Welcome to the final 2 minute read monthly online marketing report from Juicy SEO covering 2016, and what a year it was!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
No doubt like most people you will be making a new years resolution for 2017, if you haven’t thought of one yet can we recommend optimising your website?
If increasing traffic to your website is something you are interested in then make sure you keep coming back to our monthly round-up of all the important changes that will affect your website perform better each month.
So, lets get on with this…
Search Console
Google have removed the content keyword report in Search Console, this is due to it sending the wrong message to the webmasters and Google wanted to make their communication to webmaster easier to follow.
Moving websites
If you are thinking of moving your website from one server to another, Google recommend that for small and medium sized websites to move the whole site in one lump. If however, you have a large website it is ok to break it up into sections.
Sitemaps
Both Bing and Google have increased the maximum size for sitemaps that can be submitted, now 50MB instead of 10MB. However, there is still a limit of 50,000 url’s, so basically the extra space is for longer urls.
Index
Google have added a “SUBMIT TO GOOGLE” button directly in their mobile friendly test. By clicking this button it will add the URL to the Google index queue.
Submit to Google button in mobile friendly test
Speed
Google have advised to keep the homepage load speed less then 2-3secs. It is very rare that Google provide a figure like that, so worth paying attention too!
Google have also mentioned that if the page is slow to load, they might mark it as not mobile friendly even though it passes the mobile friendly test.
See our 2017 prediction below for more on this
Paid links
We know paid links are a NO NO, but did you know giving to charity for a link is also?! Well it is.
HTTPS
Google have recommended that if you are changing from HTTP to HTTPS that you keep the rest of the url the same whilst changing over. They don’t recommend changing the url structure at the same time. You might think of doing this to add some keywords into the url for example. It is better to perform two separate tasks after the new HTTPS versions have been indexed.
There is an important change coming at the start of Jan 2017 for websites that either a password or credit card details need to be entered in. If your website has this and you haven’t a SSL certificate (HTTPS) Google (Chrome) and Firefox will mark the page as NON SECURE.
Not two words you want connected to your online shop!
The fix is to make the whole site HTTPS or at least the page with the password/credit card form on it.
SEO Tip
Abbreviation are not good for SEO, especially if you are abbreviating your keywords! So, make sure you write out your keywords and linked keywords in full!
SEO abbreviation fail
AdWords
Google AdWords Editor version 3.7 has been released with many new features, if you are an advertiser with Google and you use Google Adwords Editor you should update your version and have a look at these in case you are missing out.
Algorithms
Mid December there looks to have been a search algorithm update. We have not seen any confirmation from Google about this but our stats saw a lot of movement around the 15th/16th December and the SEO industry have also reported this.
Google Maps Adverts
In case this has passed you by, you can advertise your business on Google Maps. So when someone searches for “Anniversary cards because I have forgotten” your card shop can be displayed on Google Maps so the customer can easily find your shop. Obviously this is really targeting local businesses.
Anyway, I digress, this month Google have added a nice little update to this which allows you to add your company logo as the advert pin on the map.
Example of Google Promotional Pins
2017
So it’s a new year and its traditional to post what you think the coming year will bring, well Juicy SEO does this too but much much shorter!. For our predictions we, in true spirit of our 2 minute read SEO update, are going to keep it short and sweet. Are you ready?
Mobile!
SHOCK!
We know you have heard this before from us, but for 2017 you must think mobile BEFORE desktop. This is not just creating a website but also when SEO’ing websites. Optimising a desktop website could be different to optimising your mobile version.
This includes not only that the website is mobile friendly but consider site speed (biggy!), load order and AMP.
At the moment Google do NOT use site speed when deciding mobile ranking, but as sure is eggs are eggs we think they will in 2017!
But don’t worry, as normal we are here to hold your hand and to offer any advice and tips, so follow us on Twitter, Facebook and our RSS feed.
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.