Monthly SEO Report Covering September 2017

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly roundup of all the most important changes by search engines like Google and Bing.

We only report on changes that will affect how your website will perform so make sure you read everything!

Although SEO is constantly changing previous monthly SEO reports will still be valuable, I highly recommend that you read those too. Here is a link to all our SEO monthly reports.

As you may know creating links to your website from large international news websites can often push your websites rankings up considerably. In fact you may have received an email from someone selling links from the likes of Forbes, INC and Entrepreneur. We all know that you shouldn’t pay for links but I can understand why these emails are tempting.

News this month though is that all three of these websites will now make all the links from of their contributors articles “nofollow”. This means you will not get any SEO value from having links from these sites.

So, you can ignore those emails now!

Something that was interesting that Google said this month was that there are many websites that rank within the top 3 of their search results which do not have any links to it. I would think that this is low competitive long tail keywords but interesting to hear Google say this.

Around the 8th September there looks to have been a small algorithm update from Google. Most if not all of the monitoring tools have noticed this, we have yet to get confirmation from Google.

Additionally, we noticed another algorithm update around the 16th and 20th September as well as a larger update around the 26th. We know that Google are continuously making changes but I know that they like to make a big change at the end of the year so could this be some testing??

Google this month mentioned that just because your website is whiter than white (hat) compared to your black hat competitor it doesn’t mean your site should rank high than theirs. If their website provides a better result for the search term Google could still rank it higher.

So, our takeaway from this is to make sure your website provides better content than your competitors.

“If your web page receives a lot of G+ (Google+) ‘likes’ will the website rank higher?”

That is a question that was asked of Google, they replied with a very simple, No.

Tip: That said we have found that if you do G+ a new published page Google will more than often index the page faster.

When you create a new piece of content a publish date is also created with it. In most CMS platforms you can change these dates. Some content writers believe that if you change the date it will look more recent therefore search engines like Google might value it more (We all know Google likes recent content).

Before you go and change the date on all your posts Google know about this little ‘Trick’, so the chances are you won’t get any benefit from changing the date.

However, that said why not try it for yourself?

Google have confirmed that shopping cart abandon rate is not a ranking factor. So don’t worry if people do not complete their order on your website as your ranking will not change but DO worry because they didn’t buy something!