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.