Monthly SEO Report Covering June 2018

Hi!

Welcome to this month’s SEO update report where we remove all the waffle about SEO and condense all the changes that have happened in the last month into a 2 minute read.

 

First off if you haven’t read last months report I highly recommend as previous reports can give you a history for this month’s updates.

If you are not aware of search engines crawl budget I explain what it is in our SEO report for March.

This month Google have said that unless you have a really huge site you shouldn’t worry about your budget. I would still keep an eye on it in Search Console though.

If you read my SEO report each month you will know that I have mentioned that in July Google will be launching their Speed Update.

This will affect the ranking positions for websites that are REALLY slow. We are talking many seconds. If your site loads more than 5 seconds I would start looking at reducing.

Google reminded us that it isn’t just their GoogleBot that checks for the site speed, they use several means. Therefore, if you are thinking of stopping loading of heavy scripts when a robot visits as they take a long time to load, don’t bother. Google we use other means to check the speed.

Anyway, you should reduce the speed of your page to help the visitor not to have better rankings, quicker site = happier visitor = more products sold.

Google have said this month that the order of the words in your Title tag should not make a difference to your page rankings.

Hmm!

There looks to have been another algorithm update rolled out around the 8th/9th June. No word from Google about this.

To be honest there seems to be chatter about an algorithm update every week for the last month or so.

In case you have not heard of Google’s Web Light it is basically a system that reduces heavy web pages for slow network coverage like in places in Africa, for example.

From what I understand it isn’t serving your site to them but a “more wordy, less image”  version of your page instead.

Google have now added to Search Console an option to show you how many people see the Web Light version. Quite interesting and worth a look.

Incidentally Google Web Light does not affect your websites rankings.

The order of your URL’s in your sitemap doesn’t matter and will not make a difference to your websites ranking positions.

The rating stars that you can add to your rich snippet and get displayed in Google’s search results are not a ranking factor for organic search results.

If I remember correctly I think they are for Google My Business.

Google have said that they do not count links to your website from Press Releases. They also will not penalise you for having press releases link to you.

The reason this has come up is because some people create press releases for “spammy” link building. Shame on you!