Welcome to the December 2015 edition of Juicy SEO’s Monthly SEO Report, if you have missed any other reports for previous months don’t worry they are all HERE.
As per every month we condense all the important SEO and online marketing news in a quick and handy 120 second read, so here goes…
Juicy SEO 120 second Monthly SEO Report
General SEO News
– If you are a regular reader of our Monthly SEO reports then you will remember we have been saying December is the month Google will release the latest version of their Penguin algorithm. It seems that they left it a little too late in December to make live as they have now decided to delay until 2016. If they made it live too near the Christmas holidays and there were issues there wouldn’t be enough people at work to fix. Kind of makes sense.
– Google have created a new HTML framework which they have designed to speed up web pages and in particular, mobile pages. We won’t go into the details of it here (if you want to read up about it click here) as we will go off topic. The interesting thing about this though is that Google have said that they might give websites an advantage in their search results if you use this framework. There is a good chance this will happen as it follows similar advantages for SSL websites and Mobile friendly websites.
– Last month we mentioned a possible Google algorithm update (Nov 19th) which had affected many websites ranking positions but we weren’t 100% sure, in this instance we were right there was a Phantom (Quality Update) update in November.
– It also looks like there has been another Phantom update around the 10th December and again around on the 16th and 29th December, we have seen lots of movement around those days. The SEO community has also seen this.
– Google have decided to index any website that uses HTTPS ahead of the HTTP version even if you have set it up to default to HTTP.
– If you follow us on one of the many social media channels you would have read our posts in December about Google changing the way they count visitors to your website in Search Console. You might have seen an increase in the amount of visitors Google thinks were on your website due to this change.
– Google have said that their robot can not see hyperlinks which are invoked by the cursor hovering over the button and therefore, would not be able to use to help the website. We can’t think why you would want a button on your website which you don’t click but that might be just us?
This Month’s SEO Tip
So, why would you do this?
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.