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…

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 Facebook so 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 September 2015

Welcome to the latest copy of Juicy SEO’s Monthly SEO Report. In 2 minutes you will know a lot more than you know now and the bonus is that the new knowledge will help your website perform better in search engines like Google and Bing. So lets not waste any of that 2 minutes and get to it…

General SEO News

– First off in case you haven’t noticed or you don’t use any of the many Google websites, Google have changed their logo. This change will not make any difference in your online marketing campaign but some news nether-the-less.

– Back in the July edition of our monthly SEO report we reported that Google started to roll out the latest version of Panda called 4.2. This was going to take awhile to roll out, in fact it still is rolling out. However at the end of August / start of September it looks like they backed-out the version, we are not sure why they did this.

– Also at the end of August (around 23rd) Google made a change which adjusted the amount of indexed pages reported in their analytics. In case you don’t know Google provides this figure so you know how many pages are in Google. This now shows a more realistic figure.

– When you need to redirect traffic from one page to another you should use a 301 redirect (unless temp redirections then a 302). An example of why you would create a 301 redirection is if an old page of your website which is no longer live or relevant is still indexed in the search engines, you would redirect the traffic to a newer version of the page and therefore not lose visitors to your website. By creating a 301 you are telling the search engines that they should index the new page and de-index the old page. Google this month have advised to keep these redirections in place for at least a year as it can take that long to remove old pages.

– Google have said that it is OK to create articles on your website and link to the product on the site. That might sound a funny thing for them to say?! Reading between the lines here we think they are seeing a lot of articles which are not related to the products on the website and then linking out to them (a bit spammy!). Tip: Always write the articles to help the reader find what they are looking for not just to create content!

– Google have confirmed that their robots can now actually fill out forms on your website to gain access to content behind the form. This is only done in rare circumstances but something to think about!

– Google+ links have been removed from Google search results. We think this is because of action where Google is seen promoting their own products more than competitors in search results. We also can see the Facebook wannabe slowly get less PR in the future. We still think you should use the network to help in SEO and online marketing however it’s SEO power might be a little less in the future.

– Google are expected to release the latest Penguin algorithm update by the end of the year, after that it should be real-time updates and not run every so often. If you have cleaned up some bad links to your website this is good news. If you still have bad links to your website this could be very bad news for you! If you are not sure give us a shout, we can let you know either way.

This Months SEO Tip

With the latest news above about the new Penguin Algorithm coming this months tip is to clean up those bad links. But how do you know if a link is good or bad? In fact where can you see your links?

First off start in Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console), this will show you a list of links to your website. To identify if the links are bad we recommend looking through these links and look for any which are not connected to your product and in particular anything to do with Viagra, Ray-Ban Sunglasses or UGG boots! 🙂

If you are not sure just send us an email and we will help 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.

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.

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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.

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.

Read about how to save time creating content for your site

Mobile SEO:

– 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! 🙂

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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.

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)

Some interesting news, Google have said that more people are using Smartphones than desktop computers on their sites. If you haven’t got a website that is mobile friendly please please get one!

This Months SEO Tip:

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.

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.

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.

How can I get my website on the first page of Google?

In every industry there are certain questions that always get asked more than others, for SEO this has to be the MOST popular question:

How can I get my website on the first page of Google?

So for all those people out there wanting to know the answer to this question and the people who ask me every day here is the answer…

The first thing I tell people is not to worry about where your website ranks for certain keywords, isn’t having more visitors more important? Especially the visitors that are looking for your product or service. Ok you may have to rank well for some keywords to get these visitors but don’t focus completely on the ranking positions.

With that said the question still stands.

As I write this there are a few major signals you can optimise to help your website rank well. So if you do nothing else I suggest doing these few tasks:

Title tag:

Each page can have a title tag written in HTML (some people are using more than one title tag but we do NOT recommend this). If you are using a CMS like WordPress or Joomla this is very easy to update. So make sure you use this tag, try and have the keyword you are targeting near the start of the tag as this has a small advantage to having it further down the sentence.

Don’t list a load of keywords one after another, that looks spammy and the powers that be in Google will not like it. Plus remember this single line is most likely the first thing a new customer reads about your site, so make it count!

Content:

There is no point in having a keyword in the title tag if it doesn’t relate to the content on the page, firstly the visitor will just bounce off your site and probably never return, and secondly Google will think you are trying to fool them (they don’t like that either).

Links:

You don’t need millions of links from other websites to get your website to rank well, so please do NOT sign up to those services that give you 10,000 links for £10.

By using social media or other means contact related websites to yours and see if they would provide you with a link, unless it is the BBC or CNN try not provide a reciprocal link back as it weakens the signal to Google a little.

Something to bare in mind, if your website has great content why wouldn’t Google want to rank it well for the subject you have on your webpage, Google wants good quality search results so just help them out and they will help you out!

Juicy SEO Limited is a search engine optimisation and conversion rate optimisation company based in Cheltenham, Bristol and Farnham. If you would like help with your SEO campaign please get in contact.