Juicy SEO – Monthly Online Marketing Report Covering September 2016

Welcome to this month’s edition of the Juicy SEO online marketing report where we condense all the changes and important news into a 2 minute read, as per normal we have a Glossary at the bottom to remind you which algorithm does what.

This month our report is mainly to do with a major update that has recently happened, Penguin 4.0 is now live and in the wild!

So, lets get to it…

Penguin

As this algorithm update is major news we will focus a little more than normal on this subject and explain what has changed and how it will affect you.

Real Time

This is the 4th version (4.0) of this algorithm and it will also be the last, this is because they moved the ‘code’ of Penguin into their main core ranking engine which ‘scores’ website pages continuously. Therefore, Penguin will be real time and any penalties given due to bad links will happen instantly. The good news though is that once you clean up your bad links your site should recover instantly too.

New Links

As Google will be checking your links all the time this also includes new links to your site, it means keeping a close eye on your links in case they affect your ranking positions.

Per-Page Not Per-Site

The new version of the Penguin algorithm does not assess links to your website but more to your web pages. Therefore, if Google penalises your site for a bad link it should just affect the page it is linked to and not the whole site. This is great news as you should be able to manage your link building strategy and see if certain links penalise your website.

Recovery

Once you have cleaned up your bad links you might expect to bounce back up to where your website once ranked, sadly that is unlikely. Google will instead of penalising your site and devalue the links they will simply just ignore them.

Therefore, if you once ranked no:1 for ‘Keyword Research’ and got hit with a Penguin penalty, the recovery will just ignore the link juice of those bad links so you won’t get any help at all from them. Your site should still move up the rankings as you are no longer penalised, just not as high as you once were.

One final thing about Penguin, well for this month anyway. Google have said that the roll out of Penguin 4.0 was their best roll out to date. Which isn’t surprising really is it as it took them 2 years to do it!

Local SEO

This month Google’s local algorithm received an update too, this time, the update was to target spam results.

API’s

If you provide an API for developers to access data from your site then this might be of interest. Google have said if your API requires a DOfollow link to access the API it is the same as a paid link and therefore against Google’s guidelines.

Widgets

If you are a provider of Widgets for webmasters to add to their site, Google this month have stressed that all the links back to you must be NOfollow, not a surprise here but good to be reminded of.

Links

Google this month said an interesting thing about links, “To get more traffic to your site you don’t necessarily need more links”. Is this a smoke screen to try and stop people link building or are they devaluing links?

AdWords

If you are a user of Google Adwords (PPC) you would have most likely been informed that the length the text can be for the adverts is to increase therefore allowing more “Words for your Buck”. We believe it is going live early 2017.

AMP

AMP sites have been seeing a considerable amount of traffic increase over the last couple of weeks, AMP is not for everyone but it is worth looking at to see if it will help your business.

Mobile SEO

Over the last couple of months in our SEO reports we have mentioned Google might penalise mobile websites that have pop-ups which fully cover or cover a large percentage of the screen when the page loads. This month they have added more information on this, sites can also be penalised if the pop-up appears after scrolling half way down the page. This is interesting as there are many social media sharing widgets that work like this.

Algorithms

Google this month highlighted that now Penguin 4.0 (oops sorry I mentioned it again) is live you should expect to see more algorithm updates coming in the near future and that this will never stop. Great! 🙁

Rankings

We are expecting to see a lot of fluctuations in ranking figures over the next week or so as Penguin calms down, so don’t panic if your rankings are not looking too good. If you need some help just drop us a line.

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.

Google’s Quality Update – NEW!

There has been a lot of speculation since the start of May that one or more of Google’s algorithms has had an update. The reason is that there has been a lot unusual ranking movements over the last few weeks which were not expected, out of the ordinary.

Initially it was thought to be a Panda algorithm update as it looked to target websites with low quality content. However Google have recently confirmed that it wasn’t an algorithm update at all but the introduction of their Quality Update Algorithm (it has been called the Phantom Update in the past too).

