Juicy SEO – Monthly Online Marketing Report covering July 2016
Welcome to the latest SEO and Online Marketing report covering all the important changes for July 2016.
July tends to be a quiet month for updates and this year is no exception, however, here are the most important ones!
2 Minute Online Marketing Report
Google Ranking Factor
Google have confirmed that product pricing is NOT a ranking factor for Google Shopping or their main search results. Of course in Google Shopping you can sort by Price.
Sitemaps
If you change the name or move the location of your Sitemap.xml file it will not affect your ranking positions. Google and Bing will adjust and continue using the new file in the new location. Just remember to inform them using Search Console!
Penguin Algorithm Update
Our monthly update on the Penguin algorithm update, Google said it’s coming! But then again so is Christmas!
Pop-ups!
Google have said if you use Pop-ups on page load then there is a possibility that Google will use the content in the Pop-up as the content for the page. This could affect your webpages ranking possibilities considerable so worth checking!
Short Articles
Google have confirmed that short articles do not get penalised because they are short, if the content is of quality then it will be fine no matter how long.
Linking Out
Google have confirmed that there isn’t a penalty for NOT linking out to external websites, that said they did say a while ago that it might help your website if you do link out to an authoritative site for the subject.
Adwords Extension
Google have added a new extension to Adwords called ‘Price Extension’. As the name suggests you can now add prices to your advert additional to the normal advert description.
Twitter
Twitter has now opened up their “Verified” account to everyone. These are those small blue ticks that confirm that the account is the official one for the business or person. If you use Twitter it is well worth doing, here is more on this: Why Should I Get My Twitter Account Verified?
Redirects
Google confirmed once again this month that pages that redirect to another using 301 or 302 will not loose any pagerank. This is not new news but good to remind ourselves of this.
Longer Descriptions for Adwords
Google launched longer text fields for Adwords, this will allow you to fill in more information about your product or service.
Facebook
Facebook have changed their algorithm to ensure more posts from your “Friends” are seen in your timeline than posts from pages you follow. This is a big change for businesses using Facebook, more can be found here: Facebook to increase friends posts
Yahoo! has! a! new! owner!
Verizon bought Yahoo! for $4.8 billion, we will see what that do with their new purchase!
Juicy SEO – Monthly Online Marketing Report covering June 2016
Welcome to this month’s SEO and online marketing report covering June 2016.
Quite a bit has happened over the last month so we will dive straight in…
Put the Paper down!
Penguin 4.0
News on the Penguin 4.0 update, a quick reminder that this version of the algorithm will continuously update so it is the last ‘major’ Penguin update we should see. Google have said ‘it is not too long now!’. Hmm heard that before!
Mobile
In the past Google have ‘scored’ your websites speed for their mobile search results with the same results they use to help rank your desktop version of your website. This just doesn’t make sense and Google know this. They have said this month that a mobile version of their speed test is on its way. Please please make sure your website is not only mobile friendly but also usable on ALL mobile devices!
Tools
Google have created a new tool aimed at small businesses to help them fix slow websites both mobile and desktop versions and identify what they need to do to make their website mobile friendly.
Worth a look: https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/
Page Titles
Google doesn’t care if you use Underscores ‘_’, Dashes ‘-‘ or Pipes ‘|’ in your page title tags, just pick the one you like the most! Tip: Commas are most like English sentences, therefore easier to read.
Page URL’s
Also this month Google confirmed that they don’t care which of the following you use in your URL, Underscores or Dashes. They seem to be in a non-caring mood at the moment!
TLD
If you are thinking of moving your website to a new industry version of a TLD (see glossary) like www.juicyseo.seo instead of www.juicyseo.co.uk it will not give you any advantage in their page ranking results. Phew because that is a lot of work to do that!!
Social Media
Google confirmed once again that Social Media is not used to decide their search ranking results. We do know that quantity of traffic to a page can help your website page perform better so Social Media can affect it indirectly.
Gossip
Some ‘old school’ SEO gossip raised it’s head again this month. It has in the past be thought by many SEO’s that if they see a large spike in their search ranking positions then a new Google algorithm was about to be rolled out, this is completely untrue and Google confirmed that once more this month.
Googler
An interesting conversation occurred this month with a Googler. Google’s quality algorithms might and most likely do not ‘judge’ your website right away but wait for a little while before penalising your site. This makes it very hard to see what new or changed content has affected the page ranking if affected by a penalty.
Authorship
Remember the ‘Authorship Markup‘?
A couple of years ago Google asked webmasters to create this markup on their website so they could use the data in their search results. Well, this month Google have confirmed that we all can remove them again as they are not using them anymore. Nothing like wasting a bit of time is there!?
