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.
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