Welcome to this month edition of Juicy SEO’s monthly SEO and online marketing report. Lots have happened this month so let’s get right to the most important changes that could affect your website:
100% you will learn something!
Content
We have all heard that Quality is more important than Quantity haven’t we, however, this month Google have confirmed that it is highly possible that if you remove and de-index weaker content on your website leaving the best quality content, the website could perform better and have better quality of visitor which leads to increase of conversions.
Sitemaps
If you are changing your URLs of your website and need to set up a lot of 301 redirects Google have said that you should not leave the old Sitemap.xml file in Search Console for longer than 6 months. Once the new URLs are indexed from your new Sitemap remove the old Sitemap with the old URLs. By leaving two sets of the Sitemap with two sets of URLs will only confuse Google.
Tools
Google have released a new version of their tool that tests your website for mobile friendliness, here is a link to test your website.
Google Analytics and Search Console have become a little bit more connected, if you connect the two tools you will now see some Search Console data in Google Analytics. Why don’t they just combine the two fully and have done with it??
Google’s Search Console has also had a new function added called ‘Sets’. This allows you to create a ‘Set’ of domains and group them together. This is useful if (as you should have) you have entries for www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com. Not a lot of functionality in it at the moment but we think it will increase in time.
Google have been performing a lot of tests this month on how search results are displayed, we don’t think they have settled on anything yet. This consists of colour changes, font size and the amount of white space on the page.
Google are trying to become even quicker when indexing new content. At the moment if you regularly create content Google will most likely index the new page within minutes, a little longer if you don’t create as much content. Well, Google are not happy with this and want to index ALL regular content INSTANTLY! (I know upper caps, it’s that of a big deal!).
Do you use Google’s ‘Image Search’, good isn’t it? Well, there will now be adverts within the results too. It was going to happen!
Mobile
May saw the release of the latest version of the Mobile Friendly Algorithm being updated, version 2. It was rolled out slowly so no sudden changes for most websites, in fact, many people didn’t even notice (We did!).
Google News
Some Google News, news for you. If you have a ‘local’ website which reports of local news and a large event occurs in your location which is picked up by national news, Google will push your local version up high in the Google News section, even higher than the big ones like CNN and BBC.
Bing
Bing are also testing a lot of new design changes including a carousel like Googles.
Penalties
An interesting thing that came out this month, if your website receives a penalty from Google for being naughty and you decide to create a new website and simply redirect the old site to the new, the penalty will also follow. So don’t do that! In fact, what they did also say is that there isn’t a safe way to redirect a website with a penalty to a new website. Be a good boy or girl and this won’t be an issue anyway!
Adwords and PPC
Google Adwords has had a big redesign which now allows you to include more text in your advert, to name one of the changes (the most important one really).
Bye bye Adwords content keyword tool! It’s going! 🙁
Penguin
And finally our monthly Penguin algorithm update report. For regular readers, you will know we (the whole world) have been waiting for Google to update their Penguin algorithm (see glossary below). Sadly still no news and nothing from Google to make us think it is coming soon.
This months SEO and PPC Tip, follow Juicy SEO on Twitter and Facebook as we post LOADS of tips all the time!
Glossary
Panda: The Google Panda update concentrates on the quality of the web page content, if the algorithm thinks the page is of low quality it might penalise it in Google’s search results.
Penguin: 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.
Pigeon: Google’s Pigeon algorithm concentrates on Local SEO, if you have a bricks and mortar business this is something you should take note of.
Phantom (Quality Update): This algorithm rewards website pages for good content.
TDL: A TLD means Top Level Domain like .com or .net or .co.uk.