Algorithms
Our regular entry in our monthly SEO report starts us off, Google algorithm updates. Although not confirmed by Google we think there where updates on:
30th November
10th December
16th December
Structured Data
Google have released a new set of structured data settings for question and answer pages. This will help Google display your answer for these questions in the search results.
If you have a question and answer page I recommend adding these meta tags as not many sites have them yet and you could get the jump on your competitors.
If you don’t have a Q&A pages, create one! 🙂
Image Search
Google have said if you would like all your pages to be included in their image search results they recommend have unquie images on each page. Also to note that both the image and the page(s) the image is located need to be crawlable, ie: not noindex.
Bad and Spammy Links
Google have informed us that we as webmasters and SEO’s should not worry about bad or spammy links to your website. If they find any they will simply ignore them.
That said if you have received a manual action penalty within your Google Search Console I recommend adding those links to a disavow file to ask Google to ignore to help you fix that penalty.
Scrapers
Search engines like Google as well as other services on the Web use scrapers to understand the content on your website. Sometimes they will use the content elsewhere, sometimes not.
Google have said that if your website gets scraped a lot it is not a signal or affects your ranking positions.
Mobile First Index
Google announced this month that over 50% of the websites shown in their search result on a mobile device now use Mobile First Index.
Negative SEO
Sadly the world isn’t filled with nice people like you and me, there are some people out there trying to “steal” other peoples money.
In the SEO world one way these nasty people are doing this is by bribing website owners by threatening them of negative SEO tactics.
If someone gets in contact with you and makes this threat simply ignore it or tell them to “push off big bullies we don’t like you!“.
Google have said they will know if someone is conducting negative SEO and will ignore their efforts.
Mentions
An oldy has raised its head again this month, “do mentions of your website on other websites without a link help your website perform better in search results?”
In otherwords are mentions part of the page rank algorithm?
Google have always said no they are not however this month they said they can find mentions and recognise they are talking about your website in their content. But, they did not say they don’t use them in their algorithm.
So, has something changed?
We just don’t know, I think we will be talking about this again in the near future, hint hint. 😉
Crawling
Google said this month that they will always use the most restrictive version of the index tags. For example if your robots.txt file says index everything but some JavaScript you may have on the page says noindex, then they will not index the page. Obvious but nice to remind ourselves.