Search Console
If you use Google Search Console (shame on you if you are not!) then you will know the maximum amount of data they hold for you to use is 90 days. Google this month have said that this will increase in the future. This is very good news!
AMP
AMP is a bit of a new buzz word, we have mentioned AMP a lot over the months but this month Google have said that it is an area for SEO’s to concentrate on. This is a BIG tip. If you are not aware of AMP here is a link to all the info you need! https://www.ampproject.org/
Rankbrain
Google have confirmed that their Rankbrain ‘algorithm’ doesn’t score websites so it is not possible to optimise for it. If your SEO says they are optimising for Rankbrain then simply say:
“Liar liar your pants are on fire!”.
Adwords
Google Adwords now offers buttons called ‘Click to Text‘. As the name suggest the customer-to-be just clicks the button in the Adwords advert and they can text directly to the seller.
Juicy SEO Tip
Our Tip for this month is to think about search results that have been created using Voice. Roughly about 30% of all Google searches are via voice and it will grow very quickly. Think about the way people say sentences instead of writing. There will be a lot of questions!
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.
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.
Juicy SEO – Monthly Online Marketing Report for May 2016
Welcome to this month edition of Juicy SEO’s monthly SEO and online marketing report. Lots have happened this month so let’s get right to the most important changes that could affect your website:
100% you will learn something!
Content
We have all heard that Quality is more important than Quantity haven’t we, however, this month Google have confirmed that it is highly possible that if you remove and de-index weaker content on your website leaving the best quality content, the website could perform better and have better quality of visitor which leads to increase of conversions.
Sitemaps
If you are changing your URLs of your website and need to set up a lot of 301 redirects Google have said that you should not leave the old Sitemap.xml file in Search Console for longer than 6 months. Once the new URLs are indexed from your new Sitemap remove the old Sitemap with the old URLs. By leaving two sets of the Sitemap with two sets of URLs will only confuse Google.
Google Analytics and Search Console have become a little bit more connected, if you connect the two tools you will now see some Search Console data in Google Analytics. Why don’t they just combine the two fully and have done with it??
Google’s Search Console has also had a new function added called ‘Sets’. This allows you to create a ‘Set’ of domains and group them together. This is useful if (as you should have) you have entries for www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com. Not a lot of functionality in it at the moment but we think it will increase in time.
Google
Google have been performing a lot of tests this month on how search results are displayed, we don’t think they have settled on anything yet. This consists of colour changes, font size and the amount of white space on the page.
Google are trying to become even quicker when indexing new content. At the moment if you regularly create content Google will most likely index the new page within minutes, a little longer if you don’t create as much content. Well, Google are not happy with this and want to index ALL regular content INSTANTLY! (I know upper caps, it’s that of a big deal!).
Do you use Google’s ‘Image Search’, good isn’t it? Well, there will now be adverts within the results too. It was going to happen!
Mobile
May saw the release of the latest version of the Mobile Friendly Algorithm being updated, version 2. It was rolled out slowly so no sudden changes for most websites, in fact, many people didn’t even notice (We did!).
Google News
Some Google News, news for you. If you have a ‘local’ website which reports of local news and a large event occurs in your location which is picked up by national news, Google will push your local version up high in the Google News section, even higher than the big ones like CNN and BBC.
Bing
Bing are also testing a lot of new design changes including a carousel like Googles.
Penalties
An interesting thing that came out this month, if your website receives a penalty from Google for being naughty and you decide to create a new website and simply redirect the old site to the new, the penalty will also follow. So don’t do that! In fact, what they did also say is that there isn’t a safe way to redirect a website with a penalty to a new website. Be a good boy or girl and this won’t be an issue anyway!
Adwords and PPC
Google Adwords has had a big redesign which now allows you to include more text in your advert, to name one of the changes (the most important one really).
And finally our monthly Penguin algorithm update report. For regular readers, you will know we (the whole world) have been waiting for Google to update their Penguin algorithm (see glossary below). Sadly still no news and nothing from Google to make us think it is coming soon.
This months SEO and PPC Tip, follow Juicy SEO on Twitter and Facebook as we post LOADS of tips all the time!
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.
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.
Juicy SEO – Monthly Online Marketing Report for April 2016
Welcome to this month’s Juicy SEO Online Marketing report covering April 2016. As months go this month wasn’t the busiest in terms of search engine changes which will affect your websites. Of course, all the search engines conduct tests and cosmetic changes but this report is purely for useful facts on how to help your website perform better, and we try to keep down to a 2 minute read.
