Monthly SEO Report Covering July 2017

Welcome to July’s 2017 edition of our monthly SEO update report.

Each month we inform you of the latest and most important updates from search engines like Google and Bing that could affect your websites ranking positions.

Before we get going if you have missed previous update reports we recommend quickly having a look at those too as they will still be relevant. Here is a link to all our SEO update reports.

In a rush? No problem our SEO update report is designed to be read in 2 minutes, so you get the important information you need without taking up much of your time.

So, let’s get going…

Google confirmed this month that if you have a lot of pages that need to published and therefore indexed within Google’s search results, you should not artificially slowly publish them but publish them all at once.

They mentioned even if you have 100,000’s of pages it won’t matter. One word of warning is to make sure your server can handle the crawl from Google.

Adding a video to your page does not provide you with any advantage in Google’s search results or make it a quality piece of content.

Google have said, again, that Domains that exactly match keywords do not get an advantage in their search results.

If you are targeting a certain country Google have said it will not make a difference if your website is using a server which is not located in that country. Instead you should either have a domain with the correct TLD (see Glossary for explanation) or use Google Search Console to inform Google.

In July Google made a change to how they calculate the average ranking positions within their Search Console software. Many people have seen a large drop in rankings and are quite worried. Google have said not to worry as nothing has changed only the way they report on the average positions.

No not the type that swim but Trust Seals. Someone asked Google this month if by having a seal from an trusted organisation on your website, does it help the page to rank better. In a word, No.

It is however good to show that you are affiliated to the company behind the seal but not for SEO.

Tip: a link from a trusted organisation to your website will however help your website SEO wise.

I’m including this into our report this month purely for readers who are new to SEO. Each Web page can use the META tag ‘Keyword’. A long long long time ago this was used to help search engines learn more about the page. However, this hasn’t been used by search engines for a very long time.

You will not get penalized for using it but if you do you are only telling your competitors which keywords you are targeting, you don’t want to do that now do you?

Have you noticed recently that when you start typing into Google’s search bar the suggested end of your search query is now not there?

Google have decided to remove Google Instant as it doesn’t fit within the way mobile devices use their search engine interface.

This, for me is a shame for two reasons, one personal and one professional.

1: Professional: Google Instant used to be a good way to find new keywords that were being used.

2: Personal: It used to be a fun way to waste some time seeing what silly things people have entered into Google.

These are footers that stay on the page at the bottom of your window whilst you scroll up or down the page. These are completely OK to use and are within Google’s guidelines, they are particularly useful on mobile devices to quickly find important content.