Monthly SEO Report Covering May 2018
Stuart Cole
Welcome to this month’s SEO update report. covering May 2018.
If you have missed any of the other reports, which will still be relevant, then we definitely recommend you catch up, here is a link to the SEO Report Updates.
rel=Canonical
I have mentioned a few times in the past the importance of making sure your webpage is as optimised as much as possible before making it live. In my experiments and experiences pages perform better this way rather than allowing Google to index the page first and then optimising it later.
The reason I bring this up is that Google have this month informed us that to make sure your rel=canonical tag is correct at time of publishing/indexing as they might not look at it again in future crawls.
m.mydomain.com
Just a little reminder that you should NOT have a version of your website using the m. prefix (m. = mobile) if your standard version is a responsive website.
m. sub-domains are purely to serve a copy of your desktop website created for mobile devices.
By having both it could (and probably will) confuse Google and might be seen as duplicate content which in turn gets you a black mark from the big G.
Glossary
If you are new to search engine optimisation or just need a little refresh on the phrases used in our report head over to our SEO Glossary page, everything you need to know in one place.
Adwords Bye Bye!
Google have confirmed again that Adwords accounts that have not spent any money will be closed down after 16 months or so. If you want to keep your account, even if only to use their tools to help identify keywords then I suggest spending a couple of penny’s advertising something.
Like this blog post for example. 🙂
Algorithm Update
A Google algorithm updates looks to have occurred around the 15th of May and the 25th May. As normal no word from Google. If you have seen a big ranking changes around those times it could be because of this.
Personal Search Results
It has been widely thought in the SEO community that Google could/will if possible serve up a different set of results per person – providing they are signed into a Google account – as a personalised search results. I have seen examples of this happening so it does exist.
That said Google have said that the amount of users who see personalised search results are very small and most people who are using the same language and location will see the same results.
Location and language is much more influential.
Speed
It wouldn’t be one of my monthly SEO reports if I didn’t mention that the speed of your website is soooo important. Google this month mentioned that the faster your website loads, the more of the website it will crawl.
This is interesting as it sounds as if they allot a certain amount of time per site/page. This goes against what they have said in the past.
Either way having a fast site just helps all the time!