So with the introduction over and done with let’s get on with it…
Even the National Geographic are interested!
Penguin Algorithm
It wouldn’t be one of monthly reports if we didn’t include something about the Penguin algorithm. If you need a recap what each of the algorithms do there is a Glossary at the bottom of this post.
At the start of April there were a lot of talk from SEO’s in America that Google were testing a Penguin update has there were a lot of movement which an update from Penguin could have made. However, it only lasted a few hours before everything went back to normal. Is this Google testing the Penguin update or something else, or maybe just a bug? Who knows?
Just a reminder that the next Penguin update will most likely be the last one as from then onwards it will run in real time. Great news for everyone but bad news for this monthly report. 🙁
Google have said that they will inform webmasters when they will roll out the latest Penguin algorithm update, which is nice of them. We will, of course report as soon as it has happened.
Google have confirmed that if you upgrade your webserver to HTTP2 you will not get any ranking help from the search engine, however, your website should perform faster.
Outbound links
Google have sent out another set of messages to many webmasters via Search Console concerning outbound links. If Google thinks the links on your website to other site are ‘spammy’ they will send you a message asking you to add a rel=”nofollow” META tag to the link or remove them. If you haven’t checked already we recommend that you sign onto Search Console and check for a message.
If you are a Juicy SEO client, then don’t worry we have this all in hand! 🙂
The Title tag
Although Google say they do not use the Title tag on images to help the page rank, we know differently! Juicy SEO have been using image Title tags when optimising our clients images for years and have seen very quick positive results. This month however, a public test was conducted which also proved the same.
A good tip: If you are having trouble to rank well for a certain keyword try using an image to rank for it instead!
Click Jacking
Click Jacking websites are being penalised by Google. These are websites that display an advert but when you click on the advert a pop-up or a new window is created taking you to some other dimension, or possibly just another website. This is used for forcing the visitor onto a website that they didn’t want to go to.
Website Speed
As we reported a couple of weeks ago on our social media channels, Google have said that the speed of your website if slow will not negatively affect your ranking position unless you have been informed from Google themselves. However, it is highly recommended to try and make your page load as fast as possible for the visitor as a slow = bored visitor!
Pay Per Click – PPC
PPC news, this month Google rolled out a new Adwords tag that replaces the tag you add to your ‘Thank you’ page to record conversions. The reason for this is that the new tag will provide better results for your Adwords campaign. The problem with the old tag was if the user kept refreshing the ‘Thank you’ page the refreshes were being counted as new conversions.
That’s it for this month, of course, we are continuously adding posts to our Twitter and Facebookpages if you want to learn more or be informed of changes like the new Penguin update as soon as it happens. If you find our report useful and know of someone who would too please share!
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.
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.
Juicy SEO – Monthly Online Marketing Report for February 2016
Welcome to the February 2016 Juicy SEO Online Marketing report! In case you missed previous months reports they can all be found in ourMonthly Online Marketing Blog, head over as there is a lot of good tips to help your website perform better.
As per normal, we have squished a whole months worth of important SEO, PPC and Online Marketing news into a 120-second read, enjoy!
1. Lets start with the biggest news for this month and this time it affects both SEO and PPC. Google have started to roll out a change to their search results that they will no longer show Adverts (AdWords PPC) on the right-hand side but instead to increase the amount of adverts at the top and bottom of the main search results. This is obviously bad news for SEO as we now have more adverts ‘pretending’ to be organic results. But on the flip side, it is good news for PPC! If you would like to know more about this very important change head over to our Google removes right-hand side adverts in search results page.
2. If you have been reading our monthly reports for a while you will know that Google and other search engines do not like Link Networks. Every so often Google penalises the sites that use these networks and when they do it can take a long time to get your search engine rankings back to where they were. This month Google penalised a large Link Network in Japan. Although we haven’t seen Google hit a Link Network for a while it does go to show that they are still checking!
3. Google have confirmed what we already knew, the reviews in Google Local are not a search ranking factor.
4. Google also confirmed that 302 redirects WILL pass link juice to websites, however with that said 302 is a temporary redirect and you should move to 301 if the redirect is permanent.
5. If you were thinking of changing your websites URL’s to include keywords, Google says it is not worth it as it is a very small ranking factor. That said, did we just hear Google tell us a Ranking Factor! 🙂 We would recommend adding your keywords to new URL’s though as ‘every little helps!’
6. The age old SEO theory of if you see a spike in your traffic from Google crawling it must mean that a new algorithm update is coming. The reason behind people thinking this is that they think Google is gathering the most up to date indexed pages so the update is more effective. Google however, have confirmed this is rubbish as the system that crawls websites is not connected to algorithms.
