-affirmed that you should not have too many adverts above the page, if you really need to have an advert there make it your most important one.

Links

Google also mentioned that it is possible to create a new website without any links to it and rank well for medium competitive keywords, we performed several experiments on this over the years and every time we have seen good results, so, yes it is possible. That said, it is good to hear it from Google.

Site:

Google have said that the site: command is not going away, many of the engineers at Google use this command and would fight it if Google wanted to remove.

This is a handy command that lists all the pages of your website that have been indexed. The figure isn’t 100% correct but we think it is close.

To use enter the following into Google: site:www.youdomain.com

Googles Adwords

Googles Adwords users are now allowed to bid on registered trade marks, however, you are still not allowed to use them in your advert, but this is an important change for PPC users.

Adwords also now allows price extensions for your adverts, a nice addition!

Voice

Followers of the latest tech gadgets would already know about home devices like Alexa and Echo whereby you can talk to the gadget to get search results of questions (amoung other things), a prime example would be to ask:

What is the weather going to be like today?

This month we have seen the first glimpse of how manufactures will make money from these gadgets in the future. Described by Google as a mistake before the customers home gadget replied, it told the owner that a new film is being premiered in cinemas this weekend. Beleive me this is not a mistake but a little look into the future.

Believe me this is not a mistake but a little look into the future!

Crawl Budget

Search engines are very busy things, one thing they do it spider websites to find content for their index database. To use their time and resources effectively they create a crawl budget for each website, basically the larger the budget the more time they are looking at your website.

By reducing the amount of time it takes to download a web page will use up less of the budget. Therefore, if you have faster web pages the likely hood is more of your content will appear in the search engines index.

We have tested this many times and it has been the case for all our tests, so speed up those pages!

DMOZ

DMOZ is one of the largest and oldest directories and has been around for 18 years. Many ‘iffy’ SEOs out there still use DMOZ to get links to their website, tut tut!

Well, they will not be able to do this for much longer, as of 14th March it will be closed down forever.

Mobile

Over the last few months we have been updating you with the latest news on Google’s “Mobile First Index”, this is a completely new index separated from the normal desktop version you see which will serve up the best results for mobile devices.

At the moment if you search Google on a mobile device it will use the desktop index.

The latest on this is that they will only make it live once they know the quality of the results are as good as the current desktop version.

Facebook

And finally…

It was confirmed that Google does NOT use Facebook “Likes” as a ranking signal. Shock! 🙂

Glossary

Panda: The Google Panda update concentrates on the quality of the web page content, if the algorithm thinks the page is of low quality it might penalise it in Google’s search results.

Pigeon: Google’s Pigeon algorithm concentrates on Local SEO, if you have a bricks and mortar business this is something you should take note of.

Phantom (Quality Update): This algorithm rewards website pages for good content.

TDL: A TLD means Top Level Domain like .com or .net or .co.uk.

AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages. A way to increase the speed your mobile version of your website loads.

EMD: Exact Match Domains. Matching the domain name exactly with the search term used.

Monthly Online Marketing Report Covering February 2017

SEO position rankings go up and down

Monthly Online Marketing Report Covering February 2017

Welcome to the new look Juicy SEO monthly report, this time we list all the important updates and changes that happened in February 2017.

Algorithm’s

At the start of February we heard a lot of reports in the SEO world discussing a possible Google algorithm update. After a bit of research it looks like Google had performed an update which affected certain types of links, these were mainly blog networking links. This occurred around 2nd February so if your rankings were affected around that day this could be why.

Additionally, it looked like on the 7th February Google performed a much bigger update which targeted quality content (Phantom update), or should I say bad quality content. Google have yet to confirm what it updated and as it has been about 3 weeks they are probably not going to now.

If your rankings for some of your pages have dropped around this date we recommend revisiting the content and try and make it a little better. We have a tip below on doing this.

AMP

Google informed us that around 70% of Google News results are now using AMP versions of their websites.

Tip

Do you know how to find out which one of your website pages ranks for a keyword? For free?

Enter the following command into Google and it should list the most likely page for the keyword first. If it is the wrong one then work on the content signals on the page you wish to rank for the keyword.

Site:www.domain.com keyword

Quality Content

Google have said to help your website pages perform better make sure the content actually makes sense. We recommend reading it out aloud, if it doesn’t make sense when you do this then there are things you can change.

Remember: Google’s algorithm is that clever it knows good content when it reads it.

Fast Track Indexing

Google have a ‘fast track’ index system which can be used from their mobile testing pages (link HERE). However, this tool might index the page quickly but it will not stay indexed for long.

This is a handy thing to remember, if you need a page indexed quickly, say for an urgent message or short time product sale. Then use the Fast Track Index.

If you want your page to be indexed for a longer time or even forever then it is recommended to be indexed the normal way, ie via your sitemap.

Contest Links

Google reminded everyone that using a contest which you have to create a link to the contest owners website to enter is the same as paid links and it is not advised.

IE: Win a car, just add a link to our website and we will pick a winner

Google: Hiring an SEO

Google have created a great video to help small businesses hire an SEO or SEO company. It explains what to ask an SEO when hiring and what to expect in an answer. This will help understand who to trust and who actually knows what they are talking about!

Here is the video and well worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piSvFxV_M04

Glossary

Panda: The Google Panda update concentrates on the quality of the web page content, if the algorithm thinks the page is of low quality it might penalise it in Google’s search results.

Pigeon: Google’s Pigeon algorithm concentrates on Local SEO, if you have a bricks and mortar business this is something you should take note of.

Phantom (Quality Update): This algorithm rewards website pages for good content.

TDL: A TLD means Top Level Domain like .com or .net or .co.uk.

AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages. A way to increase the speed your mobile version of your website loads.

EMD: Exact Match Domains. Matching the domain name exactly with the search term used.