SEO Services for Cheltenham & Bristol Areas Book a review

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
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 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 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

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.

 

Don't forget to sign up to our SEO newsletter!

Email Address:

 

  • 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.



Increase your social following, Juicy SEO's SMM

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.