Monthly Online Marketing Report Covering March 2017

Welcome to this month’s review on all things Search Engines, yep, it’s the Juicy SEO Monthly SEO Report!

First off before we start if you missed last month’s treat then you really should have a read there are some relevant news tips in there! SEO Report Covering February 2017.

Fred Algorithm Update

The big news this month was the ‘Fred’ algorithm update which occurred around the 8th March. The name of the update was called Fred because the person at Google who helps SEOs understand what is going on couldn’t think of a name, so, he called it Fred.

This affected many many websites and as yet we are unsure what the algorithm was targeting. Many SEO’s thought it was targeting websites with lots of adverts however our tests showed it was targeting low quality content. If your websites rankings dropped around that time have a re-look at your content and try and make it better.

UPDATE: Google this week confirmed the above that it was a quality update.

Adverts

Google this month also re-affirmed that you should not have too many adverts above the page, if you really need to have an advert there make it your most important one.

Links

Google also mentioned that it is possible to create a new website without any links to it and rank well for medium competitive keywords, we performed several experiments on this over the years and every time we have seen good results, so, yes it is possible. That said, it is good to hear it from Google.

Site:

Google have said that the site: command is not going away, many of the engineers at Google use this command and would fight it if Google wanted to remove.

This is a handy command that lists all the pages of your website that have been indexed. The figure isn’t 100% correct but we think it is close.

To use enter the following into Google: site:www.youdomain.com

Googles Adwords

Googles Adwords users are now allowed to bid on registered trade marks, however, you are still not allowed to use them in your advert, but this is an important change for PPC users.

Adwords also now allows price extensions for your adverts, a nice addition!

Voice

Followers of the latest tech gadgets would already know about home devices like Alexa and Echo whereby you can talk to the gadget to get search results of questions (amoung other things), a prime example would be to ask:

What is the weather going to be like today?

This month we have seen the first glimpse of how manufactures will make money from these gadgets in the future. Described by Google as a mistake before the customers home gadget replied, it told the owner that a new film is being premiered in cinemas this weekend. Beleive me this is not a mistake but a little look into the future.

Believe me this is not a mistake but a little look into the future!

Crawl Budget

Search engines are very busy things, one thing they do it spider websites to find content for their index database. To use their time and resources effectively they create a crawl budget for each website, basically the larger the budget the more time they are looking at your website.

By reducing the amount of time it takes to download a web page will use up less of the budget. Therefore, if you have faster web pages the likely hood is more of your content will appear in the search engines index.

We have tested this many times and it has been the case for all our tests, so speed up those pages!

DMOZ

DMOZ is one of the largest and oldest directories and has been around for 18 years. Many ‘iffy’ SEOs out there still use DMOZ to get links to their website, tut tut!

Well, they will not be able to do this for much longer, as of 14th March it will be closed down forever.

Mobile

Over the last few months we have been updating you with the latest news on Google’s “Mobile First Index”, this is a completely new index separated from the normal desktop version you see which will serve up the best results for mobile devices.

At the moment if you search Google on a mobile device it will use the desktop index.

The latest on this is that they will only make it live once they know the quality of the results are as good as the current desktop version.

Facebook

And finally…

It was confirmed that Google does NOT use Facebook “Likes” as a ranking signal. Shock! 🙂

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. Since 23rd Sept 2016 this has joined the core search updates and is now real time.

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.

AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages. A way to increase the speed your mobile version of your website loads.

EMD: Exact Match Domains. Matching the domain name exactly with the search term used.