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.