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.

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.

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.

How many websites will Google’s Mobile Algorithm affect?

In case you have not heard but Google will be launching their Mobile Friendly Algorithm update on the 21st April. This is a big deal if you own or run a website. If you don’t then I suspect you don’t really care, if that’s you then get your skis out and hit the slopes, here is a cool Ski holiday website.

If however you are interested how much the up and coming Mobile algorithm update from Google will affect websites here are the stats!

If you combine the two previous biggest algorithms launched by Google it would not add up to the conservative estimate figure of how many websites will be affected. So this is a BIG deal!

Google’s Panda Algorithm update affected 14% of all websites

Google’s Penguin Algorithm update affected 3% of all websites (which is a lot by the way!)

Google’s Mobile Algorithm update is estimated to affect between 20 – 30% of all websites!! (yes double exclamation marks needed there!)

Don’t hang around and get your website mobile friendly. If you are not sure if your website is mobile friendly or not heard over to our ‘What is a Mobile Website‘ page and you can test yours!

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.