Welcome to Juicy SEO’s monthly SEO report covering all the important changes and news for November 2016.
The idea of this post is for you to quickly read and get up to date with all the important changes that have happened in Online Marketing, SEO and Search Engines.
Mobile index
As reported last month in Octobers SEO report (if you have not read we highly recommend that you do) Google will start using a separate index for mobile versions of websites. This month we have learned a little bit more about this new index.
The difference between using the current Desktop index and the new mobile index for mobile websites is that Google will index and rank pages in their mobile search results using signals from a mobile perspective. This will include things like content on the page, internal links etc. This could affect websites that do not show all the Desktop content, you could be doing this to try and increase page load times for example.
If your website doesn’t have a mobile version (where have you been!), then the mobile index will use the Desktop version of the site.
When the new mobile index is finally launched to the world in a couple of months it shouldn’t affect your websites rankings Google says, it’s just Google performing the same job but in a different way. That said, why would they create this new index if it does the same as the desktop version?
It is very common to hide content on your mobile version of your site behind things like tabs to help make a better user experience for your visitors, after all a mobile screen is a lot smaller and less can be displayed.
In the past Google would not give the full SEO weight for the content which was hidden. This month however Google have confirmed that the new mobile first index will actually give the full weight for hidden content. They just want to make the experience the best it can, like you!
As I mentioned, it’s due to be live in a couple of months and currently testing, they are having a few teething problems which need to be ironed out.
Algorithms
Some webmasters and even some SEO’s (tut tut!) still think there is only one Google algorithm, this is incorrect. All of the search engines have many algorithms managing all sorts of calculations.
Some of these algorithms do not talk to others so, if one algorithm thinks your website is “Good Quality” it doesn’t mean all of them do, something to bare in mind.
Google Search Console
A nice and useful tool Google provides webmasters and SEO’s is Search Console (used to be called webmaster tools) and one of the functions it offers is to crawl and render a page of your website of your choosing. This can help speed up the time that it take Google to index the new page and content.
Using this function does not harm your websites rankings so completely fine to use, however having a page indexed quickly doesn’t help that page rank any better. Still good to do though as your content is in their index quicker!
Juicy SEO customers don’t need to worry about this, we ensure this is performed for all your important new content you create.
Disavow files
A disavow file is used to list links to your website which you think could be harming it in search results. This is a powerful file and unless you know what you are doing you should seek help, like contacting Juicy SEO.
The links in this file should only be external links to your website, not internal links you manage on your site.
If the external link you wish to disavow still exists then keep the link in the file. If however you have managed to remove the link to your website (best option) then it is safe to remove the link from the disavow file.
Domain Length
Size matters!
Well actually not for Google, there isn’t any ranking benefits to having a long domain name.
TLD
As the internet gets more websites webmasters are looking at other types of TLD’s (Top Level Domains) instead of the standard country code or generic TLD’s like .com or .net as the names they want are not available.
If your website uses a “new” type of TLD extension it will not however help your site rank any better or worse, particularly in the field it is associated too.
For example, if you had the site www.cheap-representation.lawyer it will not rank any better for law keywords like “cheap lawyers” or any worse.
EMD – Exact Match Domains
A member of Google’s spam team has asked his followers on Twitter for any spammy versions of EMD they have seen. He is only looking for spammy versions though, for example:
www.where-to-buy-cheap-nike-football-boots.com.
Google has an EMD algorithm which, to be honest, doesn’t run too often. So what can we read into from this message from the Googler? Are they going to run it again soon and need some examples of bad EMD to test on? Maybe they have re-written the algorithm?
Either way, this is something that it looks like Google are working on.
A side note on this, they are only looking and interested in spammy EMD’s, so www.cheaphotels.com should be ok.
And that concludes this month’s report, make sure you catch up on previous month’s reports as they will still be relevant, here is a link to them all:
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. Since 23rd Sept 2016 this has joined the core search updates and is now real time.
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.
Phantom (Quality Update): This algorithm rewards website pages for good content.
TDL: A TLD means Top Level Domain like .com or .net or .co.uk.
AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages. A way to increase the speed your mobile version of your website loads.
EMD: Exact Match Domains. Matching the domain name exactly with the search term used.