Monthly SEO Report Covering May 2017

Welcome to this month’s edition of Juicy SEO’s month SEO report. We condense all the important updates made by search engines like Google and Bing into a short easy to read blog post. We try and keep it under a 2 minute read so you can be informed and continue on your day.

If you missed last month’s SEO report covering April 2017 even though it is now a month old almost all the information is still relevant, so, head over and have a read as there would have been something there you would have missed in the news and will benefit your website in performing better in search engines.

Owl

Fake news is, well, all the news lately and search engines and social media platforms are under a lot of pressure to remove, or at least not promote fake news. Google last month released a new algorithm called Owl (What a Google algorithm which doesn’t start with a ‘P’!). Owl is designed to target fake news in their search results and remove them. We touched on this in last month’s report.

Featured Snippets

If you have managed to get your website to the top, or very near the top of the first page of Google search results then your websites data might have been included in their featured snippet section. What we have learnt this month is that Google can sometimes display the content ‘snippet’ from one website, but also display the image next to the text from a completely different website. Google News have been doing this for a long time but now we are seeing it in the main search results.

Affiliate Source

A technique that is getting quite popular to help with generating new and useful content is to combine two or more pieces of content from other sources and present them all together in one single page. Some could see this as creating useful information in one place.

Google, however, does not see this content as adding value as you are not actually providing any new data. If this is something you like doing or works well for your industry we recommend adding extra content in the form of text, images, infographics, videos and even animation to make the page unique.

Google doesn’t forget!

Google this month answered a question on their forum on if the search engine ever forgets URL’s, namely pages that have been in their index for a long long time. Google simply said, “No, we have a lot of storage”.

We believe them.

Algorithm’s

It looks like there was a Google algorithm update around 17^th May (US), 18^th May (UK), however, as I write this we are unsure what was updated by Google.

All the monitoring Apps lit up like a Christmas tree where they have seen many ranking changes over many websites. We have seen a lot of ranking movements over a considerable amount of domains ourselves, we look forward to finding out what has changed. We will let you know as soon as we know. Follow us on Facebook if you can’t wait until next month’s SEO report.

Widgets

Google are considering ignoring links that originate from website widgets. Back in the day, I’m starting to sound old here, when SEO was just starting out, a technique used to create links was to simply add links to sidebar widgets. They would normally be site-wide and give loads of link juice. Those days are well and truly gone and Google are now considering ignoring those links because they are not providing any SEO benefits.

Adwords

This month Google have updated their Ad Rank figure within Google Adwords. If you are currently running an advert using Adwords we recommend having a look at your CPC figures.

Links

Over the last 12 month’s or so there has been an increase in spam emails being sent out selling space on high domain authority websites (DA) with a link to your own website. It maybe because of this increase in these emails that Google this month have commented that these types of links are against Googles guidelines and are currently looking into it.

We are not sure at the moment if Google will penalise any sites which have used these sites for links or not, but something you should think about before hitting that ‘Buy’ button.

Over Optimisation

Google confirmed that you can over optimise your website to a point where it starts hurting your website ranking potential. We think, hmm!

Finally, if you know of someone who you think would benefit from being informed of the latest updates from search engines share this page with them, they will thank you forever!

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.