So what’s the difference?

The difference between the new Quality Update and Google’s Panda update

Lets start off with a quick reminder that Google has an algorithm called Panda which analyses the quality of the content on webpages and penalises them if they deem the quality of the content is thin or of low quality. Panda is meant to run around once a month which when ran can change a large percentage of ranking positions for lots of websites. That said though we haven’t seen a Panda update since October 2014.

This new Quality Update Algorithm doesn’t penalise webpages but in fact the complete opposite, it rewards webpages which have good content. This (we think) is a first for Google actually rewarding websites for good work! Could this be the way the search engine is going to go in the future, reward instead of penalise? We will see…

That said the results of the Quality Update Algorithm and Panda are very similar, websites with good content get ranked better than websites with poor content.

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Something else which is interesting about this update is that it only affects the page rather than the whole website, so if you have a 10 page website and only 1 page has good content then 9 pages will not get a ranking pat on the back. This should ensure that the content across the website is of better quality. It also means you can look at the pages that are not performing well and work on the content to help it out.

As mentioned above when Panda actually runs it updates in one big change, this new Quality Update Algorithm is different as it is continuously running so we shouldn’t see big movements now from it. The UP side of this means if your website has poor quality and you spend a bit of time and make it superb you don’t need to wait until an algorithm update to run to see the rewards.

So you can make the changes to your webpage and wait a few days for Google to crawl your website, or you could use Google Webmaster Tools (or Google Search Console as it is now called) to ask them to re-crawl your site. You should be able to see if it has made any difference very quickly, this is great for A/B testing!

Over the last few months we have seen some big changes in Google, with Google’s Mobile Algorithm update and the advantages of having HTTPS secure servers even though they didn’t make much of a difference in the end. Maybe Google are making these changes for a longer term goal??

So the “Take Home” from this is:

Make sure every important page of your site has unique quality content

Mobilegeddon is here! Save the World!

Mobliegeddon, it’s a great word isn’t it?
It sounds like the world is going to end for mobiles or something, very dramatic!

However this is not going to happen so you can relax in the knowledge you will still be able to play Candy Crush on your tablet.
In fact ‘Mobilegeddon’ has been used to name the launch of a new algorithm from Google which ranks websites which are designed for mobile devices better than websites which are not. This will only affect searches using Google’s mobile search facility (ie: using Google from a mobile device).
The new algorithm was launched on 21st April 2015 and Google have said it will take a week to completely roll it out.

This isn’t something they have sprung on us, they gave us a ‘heads up’ on this a couple of months ago.

If you would like to know more about this algorithm update from Google read our blog post on Googles Mobile Algorithm or What is a Mobile Website?

I’m writing this post on the 26th April so 5 days into the roll out. Juicy SEO test new algorithm updates all year round and this one is no exception. To test this new update we have deliberately left sites out there which are absolutely shocking to use on a mobile device purely to watch the results of this change. We are also monitoring many other websites which are not mobile friendly to gather as much information as possible.

Mobilegeddon

So far after monitoring 1000s of keywords every day for many websites we have yet to see any real ranking differences between the standard search results and the mobile results. There have only been a few keywords with a very minimal difference (1 position difference for 4 keywords) which we do not think is related to this update.

This isn’t to say all these ranking positions won’t all change tomorrow as there are still few days left to go. Additionally we are monitoring UK based websites and the change just might not have filtered over the pond just yet. Google are rolling out the update Data-centre by Data-centre and it will take a week to do.
Additionally from what we have read from other SEOs based in the states it doesn’t sound like much has happened over there either.

Is there really an update coming?

Now the sceptic in me is thinking that if I ran a search engine and wanted to produce good search results for mobile devices, saying to all webmasters if you don’t make your website mobile friendly it will not rank well is a pretty good way to do it. After all users of Google whilst on mobile devices want search results which work well on their device, if the user is happy they will keep using Google.

