It has been a busy month in the world of SEO and online marketing for February 2015, here is your 5min run down of what happened:
General SEO News
- The first week of February we saw a lot of movement in sites ranking positions for brand keywords, Google had refreshed their algorithm which we think affected this.
- There have been reports that users of Google’s search engine in the UK are being diverted to Google.com when using Chrome. We have not seen this ourselves but might affect some traffic figures.
- Google has increased its knowledge graph to include medical keyword phrases, this might affect traffic to any medial websites.
- Google analytics showed 0 visitors on 9th February for many accounts, if your account has 0 (zero) visitors for that day don’t worry.
- If your website is included into Google News it has been advised to keep your Title tag and H1 tag content consistent or ideally the same. This will help Google index your content.
- Google has said that it will start to include if your website is mobile friendly as a factor in its ranking results from 21st April 2015. This gives you about 5 weeks to make sure your website is mobile friendly. If you are not sure here is a good tester: www.responsinator.com
Panda News:
The Google Panda update concentrates on the quality of the web page, if the algorithm thinks the page is of low quality it might penalise it in the Google search results.
- Google have said that duplicate Title and Description tags are not considered in the Panda algorithm and the site will not be penalised if there are duplicates. However we recommend that you do not have duplicate tags for other SEO reasons.
Penguin News (including link building):
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.
- Google have said that the safest way to make sure you will not be penalised by Google for generating links to your site is to not link build. That said to help your website perform better in results you will need links. Be careful where and how you generate links, you have been warned!
Pigeon News:
Google’s Pigeon algorithm concentrates on Local SEO, if you have a bricks and mortar business this is something you should take note of.
No news for the Pigeon algorithm for this month.
This months SEO Tip:
In February Google started including Twitter tweets to their search results. We haven’t seen too many of these so far in the UK version of Google but they are there. With this new development Twitter is not just about Social Media and online marketing but is also part of SEO. If you are not using Twitter and you think your business would benefit from using it then now is the time to start!
If you missed last months report head over to the Juicy SEO monthly report for January 2015.