Juicy SEO – Monthly Online Marketing Report Covering October 2016

Welcome to another edition of Juicy SEO‘s monthly online marketing report this time covering all the important updates and changes for October 2016 by the search engines.

Let’s get right to it…

Penguin

At the start of the month we saw the continuation of the roll-out off the new ‘real time’ Penguin update. It took a week or so to fully complete due to the update gradually spreading around the Worlds servers.

Now Penguin is real time several dodgy SEO’s out there are already thinking how they can manipulate this, the obvious one is to increase your link building and if you get a penalty simply remove the links and start again. Google have said that they are “ready for you!” if you are thinking about doing this and could remove the link value of all the links to your site. So, think carefully if you thinking about doing this!

Redirects

This one if really for the webmaster who is moving their site or changing their CMS. It is not good practice to 301 redirect your old pages from your previous version of your website to the homepage of your new website. Google will mark these down as soft 404 pages and which will not pass any link juice (SEO benefit). As much as a pain as it is you should create separate 301’s from your old URLs to the new replacement pages.

Mobile

On the 10th January 2017 Google will be releasing their “Intrusive Interstitial Mobile Penalty“. A what I hear you say?!

From this date if Google finds a pop-up that covers most or all of the mobile screen it will penalise the mobile version of the site. These “pop-ups” are used all over the web and include a lot of social ‘Share’ buttons and adverts. However, Google are only looking at page load and not, say, 5mins after you have been on the site or when leaving the site. Most of the good social share widgets out there will have config options that will fix this. A tool to test this is due out too soon from Google.

Mobile

In the next few months Google will start using a separate index just for mobile devices. At the moment Google uses the main desktop index for both desktop and mobile searches. By using a separate index for mobile devices they can use mobile specific ranking signals like page load speed to help them decide ranking positions.

Content

In some of our previous reports we have mentioned that it is possible to be out-ranked by another website which has a copy of your own content. This is often the case if the other site has a better domain authority than your own. That said, Google this month confirmed that it is also due to other websites taking your content and adding extra value to it, therefore, making the content even better.
This has been a very successful way of ranking Juicy SEO’s clients websites in the past, so if you are looking for some content ideas, research other content out there and make your version better!

HTTP2

As reported previously by Juicy SEO, Google this month also mentioned that they do not pass any search engine ranking ‘help’ if your website is using HTTP2.

AdWords

Google have officially rolled out ‘Click-to-Message‘ sitelinks for adverts which allow people to…. well… click and send a message. I guess the name of it explains the idea well enough.

Domain Authority

Although lots of SEO tools out there have their own “Score” of websites Google have confirmed that they do not have an overall score for a domain (I know I used domain authority above, it was purely to help explain).

Ranking

Finally, Juicy SEO have reported for several years now that it is often the case that Google search engine ranking updates occur at the end of the quarter. A member of Google’s team has also mentioned this month that this is the case. So, keep an eye on the date! 🙂

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.

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:

Juicy SEO Monthly SEO Report - 100% you will learn something! — 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.

Tools

Google have released a new version of their tool that tests your website for mobile friendliness, here is a link to test your website.

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).

Bye bye Adwords content keyword tool! It’s going! 🙁

Penguin

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.

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…

Juicy SEO Monthly SEO Report - Newspaper National Geographic — 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.

All the previous SEO reports can be found here!

HTTP2

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 Facebook pages 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.

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.