Juicy SEO Monthly Report for April 2015

In the world of SEO for April it has all been about the new mobile algorithm update which was expected to have the biggest impact in Google’s search results for many years, more on that below.

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.

General SEO News:

Google have rolled out a new algorithm to tackle websites that use doorway pages, these are webpages which target keywords and then send the visitor to a different webpage (one reasons for their use). There are several sneaky options people can use Doorways but none of them should be used! One reason they are used is to funnel visitors to other areas of the website whilst actually looking for something completely different. This new algorithm is targeting these websites and which will hopefully put an end to people using them.

If you would like to know more about Doorway pages here is a good resource.

Google have also said that it is important that your web server responds within 2 seconds of the initial request from Google when it is crawling your site. If your server is taking longer than 2 seconds to respond, Google might think the website is no longer available and not include it in their index.

Here is the page explaining this from Google: Server Response Times

Here is a tool to check your server response time: Google Insights

Google is now starting to highlight the answers to questions INSTEAD of the question asked, in their search results. We don’t normally include any design/cosmetic changes by the search engines in our report as we prefer to focus on the actual SEO. However this is quite interesting as this can be used in your keyword research and landing page optimisation.

Panda News:

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.

Another month goes by without a Panda update, Google have confirmed the last Panda update was in October 2014. This is delaying websites that have improved their content to help their site rank better. Quite frustrating!

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.

Google have also confirmed that the Penguin update is still not running regularly (it should be running at least monthly). If you have however cleaned up any bad links to your site and informed Google via Webmaster Tools then this will update straight away and will not need to wait for an algorithm update.

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.

No news for the Pigeon algorithm for this month.

Mobile SEO:

Google has fully rolled out its highly anticipated Mobile Friendly algorithm update. The impact doesn’t look to be a big as it was expected, this is partly due to the amount of websites that became mobile friendly. However we are still monitoring many websites which are currently not mobile friendly and we are not seeing much of a change in their ranking results. Google have said that although the algorithm has rolled out some websites might not yet be re-indexed. We will continue to monitor.

This Months SEO Tip:

As mentioned above Google is now showing the answers to questions and highlighting the answer instead of the question (as per before). So there isn’t any reason to not target the answers to the questions too. The highlighted word catches the eye, if someone has asked a question it’s the answer they are interested in not the question. 😉

Think of questions people might ask in your industry and use Google Adwords tools to find the ones with some traffic, then answer the question!

If you missed last months SEO report head over to the Juicy SEO monthly report for March 2015 page.

Juicy SEO Monthly Report for March 2015

It has been another busy month in the world of SEO and online marketing for March 2015, here is your 5 minute run down of what has happened over the past month:

General SEO News:

We start off with one for the website designers out there who are still adding a link, generally in the footer of clients websites advertising that they created the site. About 3-4 years ago adding links to footers would have helped the web designers site rank better by generating a link to their site.
However the world and Google have changed a lot since then and this month Google have STRONGLY suggested adding a rel=”nofollow” tag to these links. This will of course not pass on any link Juice to your site but it will also not provide you with any penalties.
WordPress websites using the popular Yoast SEO plugin were vulnerable to a possible hack this month. Yoast discovered this very quickly and sent out an update to fix, if you have not updated your website plugin to the latest version you should do this now. This just highlights that it is very important to make sure your WordPress Plugins and Themes are running on the latest versions.

Panda News:

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 the Google search results.

The last time the Panda algorithm update was run was around the start of November 2014, if you were hit with a Panda penalty you are sadly still being penalised. It just goes to show how long it can be between updates.

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.

The Penguin algorithm was planned to run every month and for a while it did, however an update now has not happened since December 2014. We do not know when the next update is due, but it’s due.

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.

No news for the Pigeon algorithm for this month.

Mobile SEO:

You may remember we have mentioned previously that on the 21st April Google will be making a update in their algorithm relating to Mobile friendly websites (see our What is a Mobile Website post for more on this). Recently Google have added some more information about this update by stating that if you update your webpage to become mobile friendly AFTER this date Google will almost immediately update the mobile value of that page in its mobile search results. Therefore if on the 21st April you do not have a mobile website and then on the 30th April you make your website mobile friendly, when Google next crawls your website it will update it’s mobile search results with your new website. No need to wait for an algorithm update here!
The Mobile algorithm update will affect more websites than the Panda and Penguin updates when introduced, this means more than 20% (probably nearer 30%) of all websites will be affected.

This Months SEO Tip:

Google have also said that it will decide if your website pages are mobile friendly rather than the whole website. Therefore if you can’t make the whole of your site mobile friendly at first then start off with the most important pages first. This will help non-CMS websites.

If you missed last months report head over to the Juicy SEO monthly report for February 2015.