7. The SEO industry noticed a large drop (more than 20%) in websites with Reviews Rich Snippets. These are the little stars next to the search results in Google. A bug was later found by Google and we are now seeing the review stars returning. Phew!
8. Google sent out a large amount of Hreflang notifications to webmasters Search Console recently, if you use Hreflang we recommend that you check your Search Console. Of course, Juicy SEO clients do not need to worry about this as we monitor your Search Console for you!
9. AMP was launched to the World this month, AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, it is a way to display websites faster for static content on mobile devices. Google is heavily behind this project and this month said that websites that use AMP will not have a better chance of ranking in search results. We are willing to bet that it won’t be long until it will though! We will let you know when you should be seriously looking at AMP so keep reading our future reports or follow us on Social Media.
10. It wouldn’t be a Juicy SEO report if we didn’t mention the up and coming Penguin algorithm update. The story (shortened version) so far…. Google said in the middle of 2015 that the new Penguin algorithm will be live by September, then it was November. Then in December they said it is ready to make live but didn’t want to because of the holidays so they will run in the first couple of weeks of 2016. Then, in January they informed us it will be live for definitely in the first quarter of 2016. So this month’s update, they have said ‘It will be live once it is ready!’. We think they will miss that deadline too! 🙂
Juicy SEO Monthly Report Covering January 2016
Welcome to the January 2016 edition of Juicy SEO’s Monthly SEO Report, Happy New Year! 🙂
As per the last couple of years we will be continuing out monthly look at SEO and online marketing and remove all the fluffy that doesn’t really help your website perform better and highlighting all the good stuff!
We will as per normal try and keep it down to 120 seconds so you get the information you need as quick as possible so you can get on with the rest of your day.
General SEO News
– Google have recommended that you do NOT use decimal points in your pages URL, the search engine says it makes it hard for them to understand the page.
– This month Google explained that links to websites from your own do not help your website rank better (we wrote a short blog post on this on our Google ranking factor found page), obviously the link will help the other website.
– At the top of the search results in Google you may have noticed a box containing an answer to your query. This is called ‘Featured Snippets’ and it is a section from a website which Google has decided provides the best answer. Many people in the SEO industry, myself included feel this is a disadvantage to the content owners website as it could stop the reader clicking to their site. However Google this month have said that Featured Snippets do not reduce the amount of visitors to websites but in fact increases them! hmm.
Featured Snippet example
– AOL search engine is now powered by Bing. This and other changes to Bing’s search engine has helped it gain a bigger slice of the searches (incidentally, Google is still by far the biggest search engine but their grip has loosened slightly).
– Mid January we saw some major movements in search results across the board, ‘Was this the Penguin update we have been waiting for?’No. In fact, it was a Core ranking update (not including Panda – see below) so the wait for the Penguin update continues…
– Speaking of the Core search ranking algorithm (CSRA), Google have now confirmed that the Panda algorithm is now part of the CSRA.
– This month a test was carried out and found that 25% of 10,000 searches were websites which had SSL (HTTPS). We expect this to increase in time and therefore if your website has not currently got an SSL certificate and you are in a competitive industry you should consider securing your site.
– Google have said that the new version/update of their Penguin algorithm WILL be live in the first quarter of this year. Don’t blame me if I don’t hold my breath though!
– Google is now using their Search Console more to send out messages to website owners, these messages should not be received unnoticed as some are very important for your website. Of course all Juicy SEO clients don’t need to worry as we do this for you.
– Google paid Apple $1B in 2014 to provide search results for IOS devices; with all the talk going around that Apple are creating their own search engine, surely it is a better commercial decision to keep earning $1B per year for no work?
– As you may know, Google has it’s own search engine for Images (Example), this month they have said that although they do try and index new images as quick as possible they do not update indexed images with the same URL that often. Therefore, if you are using Google image search to gain traffic (and it is a very good way to do that) and you want to index a new image, then make sure the URL is also new. It does mean however the old image is still indexed.
– And finally Bing have changed their logo this month, didn’t Google do that not so long ago? Hmm, the word ‘sheep’ comes to mind! Anyway here is the new logo next to the older yellow version and the original one.
Bing logo 2016
If you missed previous monthly reports, don’t worry they are all in our monthly SEO section.
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.
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.
Juicy SEO Monthly Report Covering December 2015
Welcome to the December 2015 edition of Juicy SEO’s Monthly SEO Report, if you have missed any other reports for previous months don’t worry they are all HERE.