In a recent survey it was reported that it is now a near 50/50 split of people using the internet on a mobile device compared with a desktop computer. This is clearly going to sway towards the mobile device very soon and Google know this, so providing a good search results for mobile devices will be very important for them. Other search engines are slowly catching Google up in terms of monthly users so they can’t sit on their laurels.

So all this end of the world style Mobilegeddon might just be a way to help Google get what they want?

This wouldn’t be the first time Google have done something like this, it wasn’t that long ago Google said that if you move your website to a secure server (SSL cert, using HTTPS) the website will receive a boost in their search results, even if only a little. From our test results it was a VERY little boost indeed!
However it did push some reluctant webmasters to secure their website, and we all want a secure internet so it wasn’t a bad result really was it?

Even if nothing comes of this it is still a win for website owners who have made their website mobile friendly as your visitors will appreciate it!

As said above we still have a few days to go and the ‘Mobile Friendly’ tag is being seen in mobile search results so who knows!

If you agree, disagree we would love to hear from you on our Facebook page or on Twitter.

What is a Mobile Website?

Recently there has been a lot of talk about mobile websites, Google have announced that they are making a change to their algorithm for mobile search results that will affect all non-mobile websites.

But what is considered a mobile website and what do I need to do so my website is not affected by this algorithm?

There are essentially 4 types of websites relating to mobile devices:

The old style website which doesn’t care about mobile devices, it doesn’t fit on ‎smaller screens and you have to pinch and zoom out to see the pages. The text is very small and the buttons are just a small.
Next are sites that have had some coding put in place so the website fits on your mobile phone or tablet. You still need to pinch for somethings and the buttons are often too small for fat fingers. They look like the desktop version but on a smaller screen. This is often seen as a suitable fix for a mobile responsive website.

The next one is a mobile designed website, when your website is viewed on a phone the buttons are thumb sized, the menu options are easy to navigate on a small screen (often using the hamburger icon) and images are smaller so it is quicker to load the page. Remember Google likes fast loading pages and it is now thought to be part of their main search algorithm.
Finally the website that has be tailored for their mobile visitors. Identifying the details they are looking for and having these details near the top of the page. If having your website shared on social media is important then make sure you have the ‘share this page’ buttons easy to get to. If you are a shop or restaurant for example, somewhere people can actually visit then your location, address, click-able phone number, map and maybe Sat Nav functions might be important. Real thought on what mobile users need from your website.

Ok so now you know what needs to be done, who should you call? One word….

Ghostbusters!

…sorry couldn’t resist.

The obvious person is your website developer (or company), anyone who makes websites worth their salt will know what to do. Ask them for examples of their work to make sure and test on your own mobile device (or several if you have). If they haven’t got one to show then it’s time to find someone new as they are very behind the times!

…the biggest search engine ranking shake-up for several years…

The next question you might ask yourself is…

Is my current website already mobile friendly?

There are many tools and simulators out there which test websites for this however there is really only one you need to satisfy, and that is Google’s!

This is a link to their test, enter in your website to find out.

Google Mobile Website Test Page

If this tools says your site is not mobile ready then you need to makes some changes.

On 21st April 2015 Google will be rolling out an algorithm update which will take about a week to complete, it will affect websites that are not designed for mobile devices.

It is looking like it could be the biggest search engine ranking shake-up for several years, so expect your traffic figures to change either up or down. Of course if your website is already ready for this update your competitors might not be, you could do one of two things here:

Let your competitors know they are just about to lose a lot visitors to their website and they should make their website mobile ready.
Or you could just let them figure it out for themselves and you can have all their customers. It would teach them for not following Juicy SEO would it!

The algorithm update will N‎OT affect your website in normal desktop search results, however it is now nearly 50/50 users of the internet use mobile devices to surf, wouldn’t you be silly to ignore?!
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Want to know what else is happening in the world of SEO? Head over to our latest Monthly Search Engine Optimisation 2min update!