Juicy SEO monthly report for February 2015

It has been a busy month in the world of SEO and online marketing for February 2015, here is your 5min run down of what happened:

General SEO News

The first week of February we saw a lot of movement in sites ranking positions for brand keywords, Google had refreshed their algorithm which we think affected this.
There have been reports that users of Google’s search engine in the UK are being diverted to Google.com when using Chrome. We have not seen this ourselves but might affect some traffic figures.
Google has increased its knowledge graph to include medical keyword phrases, this might affect traffic to any medial websites.
Google analytics showed 0 visitors on 9th February for many accounts, if your account has 0 (zero) visitors for that day don’t worry.
If your website is included into Google News it has been advised to keep your Title tag and H1 tag content consistent or ideally the same. This will help Google index your content.
Google has said that it will start to include if your website is mobile friendly as a factor in its ranking results from 21st April 2015. This gives you about 5 weeks to make sure your website is mobile friendly. If you are not sure here is a good tester: www.responsinator.com

Panda News:

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 the Google search results.

Google have said that duplicate Title and Description tags are not considered in the Panda algorithm and the site will not be penalised if there are duplicates. However we recommend that you do not have duplicate tags for other SEO reasons.

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.

Google have said that the safest way to make sure you will not be penalised by Google for generating links to your site is to not link build. That said to help your website perform better in results you will need links. Be careful where and how you generate links, you have been warned!

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.

No news for the Pigeon algorithm for this month.

This months SEO Tip:

In February Google started including Twitter tweets to their search results. We haven’t seen too many of these so far in the UK version of Google but they are there. With this new development Twitter is not just about Social Media and online marketing but is also part of SEO. If you are not using Twitter and you think your business would benefit from using it then now is the time to start!

If you missed last months report head over to the Juicy SEO monthly report for January 2015.

Juicy SEO monthly report for January 2015

Welcome to another edition of our monthly SEO report where we quickly run through what has happened in the world of SEO and online marketing. If you missed our first post here it is: Juicy SEO Monthly Search Engine Report for December 2014

Mobile SEO:

Over the last couple of weeks Google has sent out a mass email/notification informing webmasters of sites which currently do not have a mobile friendly websites. Knowing Google as we do they tend not to do this type of thing unless something is planned for the future. Take this notification seriously, if your site is not currently mobile friendly we recommend discussing with your web designers to make the changes needed to make it mobile friendly.

Adsense:

If you are a user of Googles Adsense you may have been approached by ‘agents’ offering to pay you a set amount each month similar to what you currently earn from Adsense and in return they will take the income from the advert. Basically they want to buy your advert space.
We recommend not agreeing to these offers as although you don’t lose control of anything you don’t know what they are doing to increase their sales, this could include sending bad links to your site which will affect your organic ranking results.

…and finally:

We haven’t had a major Google algorithm update since December 2014 and there is currently a lot of talk that one is on its way. We think it has just about started so the next week or so ranking positions will most likely be quite volatile.

This month’s SEO tip:

You may or may not have thought about this but many people use the image search results instead of the main Google web search results to find what they are looking for. If your website is image friendly this is an area which you can get some easy wins. To help with these rankings we suggest the following:

Add detail to the name of the image. IE not: wow-what-a-car.jpg but instead: Ferrari-250-GT.jpg

If you have time also include these details in the META of the images if you have the copyright. Also don’t forget to use the ALT and TITLE tags on your site when displaying the images.

Juicy SEO monthly report for December 2014

Each month we provide useful information about the world of SEO to our clients, this information is normally sent directly to them.

We got thinking and thought “Why not let read our monthly reports!”

So here we are, each month we will share all the major important things that have happened in the world of SEO and online marketing that might affect your own website. We will not be going into too much detail but more of a bite sized run down. If you do want more info then just ask via Twitter or Facebook and we will do our best to answer.

So onto this months report.

Mobile SEO

Google has said that having a mobile friendly website will help your site perform better (SEO wise) in their search results. From this month you will now see Mobile-Friendly written just under the Title and URL in search results. How this will affect people clicking on your site on a mobile device we will find out.

Google

Google are testing the user experience of websites, we expect in 2015 websites with a good user experience (as decided by Google) will get a little help in the rankings. Our tip: ask someone who has never been on your site to perform a couple of tasks set by you, how many clicks did it take and did they enjoy the experience?

Website Design

A popular way to present content to readers on websites is to use Tabs and only show the text on the page when the person clicks on the tab. This is also a good way to include more text on a page but not clutter the page up. However it looks like Google doesn’t like this any more and will only value (SEO wise) the displayed content on page load. Our Tip: Make sure your most important keyword terms are on the displayed tab.

Algorithm’s

Google are still rolling out changes to some of their algorithms, it is taking a lot longer than we all expected which makes the SEO community think there is a lot going on behind the scenes! More on this soon!