SEO Update Report Covering May 2019

Each month I list all the dates that we think an algorithm update occurred, here are the dates for May 2019:

26th April (close enough to May)

22nd May

29th May

Within both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is a tool that lets you disavow any links you feel might be penalising your website due to them being a little spammy. I have mentioned in previous reports that I recommend waiting for the search engine to complain about the link before disavowing it.

However, this month Google have said “if you can’t find any dodgy – they didn’t say dodgy but a similar word I can’t remember – links to your website then the chances are you don’t have any”.

So, don’t panic unless you hear from them.

Google have released a new set of structured data markup tutorials, FAQ’s if you will. Here is a link to this site.

New options are also available including, which I like a lot, is a “how to” mark up. So when you create your stunning landing page on how to draw a circle you can add some schema to help search engines display the content nicely in their search results.

There is also a new FAQ mark up too which joins the already launched “Question and Answer” mark up.

If you are not using these you really should at least look into them. They won’t be for everyone as they could reduce clicks to your site, – ie: the searcher gets the info they need from the search result and therefore doesn’t click to your site – however, they could do the opposite too!

You see if you are currently ranking in 11th position for a keyword and getting very little traffic from it, adding this mark up might move your website into the top 3 positions which more people will see and more people might click onto your website.

They are easy to install and once done you can pretty up forget about them.

But test test test!

Once again I have managed to shoehorn an entry in this report about website speed – I love fast websites!

Google have released as Beta – not due to be live for quite a while yet though –  a new tool to measure the speed of all your pages so you can tell which ones are slow and fast.

Nice!

If you haven’t heard – excuse the pun –  audio search is coming. You will soon be able to search on words that someone have said in a podcast, for example. Not witchcraft but very fancy.

Think about how you can use this in your industry.

As webmasters, you know that space on a page especially if on a mobile device is very tight. We all want to say more but not clog up the page with lots of words and ruin the websites design.

A way around this has been to use Tabs or Expandable sections on the page. As I reported, best part of two years ago now, Google can see the content hidden in these Tabs. However, the content that is hidden will not be part of rich snippet data. Something to bear in mind when deciding what copy to display on page load.

A question was asked of Google on how and when to delete old pages. They replied that you should look into this carefully in case it will affect your site’s ranking.

What they mean by this is that the page might have a load of good links to it which you will lose the SEO value from.

I say, why would you want to delete a page in the first place? 🙂

If you have ever created a new project and discovered a load of bugs, feel happy that even the biggest companies in the World have bugs.

May saw either a large indexing bug from Google or in fact many indexing bugs. I’m not going to delve into this as at the time of writing they have fixed all the issues.

Still nice to know everyone gets bugs.

Most websites don’t need to worry about crawl budget but if you manage a large site and it is an issue change your forms from POST to GET as GET uses less budget.

Handy to know!

We touched on this in previous reports, if you are thinking about splitting up your website into two or more sites to try and get more positions in the search results,  Google have said that this will not work.

I agree, but if you created another site with more great content but targeting a new set of keywords that will be fine! 😉

Favicon – fav icon – are those little images you see in browser tabs which should represent the websites logo or name.

Well, Google are now including these favicons in their search results. The word on the SEO street is that they are doing this to make paid adverts – which are displayed above organic results – look similar and therefore you might not realise you have clicked on an advert.

A very sneaky way to make more money Mr Google!

Speaking of hidden adverts in Google’s search results, Google have changed the colour and the way they display the AD symbol.

It wasn’t too long ago they were obvious in a strong bold green colour – they still might be on mobile devices, for now.

Now they are black and very much look like part of the web page entry.

Shame on you Mr Google!