Welcome to the February 2016 Juicy SEO Online Marketing report! In case you missed previous months reports they can all be found in our Monthly Online Marketing Blog, head over as there is a lot of good tips to help your website perform better.
As per normal, we have squished a whole months worth of important SEO, PPC and Online Marketing news into a 120-second read, enjoy!
1. Lets start with the biggest news for this month and this time it affects both SEO and PPC. Google have started to roll out a change to their search results that they will no longer show Adverts (AdWords PPC) on the right-hand side but instead to increase the amount of adverts at the top and bottom of the main search results. This is obviously bad news for SEO as we now have more adverts ‘pretending’ to be organic results. But on the flip side, it is good news for PPC! If you would like to know more about this very important change head over to our Google removes right-hand side adverts in search results page.
2. If you have been reading our monthly reports for a while you will know that Google and other search engines do not like Link Networks. Every so often Google penalises the sites that use these networks and when they do it can take a long time to get your search engine rankings back to where they were. This month Google penalised a large Link Network in Japan. Although we haven’t seen Google hit a Link Network for a while it does go to show that they are still checking!
Find out how you can benefit from the latest Google Search Results change!
3. Google have confirmed what we already knew, the reviews in Google Local are not a search ranking factor.
4. Google also confirmed that 302 redirects WILL pass link juice to websites, however with that said 302 is a temporary redirect and you should move to 301 if the redirect is permanent.
5. If you were thinking of changing your websites URL’s to include keywords, Google says it is not worth it as it is a very small ranking factor. That said, did we just hear Google tell us a Ranking Factor! 🙂 We would recommend adding your keywords to new URL’s though as ‘every little helps!’
6. The age old SEO theory of if you see a spike in your traffic from Google crawling it must mean that a new algorithm update is coming. The reason behind people thinking this is that they think Google is gathering the most up to date indexed pages so the update is more effective. Google however, have confirmed this is rubbish as the system that crawls websites is not connected to algorithms.
7. The SEO industry noticed a large drop (more than 20%) in websites with Reviews Rich Snippets. These are the little stars next to the search results in Google. A bug was later found by Google and we are now seeing the review stars returning. Phew!
8. Google sent out a large amount of Hreflang notifications to webmasters Search Console recently, if you use Hreflang we recommend that you check your Search Console. Of course, Juicy SEO clients do not need to worry about this as we monitor your Search Console for you!
9. AMP was launched to the World this month, AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, it is a way to display websites faster for static content on mobile devices. Google is heavily behind this project and this month said that websites that use AMP will not have a better chance of ranking in search results. We are willing to bet that it won’t be long until it will though! We will let you know when you should be seriously looking at AMP so keep reading our future reports or follow us on Social Media.
10. It wouldn’t be a Juicy SEO report if we didn’t mention the up and coming Penguin algorithm update. The story (shortened version) so far…. Google said in the middle of 2015 that the new Penguin algorithm will be live by September, then it was November. Then in December they said it is ready to make live but didn’t want to because of the holidays so they will run in the first couple of weeks of 2016. Then, in January they informed us it will be live for definitely in the first quarter of 2016. So this month’s update, they have said ‘It will be live once it is ready!’. We think they will miss that deadline too! 🙂