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!
Juicy SEO 120 second Monthly SEO Report
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.
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.
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.