Monthly SEO Report Covering April 2017

Welcome to this month’s edition of our monthly SEO report updating you with the most important changes in SEO and online marketing. As per normal we will try and keep under a 2 minute read.

If you missed last month’s report it is well worth a read as there are loads of great insights for you to learn, SEO report covering March 2017.

Mobile

If you are a regular reader of our monthly update report you will know that Google are working on a new Mobile First index, it looks like it will take them a little longer than they first thought as they have now delayed the launch until 2018. If you were not sure what the mobile first index is we recommend quickly reading the last few reports for a catch up.

Algorithm’s

At the start of March Google updated their algorithm that scores the quality of the content on pages, it was named Fred. Google have confirmed that at the same time Fred went live other algorithms were also updated therefore your website might have been affected by them and not Fred if you saw a drop in rankings.

Advanced SEO Audits

Understand why your website is not performing well with our advanced SEO audit, your website will not thank you enough!

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Disavow

If you are new to SEO you may not know about Disavow files, this is a file that you can add websites that link to yours which you would like the search engines to ignore. A reason you would do this is if you have spammy links to your site and it is harming your site in the search results.
If you add some links to this file and then see your website drop in the search engine rankings we recommend that you remove some of those links in case they are actually helping your website perform better. It is a little trial and error with this.

Domain Age

Just a quick reminder that the age of a website or the length a domain has been registered does not affect how your website performs in search ranking results.

CAPS PAGE TITLES AND DESCRIPTIONS

GOOGLE HAVE CONFIRMED THAT THERE ISN’T A PENALTY IF YOU USE UPPERCASE CAPS IN YOUR TITLE AND DESCRIPTION META TAGS. WE DON’T USE THEM OURSELVES BUT IT MIGHT GET A FEW MORE EYES LOOKING AT YOUR LISTING IF YOU DO.

Updates

Like previous years this time of year sees a lot of big algorithm updates, we saw “Fred” in March and there was an another update around 18th April as well. At this time we are unsure exactly what that update was targeting. We will update you once we know.

Owl – Hoot hoot!

An Owl has flown into our lives this month targeting “fake news”. Google’s latest algorithm called Owl rewards authoritative content and penalises fake or bad quality content. It is targeting offensive and misleading pages.

Links

Google have confirmed this month that links from higher ranking websites do not provide any more link juice than links from lower ranking websites. So, if you were ranked number 5 and you got a link from the website at position 1, it will not provide any more “power” than if you got a link from the website ranking at number 10.

Don’t get this confused with links from higher Pagerank websites as this is certainly still the case.

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.