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Welcome to August’s edition of the Juicy SEO online marketing report. This is where you can read the latest news about SEO, PPC and online marketing in less than 2 minutes.

We only report on the changes that will actually matter and could affect your website’s performance in search engines.

Juicy SEO August Monthly Online Marketing Report

Pagerank

Google have confirmed this month that Pagerank is still important, this is a number that Google assigns to each page of a website and scores it by authority.

Obviously the higher the number the better.

Subdomains

This is a common question we get asked and it just so happens someone asked Google too this month.

“Does Google see subdomains and sub-folders differently?”

The answer is….. drum roll please…… no.

Changing Domain Names

If you decide to change your domain name and redirect the inbound links from your old domain to the new one, Google have confirmed that you should try to get the links changed to the new domain name.

It’s not a critical loss if you don’t, but don’t forget to set up your 301 redirects from old to new site!

Adwords

Google have been testing their new Adwords interface for some accounts, this is due to be rolled out early next year for everyone.

Duplicate Content

If you have a copy of your website’s content in a downloadable PDF file this is not seen by Google as duplicate content.

It is completely fine to do this, in fact there are PDF search engines out there which you could add your files too!

Blogdash

If like us, you have received emails recently from a website called Blogdash here is a word of warning.

Blogdash promise to get your website in front of leading high end publishers using their PR system.

This is something you should NOT sign up to. This is exactly what search engines like Google penalise websites for.

In fact the other week Google have confirmed that they know of Blogdash and will penalise them.

Penalties

If Google gives your website a penalty and then at a later date removes the penalty due to you fixing the problem, it is very unlikely that your website will fully recover.

Best not get the penalty in the first place!

Google Keyword Planner Tool

This is a tool if you are not familiar with it that Google created to help advertisers using Google Adwords pick the right keywords for their advertising campaign.

However, a lot (most) SEO’s also use this data to help understand the volume of keywords used.

The figures are not exact and they are really Adwords results not organic but it’s all useful information.

This month however, Google have removed a lot of the detail of this data to people not running an Adwords campaign.

That said if you have a running Adwords campaign all the data is available to you.

If you really need this info, then just create a small Adwords campaign and you will see everything.

Rel=”canonical”

Just so you know, you can not use the HTML tag rel=”canonical” for images, only pages.

Algorithms

Last week Google rolled out a new Mobile Interstitial Algorithm.

This is to target popups which cover most or all of your mobile screen, Google have decided that this is not a good experience and will penalise websites with them.

This is just for mobile views and not for desktops.

Mobile

Remember when Google said:

“Make your website mobile friendly and we will add a little Mobile Friendly label next to your website in our search results”

This month Google decided to remove this little label. It doesn’t surprise me as so many websites are now mobile friendly so defeats the object.

Did you miss last month’s report? It is not out of date and definitely worth a read, here is a link: Monthly Online Marketing Report covering July 2016

Google provide many tools to help business owners and webmasters manage their websites, this includes a set of tools to help manage their pay per click (PPC) Adwords campaigns.
Although these tools are designed to be used with your Adwords accounts many SEO companies use some of them to help with their organic keyword targeting. There isn’t anything wrong with this and in fact we recommend using some of them, after all if Google are providing you with data about keyword relavence you would be mad not to use it!

So why the negative title to this blog post then?

Google’s keyword tools do provide some useful data, like how competitive a keyword is but you must remember that the tool is providing results for paid search not organic search results.

A good example of this is their ‘Keyword Ideas‘ tool, the idea of this tool is to help generate keywords that you may have not thought of. However the results from this tool tend to be focused on commercial keywords, things like ‘buy dog mints‘ or ‘ski apartments to rent‘. If you wish to target non commercial keywords this tool might not help you too much.

Something that the Adwords tools are useful for is to give you an idea how many times a keyword is searched. The figures are far from exact but if you are deciding between several keywords to target this tool can help by letting you know which is searched more. As mentioned above you can’t use the Keyword Ideas section for this but if you enter in the keywords manually you should get the data you are after.

So if you can’t rely on Google’s Adwords tools to help find new keywords, what can you use?

Here are two good FREE ways to get some keyword ideas to target.

Predictive Searches

When using Google, as you type in their search bar Google often ‘guesses’ what you are going to write and lists several common used searches. This is a very handy way of finding new and commonly used multi-word keyword phrases.

Read about how to save time creating content for your site

Juicy SEO – Monthly Online Marketing Report Covering August 2016