Welcome to the latest SEO report highlighting all the important SEO news you actually need to know about to help your website perform better.
And it’s all in a 2-minute read, so, without any delay here it is…
Google Core Update
It’s coming…
Yep the latest core update from Google is due very soon. This is their biggest update they perform which is performed 3 or 4 times a year and is due very soon.
I will let you know when it arrives so you can check your ranking positions.
Algorithm
We saw algorithm updates on the 1st, 6th and 7th August.
Can website comments affect your ranking results?
Generally no but Google has said this month that if you have a considerable amount of adult words in your comments it could make search engine think your site is for adults only.
This would of course not help your ranking for searchers who turn off adult content in their results, something to bear in mind.
Would incorrect Headings order affect your ranking positions?
What we are talking about here is if you had a page with a H1 tag followed by H3 then H2 instead of the correct order of H1, H2 then H3.
Google confirmed that this will not affect your ranking positions but they don’t recommend doing it. I personally wouldn’t waste too much time on fixing pages but consider when creating new ones.
How many times does Google change your Meta Description tag?
As you know the Meta Description tag is one of the two tags used in search results that you have control over, or so we thought.
Analysis has shown that over 60% of first-page description tags are changed by Google.
You might think why bother creating them?
That 60% are probably for pages that someone who hasn’t manually created them and are not very good so Google changes them to something better.
The Description tag is your best option to increase CTR (click through rate) to your website.
So, keep writing! 🙂
Guest Blog Posts don’t help your SEO
That’s what Google has stated this month. Is it their way of stopping you game the system and use guest blog posts? Who knows.
SEO reasons aside guest blog posts are still a very good way to marketing your business and get it seen by a new audience.
Can lots of outbound links hurt your website?
If they are normal, related outbound link and not spammy to sites not connected to the site or subject, then you can really have as many as you like and it shouldn’t affect your website.
Your website will not be negatively affected by the search engines.
Does the new image licence markup help with rankings?
Recently a new markup was released that allows you to state the license of images on your site. It is a good idea and should help the creator of the images.
But, by adding this markup to your site it will not help it rank any better, sorry.
Does having keywords in domain names, help with your ranking?
Google will say that a very small signal is given by the domain name in deciding where your website should rank.
What they did also say is that if they can not crawl the content on the page, say it was behind a paywall, then they might use the domain name more.
Read into that as much as you like. 🙂
Sitemaps should include your main pages
That statement might sound obvious but many site owners are not including their main pages and category pages in their sitemap.xml file because those pages are already indexed.
Bing have confirmed that you really really should include them.
Do links from Wikipedia help your website rank?
Google has said that there are zero benefits to gaining links from Wikipedia for SEO.
If this is part of your link building technique it might actually be harming your site.
All links from Wikipedia are nofollow so there is no SEO link juice from them. But if you do start randomly adding links there, Google could use this as a signal that you are falsely link building and give you a penalty. Be careful!
That’s it for this month, don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter and receive this report directly into your inbox!