Keeping up with the goings on in the world of online marketing and in particular SEO can be quite draining and very time consuming. But never fear as we have once again squished all the important news and changes from Google and the other search engines into our quick and easy 5 min SEO Monthly Update Report.
If you have not read one of our monthly SEO reports before they are designed to be short and to the point so you can be informed with the most important changes made by the search engines so you can help your website perform better. So we hope you enjoy and don’t forget to read our previous monthly reports as they are still relevant in our Search Engine News section.
This is what has happened in May 2015:
General SEO News:
- Google confirmed that they have a new Quality Update algorithm which helps rate the quality of the content on a webpage. If you thought that is what Google’s Panda algorithm does then head over here to our Google’s Quality Update post to understand more on this. Content has always been King, now quality is the Queen!
- If you are currently using Twitter here is some good news, Twitter feeds are now included into Google’s search engine results. These are mainly trending tweets but we have also seen many local based Tweets too. If you are not already actively using Twitter this news should highlight the importance of this social network for online businesses. To find out more on this head over to our Social Media Management page.
- One of the important ways to help search engines know of new content is by making sure your sitemap.xml is up to date and submitted to all search engines. The sitemap.xml file has a couple of parameters which are called Priority and Change Frequency. In the past webmasters have used (and abused) these parameters to help certain content get more priority. Google have confirmed that they no longer use this two parameters.
- Lots of rumours about Apple creating their own search engine, this would (most likely) only be for mobile devices if they do indeed create one. It would also replace Google and Bing one would think too. We all want another search engine to worry about don’t we! 🙂
- Websites with Doorway Pages have been hit over the last week or so and their ranking positions have taken a slide. To remind you a Doorway page is if you have say 300 pages with the same content for 300 towns but only a few words have changed, namely the town names. Ie: Bristol Taxis, Essex Taxis, Birmingham Taxis etc… The reason they would do this is to try and target local based keyword terms.
If you are doing this or intend to do so soon, then we have one word for you, STOP! 🙂
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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 Google’s search results.
- A little news on Penguin and Panda, Google in their own vague manor have said they will run the updates for these two algorithms faster. Helpful!
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.
- As above.
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.
- Lots of movement over the last couple of weeks with local based search terms, we are not sure if there was a bug or if Google are testing something, however everything now seems to be back to normal and how it was beforehand.
Mobile SEO:
- Bing have announced that they too are rolling out a mobile algorithm similar to Google’s recent addition (link to Google’s mobile algorithm post). Bing’s will be a little different in that if a website is designed mobile friendly it will not get a ranking boost on mobile devices (like Google), Bing will continue to show the most relevant search results for the search term mobile friendly or not. They will have a ‘Mobile Friendly‘ label next to the website link though. More on this to come.
- This is exciting news if your business has an App. Google have now started to include Apps within mobile search results. It is called App indexing and it works like this. If you search for say Cake Recipes on a mobile device it might include an App with lots of Cake Recipes. If you click on the link it will either open the App on your mobile device or take you to a page to download the App.
Bing have also said they will be rolling this out too soon. It works both for Android and IOS.
There is a lot of movement in App indexing so expect more on this in the future.
- Google have been testing a badge in their search results called SLOW. The idea is to identify sites that are slow to load. We haven’t seen this ourselves but several people in the SEO industry have. If this is rolled out it wouldn’t look good next to your website in the search results! (a link to find out how to increase the speed of your website)
- Some interesting news, Google have said that more people are using Smartphones than desktop computers on their sites. If you haven’t got a website that is mobile friendly please please get one!
This Months SEO Tip:
A popular way of displaying a lot of content on a page is to use tabs (often JavaScript or HTML). An example of one below:
Google have said that if you have a website that uses these tabs or similar ways of hiding content it will not value the content on the hidden tabs as much as the initial open tab. Therefore make sure your important primary keyword friendly content is in the initial opened tab.
If you missed last month’s report don’t worry, all the information is still relevant and available in April’s SEO monthly update report.