As per every month we condense all the important SEO and online marketing news in a quick and handy 120 second read, so here goes…
Juicy SEO 120 second Monthly SEO Report
General SEO News
– If you are a regular reader of our Monthly SEO reports then you will remember we have been saying December is the month Google will release the latest version of their Penguin algorithm. It seems that they left it a little too late in December to make live as they have now decided to delay until 2016. If they made it live too near the Christmas holidays and there were issues there wouldn’t be enough people at work to fix. Kind of makes sense.
– Google have created a new HTML framework which they have designed to speed up web pages and in particular, mobile pages. We won’t go into the details of it here (if you want to read up about it click here) as we will go off topic. The interesting thing about this though is that Google have said that they might give websites an advantage in their search results if you use this framework. There is a good chance this will happen as it follows similar advantages for SSL websites and Mobile friendly websites.
– Last month we mentioned a possible Google algorithm update (Nov 19th) which had affected many websites ranking positions but we weren’t 100% sure, in this instance we were right there was a Phantom (Quality Update) update in November.
– It also looks like there has been another Phantom update around the 10th December and again around on the 16th and 29th December, we have seen lots of movement around those days. The SEO community has also seen this.
– Google have decided to index any website that uses HTTPS ahead of the HTTP version even if you have set it up to default to HTTP.
– If you follow us on one of the many social media channels you would have read our posts in December about Google changing the way they count visitors to your website in Search Console. You might have seen an increase in the amount of visitors Google thinks were on your website due to this change.
– Google have said that their robot can not see hyperlinks which are invoked by the cursor hovering over the button and therefore, would not be able to use to help the website. We can’t think why you would want a button on your website which you don’t click but that might be just us?
This Month’s SEO Tip
This month’s SEO Tip is to do with Sitemaps. Every website should have a sitemap.xml file which you can use to inform search engines of new content to your website. It helps them index pages quicker. If your website is large it makes sense to split up your sitemap, you could have the main Index version which lists all the other sitemap versions inside it. You would then only need to tell the search engines about the Index version.
So, why would you do this?
By splitting up your content into separate sitemap files you can identify which types of content index better. For example, if one of your sitemaps is for Categories and more pages are indexed compared to your Posts sitemap it could be down to the way the page (template) is designed. Just another little signal to help you understand why certain pages are indexing better than others.
As mentioned on Social Media and in last month’s report we have some VERY exciting news which we will be announcing soon about Social Media. You will not want to miss but as it is about Social Media we will be announcing it on Social Media (kind of makes sense doesn’t it). So follow us on Twitter and Facebookso you don’t miss out!
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.
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.
Juicy SEO Monthly Report Covering November 2015
Welcome to another edition of Juicy SEO’s Monthly SEO Report, first off if you missed last month’s SEO report then you should quickly read it so you are fully up to date, here is a link to our monthly SEO report for October 2015.
Lots going on so we will go straight to it as our aim as normal is to condense a whole month’s SEO changes into a 120 seconds read, so here goes….
General SEO News
– We all know now how important a mobile friendly website is for Google and their mobile version of their search result algorithm, well now it looks like Bing will be releasing a mobile version of their algorithm too. So expect the same penalty if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website. We are expecting this to be rolled out in the first quarter of 2016.
Did we mention that some big news in Social Media is coming?!
– Google has reminded small business and website owners not to analyse big websites and try and copy how they do their SEO, Google said ‘…you would be surprised how many get it wrong…’ when talking about big companies SEO campaigns. Nothing to learn from there but it’s nice to hear. We at Juicy SEO analyse big and small websites all the time and we can back Google’s comments up, we have seen some shockers!
– Around the 18th/19th of November there looks to have been a Google update of some kind, Google are saying there hasn’t been an algorithm update but there are too many SEOs saying something has happened. We too have seen a lot of movement in the ranking results. We do not think it is an algorithm update but maybe a refresh of some kind.
– This month Google have said AGAIN that the new Penguin algorithm update is very close, they have a date but can’t say when it is yet. To us that means that they have finished the work and are ready to hit the GO button.
– Google are making lots of changes to Google+, this is most likely due to the lack of interest people are having with the social network. They are cleaning the mobile interface to make it easier to navigate among other work.
Juicy SEO 120 second Monthly SEO Report
That’s the lot for this month, however, we are expecting THE BIG PENGUIN news in December!
This Month’s SEO Tip
This month’s tip is something we at Juicy SEO say to all our clients, and, in fact anyone else who will listen and has now been advised by Google as well,
Be Consistent!
– If you are writing blog posts, keep to a schedule.
– Make sure your website is designed consistently throughout the site (buttons, image naming etc).
– Internal links.
– External links for that matter too!
