Monthly SEO Report Covering November 2017

SEO position rankings go up and down

Monthly SEO Report Covering November 2017

Our latest monthly SEO report covering all the changes through-out November 2017. Understand what has changed and how you can help your website perform better. A 2 minutes read.

Stuart Cole

Welcome to this months Search Engine Optimisation report updating you of all the latest changes that have happened of November 2017.

The aim of this report is to only inform you of changes that WILL affect how your website performs in search engines. This way we keep the read time to below 2 minutes.

If you have missed any of the other reports, which will still be relevant, then we definitely recommend you catch up, here is a link to the SEO Report Updates.

Algorithms

Through-out November there have been many fairly large algorithm updates. Google, of course have not commented on any of these, as expected.

There was a large one at the start of the month and another around the 14th of November, the search industry are not sure what was changed though.

If Google let us in what they are doing I will let you all know.

.co.uk

Country versions of Google like www.Google.co.uk are not used to decide where you are in the World for Google to serve you with local search results.

For example, if you were in London and using Google.co.uk Google would not use the .co.uk to identify if you were in the UK or not, instead they use your IP address to figure out where you are.

Glossary

If you are new to search engine optimisation or just need a little refresh on the phrases used in our report head over to our SEO Glossary page, everything you need to know in one place.

Manual Action Penalty

Google have said that unless you have received a penalty message from them in Search Console you do not need to create a disavow file.

As a reminder the disavow file is used if you have links to your website which are against Google’s guidelines (spammy links) and you can not get them removed.

By adding those links to this file Google will ignore them.

Strong Content

Google once again reminded the SEO community that a few pages with good quality content is better than lots of pages with content that isn’t any good.

It makes sense but some people may not have realised this.

Links to images

For SEO’s and webmasters links are very important, so if you manage to generate a loads of great links that point to a great image you have created that’s great news, well done!

However, these links will only help that images URL to perform better (in Google image search) and not necessarily your website.

TIP: So make sure you add your image to a page and share the page’s URL.

Low Hanging Fruit

Do you want to know how to help your website perform better by helping Google understand what your page is about?

Oh and you have the control and ‘power’ to do this!

Google this month confirmed that they do look at Anchor text when spidering your internal links.

It’s a no brainer, make sure you use Anchor text!

Written by Stuart Cole

Stuart Cole has been running Internet businesses since 1996 and has been concentrating on SEO and online marketing since 2007. Stuart is a regular SEO author specialising in recent changes that can affect how websites perform in search engines.

Juicy SEO – Monthly Online Marketing Report Covering September 2016

Welcome to this month’s edition of the Juicy SEO online marketing report where we condense all the changes and important news into a 2 minute read, as per normal we have a Glossary at the bottom to remind you which algorithm does what.

This month our report is mainly to do with a major update that has recently happened, Penguin 4.0 is now live and in the wild!

So, lets get to it…

Penguin

As this algorithm update is major news we will focus a little more than normal on this subject and explain what has changed and how it will affect you.

Real Time

This is the 4th version (4.0) of this algorithm and it will also be the last, this is because they moved the ‘code’ of Penguin into their main core ranking engine which ‘scores’ website pages continuously. Therefore, Penguin will be real time and any penalties given due to bad links will happen instantly. The good news though is that once you clean up your bad links your site should recover instantly too.

New Links

As Google will be checking your links all the time this also includes new links to your site, it means keeping a close eye on your links in case they affect your ranking positions.

Per-Page Not Per-Site

The new version of the Penguin algorithm does not assess links to your website but more to your web pages. Therefore, if Google penalises your site for a bad link it should just affect the page it is linked to and not the whole site. This is great news as you should be able to manage your link building strategy and see if certain links penalise your website.

Recovery

Once you have cleaned up your bad links you might expect to bounce back up to where your website once ranked, sadly that is unlikely. Google will instead of penalising your site and devalue the links they will simply just ignore them.

Therefore, if you once ranked no:1 for ‘Keyword Research’ and got hit with a Penguin penalty, the recovery will just ignore the link juice of those bad links so you won’t get any help at all from them. Your site should still move up the rankings as you are no longer penalised, just not as high as you once were.

One final thing about Penguin, well for this month anyway. Google have said that the roll out of Penguin 4.0 was their best roll out to date. Which isn’t surprising really is it as it took them 2 years to do it!

Local SEO

This month Google’s local algorithm received an update too, this time, the update was to target spam results.

API’s

If you provide an API for developers to access data from your site then this might be of interest. Google have said if your API requires a DOfollow link to access the API it is the same as a paid link and therefore against Google’s guidelines.

Widgets

If you are a provider of Widgets for webmasters to add to their site, Google this month have stressed that all the links back to you must be NOfollow, not a surprise here but good to be reminded of.

