SEO Update Report Covering September 2018
Stuart Cole
Welcome to the latest SEO update report covering all the important changes that happened in September 2018.
First off I’m sorry this is a little late, we have been very busy rolling out new SEO audits for our clients.
Algorithm’s
Oh boy what a month for algorithm updates!
Lots of chatter around the 8th as well as at the end of the month around the 27th September.
Google have confirmed these updates occurred.
Basically the updates were to re-evaluate the quality of the content on the sites and update their ranking positions. They have said if your website has dropped it isn’t because it has been penalised, just it is not as good as other websites out there to answer the query.
TIP: If you have lost some positions look at the sites beating you and update your page to be even better!
GDPR
You may have noticed this yourself since the due date of GDPR. Some websites outside of Europe are not displaying their content to visitors from Europe because of GDPR. Instead they display a message explaining this. Essentially they don’t want to be GDPR compliant so stopping all European visitors.
First off, what silly silly people they are!
Google knows this is happening and that the traffic from Google.com to these websites is not providing the experience Google wants.
They are looking into this, it wouldn’t surprise me if their websites disapear from European searches.
For European websites this is really good news, less competition from some big US websites!
If your rankings go up soon it could be related to this, keep an eye on your rankings!
I will report as soon as I hear anything.
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.
Content Date
Google have said that they will keep displaying the original created date of the page or post even if updated.
However, if a large amount of content has changed they will display the modified date in their search results instead.
They are doing this because we know that Google lke recent content and people think changing the date their post was published will make it look more recent, it doesn’t.
Speed
My favourite SEO subject was mentioned this month by Google. They have said that you should try and get your page speed to less than 100ms.
WHAT!!
That is quite hard to do. The sites I design and create are normally around the half a second to load, and that’s not that easy.
Good luck everyone!
Sitemap
Google have said that sitemap files need to be located in the parent folder of the files it contains.
So, if the file lists all the URL’s in the /TEST/ folder you could put the sitemap in that folder or the ROOT.
Most people will just keep their sitemaps in the ROOT folder or use a dynamic sitemap, but interesting to know.
Image Search
Google have released a new algorithm for image searches that now looks more at the website as well as the image.
- It now checks the authority of the website, this will benefit those high authoritive websites.
- Also where the image is being displayed on the page – higher the better – so make sure your most important images are high up the page and using all the Tags!
- And of course how recent the image/post is.
Google rarely makes changes to their Search algorithm, I think this is quite a big one and brings it inline – partially – with the main search index.
Title Tags
There have been some talk that Google have increased the length of the search results title field – Tag – from 55 chars to 67 chars.
I’ve not seen any examples of this but interesting news!
I will report back if/when this happens as it will provide more real estate for the most important of META tags.
That’s it for this month, don’t forget to come back next month. You can get a reminder if you sign up to our newsletter or just follow us on social media.
If you know of someone who would benefit from this information, please share. Thanks! 🙂