This is also is something you should consider when posting on Social Media, consistency will be big in 2016!
As I mentioned Social Media we have some VERY exciting news which we will be announcing soon about Social Media. You will not want to miss but as it is about Social Media we will be announcing it on Social Media (kind of makes sense doesn’t it). So follow us on Twitter and Facebookso you don’t miss it!
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.
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.
TDL: A TLD means Top Level Domain like .com or .net or .co.uk.
Juicy SEO Monthly Report Covering October 2015
Welcome to another Juicy SEO’s Monthly SEO Reportwhere you will be informed of all the important changes in SEO from over the last month. So get a cup of Tea or Coffee and a couple of biscuits and find out what has happened in the ever changing world of SEO for October 2015.
General SEO News
– This month Google confirmed if you have duplicate content on the same site and you haven’t set up canonical tags then it will choose the shortest URL to index. What this means is if you think or know you have more than one copy of the same content (text) on more than one page of your website you should use a HTML tag called canonical. This will inform the search engines which page should be indexed.
– Google released a new algorithm, clearly they need more algorithms! This one will target hacked websites, the idea is to remove hacked sites from their index. This is expected to affect around 5% of searches. Google are trying to remove spam websites which are just a real pain. Good news for website owners whose site have not been hacked.
Incidentally we have an interesting post coming soon which shows you how you can tell if your website is hacked, not as obvious as you would think!
– If you think some of the pages on your website are being penalised by the Panda algorithm Google have recommended not to remove the pages but to improve the content instead. You can of course use the <noindex> tag to inform the search engines not to index the page if you don’t have the time to update the content.
– We reported a few months ago in our monthly report that more people are using Mobile devices to search via Google than desktop computers in the UK. This month it has moved on a little more as this is now the case for all searches for the whole world rather than just the UK and a few other countries.
– More updates from the Panda algorithm (see Glossary below to remind you which algorithm is which) over the last couple of weeks, lots of websites affected.
A big statement from Google!!
– There has been reports in the SEO world the Google updated their core ranking algorithm, this happened around 21st/22nd October. If your ranking positions changed around then it is most likely due to this.
– Yahoo and Google have made an agreement for Yahoo to show Google search results and adverts. This is not live yet but should be in the coming months. If you are not performing well on Bing but only Google then this is good news for you as at the moment Yahoo only shows Bing results (plus their own).
– A big statement from Google recently that 40% of the top 5 search results are now Apps. That is a huge figure, if an App would help your business then now might a good time to create one.
– Google have said on record that there will be a Penguin update before the end of the year. We think there is still time to sort out your bad links to your website now but don’t hang around!
Juicy SEO 120 second Monthly SEO Report
This Months SEO Tip
This months tip HAS to be about APPs, as mentioned above they are being seen in search results by a LOT of people and now is the time to utilise this.
So for this example we will pick the most non-APP type online business we can think of here in the office to show you there is always a way. Lets say you are selling fish online, yep fish! What on earth can an online fish seller use an APP for?
Maybe:
Because APPs use push technology you can inform people of new products.
Recipes, we all like to know new ways to cook our fish don’t we? The APP could have a top 10 of Salmon dishes.
Increase sales, if the recipe says you need 20kg of Tuna (thats a lot!) then the APP could have button to buy quick and easy from you.
We could go on but I think you get the idea.
There are two ways you could create an APP, either in-house (you!) if you have the skills or happy to learn or to hire someone else to do it for you.
Our advice is start simple, don’t spend too much money or time and get it out there as quick as possible. You can always keep adding to it over time after it is live. Make sure your customers know what the APP will do as you don’t want bad ratings if they were expecting more or something different.
If you want more info or would like to ask us any questions on this head over to Twitter or Facebook, we only have 2mins so ran out of time here.
PS: Incidentally if you want to buy fish online try out Springs Smoked Salmon!
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.
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.
TDL: A TLD means Top Level Domain like .com or .net or .co.uk.
Juicy SEO Monthly Report Covering July 2015
Welcome to another edition of Juicy SEO’s monthly SEO report. Each month we highlight the important changes in the SEO industry which ALL webmasters, website owners and SEOs should know about. We de-clutter all the chitter-chatter about rumours and thoughts and tell you about the facts which you should act on.
So with that strong hard hitting start here is the News:
Juicy SEO 120 second Monthly SEO Report
General SEO News:
The big news is about the Panda refresh (see below for Panda explanation). Panda has finally started to roll out a refresh, and about time too as we haven’t seen a refresh since late last year. If you are a regular reader of our monthly SEO report (silly you if you are not) then you know this is a long time coming! The update will take a long time however, in the past a Panda refresh would take a couple of days to complete, this time however it will take MONTHS! The reason for this is that it is updating the Panda score per page rather than per site, so it basically has to score each websites page, when you say it like that you can see why it will take months.