Links

Google this month said an interesting thing about links, “To get more traffic to your site you don’t necessarily need more links”. Is this a smoke screen to try and stop people link building or are they devaluing links?

AdWords

If you are a user of Google Adwords (PPC) you would have most likely been informed that the length the text can be for the adverts is to increase therefore allowing more “Words for your Buck”. We believe it is going live early 2017.

AMP

AMP sites have been seeing a considerable amount of traffic increase over the last couple of weeks, AMP is not for everyone but it is worth looking at to see if it will help your business.

Mobile SEO

Over the last couple of months in our SEO reports we have mentioned Google might penalise mobile websites that have pop-ups which fully cover or cover a large percentage of the screen when the page loads. This month they have added more information on this, sites can also be penalised if the pop-up appears after scrolling half way down the page. This is interesting as there are many social media sharing widgets that work like this.

Algorithms

Google this month highlighted that now Penguin 4.0 (oops sorry I mentioned it again) is live you should expect to see more algorithm updates coming in the near future and that this will never stop. Great! 🙁

Rankings

We are expecting to see a lot of fluctuations in ranking figures over the next week or so as Penguin calms down, so don’t panic if your rankings are not looking too good. If you need some help just drop us a line.

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 Covering August 2016

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

Juicy SEO Monthly Report Covering October 2015

Welcome to another Juicy SEO’s Monthly SEO Report where you will be informed of all the important changes in SEO from over the last month. So get a cup of Tea or Coffee and a couple of biscuits and find out what has happened in the ever changing world of SEO for October 2015.

General SEO News

– This month Google confirmed if you have duplicate content on the same site and you haven’t set up canonical tags then it will choose the shortest URL to index. What this means is if you think or know you have more than one copy of the same content (text) on more than one page of your website you should use a HTML tag called canonical. This will inform the search engines which page should be indexed.

– Google released a new algorithm, clearly they need more algorithms! This one will target hacked websites, the idea is to remove hacked sites from their index. This is expected to affect around 5% of searches. Google are trying to remove spam websites which are just a real pain. Good news for website owners whose site have not been hacked.

Incidentally we have an interesting post coming soon which shows you how you can tell if your website is hacked, not as obvious as you would think!

– If you think some of the pages on your website are being penalised by the Panda algorithm Google have recommended not to remove the pages but to improve the content instead. You can of course use the <noindex> tag to inform the search engines not to index the page if you don’t have the time to update the content.

– We reported a few months ago in our monthly report that more people are using Mobile devices to search via Google than desktop computers in the UK. This month it has moved on a little more as this is now the case for all searches for the whole world rather than just the UK and a few other countries.

– More updates from the Panda algorithm (see Glossary below to remind you which algorithm is which) over the last couple of weeks, lots of websites affected.

A big statement from Google!!

– There has been reports in the SEO world the Google updated their core ranking algorithm, this happened around 21st/22nd October. If your ranking positions changed around then it is most likely due to this.

– Yahoo and Google have made an agreement for Yahoo to show Google search results and adverts. This is not live yet but should be in the coming months. If you are not performing well on Bing but only Google then this is good news for you as at the moment Yahoo only shows Bing results (plus their own).

– A big statement from Google recently that 40% of the top 5 search results are now Apps. That is a huge figure, if an App would help your business then now might a good time to create one.

– Google have said on record that there will be a Penguin update before the end of the year. We think there is still time to sort out your bad links to your website now but don’t hang around!

This Months SEO Tip

This months tip HAS to be about APPs, as mentioned above they are being seen in search results by a LOT of people and now is the time to utilise this.

So for this example we will pick the most non-APP type online business we can think of here in the office to show you there is always a way. Lets say you are selling fish online, yep fish! What on earth can an online fish seller use an APP for?

Maybe:

Because APPs use push technology you can inform people of new products.
Recipes, we all like to know new ways to cook our fish don’t we? The APP could have a top 10 of Salmon dishes.
Increase sales, if the recipe says you need 20kg of Tuna (thats a lot!) then the APP could have button to buy quick and easy from you.

We could go on but I think you get the idea.

There are two ways you could create an APP, either in-house (you!) if you have the skills or happy to learn or to hire someone else to do it for you.

Our advice is start simple, don’t spend too much money or time and get it out there as quick as possible. You can always keep adding to it over time after it is live. Make sure your customers know what the APP will do as you don’t want bad ratings if they were expecting more or something different.

If you want more info or would like to ask us any questions on this head over to Twitter or Facebook, we only have 2mins so ran out of time here.

PS: Incidentally if you want to buy fish online try out Springs Smoked Salmon!

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 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.