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.