If you are thinking of making changes to your website for this refresh we think you are too late, we understand that Google has already scored each page now and they are now updating their database. That said this is version 4.2 of Panda, it would make sense you should be ready for version 4.3 if you have missed it! Lets hope it won’t be another 10 or so months (for the record we are not expecting another refresh for at least 6 months!).
Incidentally the Panda 4.2 refresh is for all language and country websites not just English written sites.
Just so you know the SEO industry didn’t know this was going to happen this month, we knew it was coming as mentioned in many of our previous reports and social media posts but we didn’t know when.
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To help search engines (not just Google) find your new pages quicker and easier it is advised to submit a Sitemap.xml file for them to crawl. It is easy to do and there are lots of free plugins out there to create the file. Just sign into the search engines Webmaster Tools and add the file location. There is a Tag which can be used in the file which lets the search engines know when the page was last modified, called LastMod. In the past Google has taken this data into account. This month Google have confirmed that they no longer look at this tag.
Google has started sending out another bunch of messages via their Webmaster Tools site, the ones we have heard of are for Hrefland and CSS & JS blocking. If you have not received an email from Google about these it would be wise to check your Webmaster Tools account just to make sure. If you have any questions on these please contact us on either Twitter or Facebook and we will try and help out.
Penguin refresh (see below for Penguin explanation) is still months away, end of last year was last one. So this give you plenty of time to remove those bad links to your website.
Google has confirmed that they do not treat the different TLD’s (see below for explanation) of a website any differently unless they are country specific. If the TLD is country specific like .co.uk it will focus it more on the home market version of the search engine. Therefore if you are targeting an audience outside of your home country (international) you should look into a more international TLD.
In some of our previous monthly reports we have mentioned that content in Tabs which are not displayed at page open will not get the full SEO value that the tab which is defaulted to be open (see our SEO tip in May 2015 monthly report), now it looks like it has spread to the use of the CSS command ‘display: none;’. So just be a little careful with the content that is not being displayed at page load.
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.
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.
TDL: A TLD means Top Level Domain like .com or .net or .co.uk.
Juicy SEO Monthly Report for June 2015
Juicy SEO’s monthly SEO report only highlights changes to the search engines which affect how websites are marketed online, every month each of the search engines make many changes to their UX or add new functionality which we do not include. This month Google made a lot of these types of changes so our report might seem like it was a quiet month for them, but it really wasn’t.
If we feel that any of these more cosmetic changes will make a difference to how people find your website we will include in future monthly SEO reports. Just a reminder that these reports are for you to get the important information you need to help your website as quick as possible.
This is what has happened in the world of SEO and online marketing in June 2015:
General SEO News:
– Once again Google have said a new Panda algorithm update is coming very soon, they have been saying this for several months now but we think it will be in the next 2-3 weeks. A quick reminder the Panda algorithm value webpages on the quality of the content.
– Around the middle of June 2015 we saw some reasonably big changes in the ranking results for many sites, at first we thought the Panda update was finally here however Google have confirmed that this is not the case but just a core index refresh.
– Once again Google have confirmed that they make thousands of algorithm updates per year, this only highlights the continuous development of their search engine and the importance of making sure you are up to date with the changes.
– There has been a lot of talk once again within the SEO industry and on Google hangouts hosted by Google on the value of regular quality content on websites, this subject is here to stay folks so if you want to attract new traffic content creation is now becoming one of the main ways to do it.
– IOS app indexing has now started its roll out, this is when Google will include Apps from the IOS app store within the search results when using a mobile device. When you click on the link it will take you to the already installed App on your phone or to the App store for you to download the App. This highlights the recent increase in importance for having an App in certain industries.
– Google have made a change to their Google Maps navigation, if you enter in a destination like a business or a shop and your expected arrival time falls outside the opening time of the shop or business it will show a message stating the opening hours and ask if you still wish to start the navigation. Obviously this could stop some people visiting your business as it would be closed when they get there. It is a nice idea and quite handy. However it also highlights the importance of having your correct opening hours in your Google Business account. If you are even opening later just for one week it could be worth making sure your opening hours are updated.
– Google confirmed that more people in the UK are using mobile devices to search than desktop PCs. We have mentioned this was going to happen a lot over the last few months and not at all surprised it is finally here. It also shows if you want to know what it going to happen in the future for online marketing and SEO you should make sure you read our monthly SEO report. 🙂
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This Months SEO Tip:
Each month we like to offer up a little tip which will help your website perform better which you may not know about or just forgotten about it.
