Welcome to another edition of our monthly SEO report whereby we briefly highlight all the important changes and updates you need to know about. The online world is very competitive so any help to make your website perform better is a good thing. This is why this monthly SEO report has been created.
Lots to update you on so let’s get right to it…
Algorithm
Every month I list all the algorithm updates that occurred or we think occurred through-out the month. Often search engines will not confirm either way so it is our – SEO industry – best guess. If your rankings have changed around these dates it could be due to the algorithm changing.
29th March to 5th April
Missing pages
This month Google made a boo boo and dropped a large number of pages from their index. It took them a little while for them to fully sort it out, but it is all back to normal again now.
A consideration to this is that many of the ranking tools figures will be providing incorrect results due to the missing pages. Well, they are correct just not normal if you know what I mean.
Fun Fact
Google ran their PageSpeed Insights tool on over a billion URL’s in 2018 seeing 95% of them increased in speed. Which also decreased their bounce rate. You know I like a fast website!
Links
Google have come out and said that links that are not in their Search Console do not matter – for SEO. It’s the first time they have said this. I guess you can use this new knowledge when link building to identify if the new link was worth the work to get.
Why is a website out ranking mine?
If a competitors website is out ranking yours and you think your website is great in many SEO areas it could be because there are many signals Google uses and the competitor’s website is doing better in other areas.
Google said this month that due to the fact there are so many ranking factors it helps make each SEO unique so hard to directly compare.
If this is the case for you and you have mastered all the ranking signals you can think of, then you need to keep looking, or ask for help.
Cache:
The cache command shows the version of your website that the search engines currently have cached. You enter it into the search box like:
Cache:https://myDomain.com
Try not to worry about the date Google shows that they cached the page as they have confirmed that it often can be out by several days.
Index pages
Google this month reminded everyone that they no longer index the whole web but only the good parts.
This is something to remember when searching for established pages of your website and to check if they are in their index. If you can’t find the page it just maybe time to update the content with a better version and ask them to reindex again.
Tip: THIS REALLY WORKS!
Personalised content
If you have a fancy pants website that serves up different content depending on the person on the site Google have recommended how to handle the content.
Instead of directing the visitor to different URL’s it is better to slightly change the content and keep the same URL.
How important are the Menu Navigation links?
Well in two words, quite important.
Search engines like Google use the links in the navigation section to find pages, it’s one of the first places they look.
Tip: Always make sure your most important pages are in your Menu.
Noindex in Robots.txt file
If you don’t wish for search engines to index some of your pages – for whatever reason – it’s not good practise to use the robots.txt file to handle this. Google does not support these commands in the robots.txt file.
It is better to add the noindex command in the pages <head> section.
Are webpages ever manually ranked by Google?
A fair question that was asked of Google. And a very predictable answer returned, NO!
There are way too many pages to rank any by hand, they confirmed.
Reading between the lines I think the person really wanted to know that if Google ranks the odd website by hand for certain reasons.
The answer is still no.
Do you like this SEO update?
Would you like more or less info on each subject? Let me know, I want to make this report useful to you.