A trend which we feel will just continue is people using YouTube to find the answer to their questions. After all YouTube is actually a search engine in its own right so why not? An interesting statistic has been published recently, YouTube “How To” video searches are up by 70% with over 100 million hours watched in 2015 so far. If you are in an industry where you can create one or more “How To” video(s) then it might be time to get out your cine-camera!
If you missed last month’s report don’t worry, all the information is still relevant and available in May’s SEO monthly update report.
Juicy SEO Monthly Report for May 2015
Keeping up with the goings on in the world of online marketing and in particular SEO can be quite draining and very time consuming. But never fear as we have once again squished all the important news and changes from Google and the other search engines into our quick and easy 5 min SEO Monthly Update Report.
If you have not read one of our monthly SEO reports before they are designed to be short and to the point so you can be informed with the most important changes made by the search engines so you can help your website perform better. So we hope you enjoy and don’t forget to read our previous monthly reports as they are still relevant in our Search Engine News section.
This is what has happened in May 2015:
General SEO News:
Google confirmed that they have a new Quality Update algorithm which helps rate the quality of the content on a webpage. If you thought that is what Google’s Panda algorithm does then head over here to our Google’s Quality Update post to understand more on this. Content has always been King, now quality is the Queen!
If you are currently using Twitter here is some good news, Twitter feeds are now included into Google’s search engine results. These are mainly trending tweets but we have also seen many local based Tweets too. If you are not already actively using Twitter this news should highlight the importance of this social network for online businesses. To find out more on this head over to our Social Media Management page.
One of the important ways to help search engines know of new content is by making sure your sitemap.xml is up to date and submitted to all search engines. The sitemap.xml file has a couple of parameters which are called Priority and Change Frequency. In the past webmasters have used (and abused) these parameters to help certain content get more priority. Google have confirmed that they no longer use this two parameters.
Lots of rumours about Apple creating their own search engine, this would (most likely) only be for mobile devices if they do indeed create one. It would also replace Google and Bing one would think too. We all want another search engine to worry about don’t we! 🙂
Websites with Doorway Pages have been hit over the last week or so and their ranking positions have taken a slide. To remind you a Doorway page is if you have say 300 pages with the same content for 300 towns but only a few words have changed, namely the town names. Ie: Bristol Taxis, Essex Taxis, Birmingham Taxis etc… The reason they would do this is to try and target local based keyword terms.
If you are doing this or intend to do so soon, then we have one word for you, STOP! 🙂
The Google Panda update concentrates on the quality of the web page, if the algorithm thinks the page is of low quality it might penalise it in Google’s search results.
A little news on Penguin and Panda, Google in their own vague manor have said they will run the updates for these two algorithms faster. Helpful!
Penguin News (including link building):
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.
As above.
Pigeon News:
Google’s Pigeon algorithm concentrates on Local SEO, if you have a bricks and mortar business this is something you should take note of.
Lots of movement over the last couple of weeks with local based search terms, we are not sure if there was a bug or if Google are testing something, however everything now seems to be back to normal and how it was beforehand.
Mobile SEO:
Bing have announced that they too are rolling out a mobile algorithm similar to Google’s recent addition (link to Google’s mobile algorithm post). Bing’s will be a little different in that if a website is designed mobile friendly it will not get a ranking boost on mobile devices (like Google), Bing will continue to show the most relevant search results for the search term mobile friendly or not. They will have a ‘Mobile Friendly‘ label next to the website link though. More on this to come.
This is exciting news if your business has an App. Google have now started to include Apps within mobile search results. It is called App indexing and it works like this. If you search for say Cake Recipes on a mobile device it might include an App with lots of Cake Recipes. If you click on the link it will either open the App on your mobile device or take you to a page to download the App.
Bing have also said they will be rolling this out too soon. It works both for Android and IOS.
There is a lot of movement in App indexing so expect more on this in the future.
Google have been testing a badge in their search results called SLOW. The idea is to identify sites that are slow to load. We haven’t seen this ourselves but several people in the SEO industry have. If this is rolled out it wouldn’t look good next to your website in the search results! (a link to find out how to increase the speed of your website)
A popular way of displaying a lot of content on a page is to use tabs (often JavaScript or HTML). An example of one below:
Google have said that if you have a website that uses these tabs or similar ways of hiding content it will not value the content on the hidden tabs as much as the initial open tab. Therefore make sure your important primary keyword friendly content is in the initial opened tab.
If you missed last month’s report don’t worry, all the information is still relevant and available in April’s SEO monthly update report.
