Algorithm updates
6th November 2019 a search local algorithm update looks to have happened. This update has been named Bedlam.
12th November, this update looked to have affected a lot of websites but Google are playing it down. Most of the ranking tools didn’t see much of a change.
In fact it didn’t stop there, there were updates throughout that whole week and the following one.
BERT
Last month I reported on the huge algorithm update named BERT. Google have since the launch of this update provided a little more information about it.
BERT is an AI algorithm that trys to understand human language better. You can not optimise for it as an SEO but instead they said the best thing to do is write great content and forget about BERT.
You may not see much change in your rank monitoring tools as the chances are you are only monitoring short tail keywords.
BERT is trying to understand language so you will most likely see ranking changes for long tail keyword phrases.
Now whilst the BERT news is big news from Google, Bing on the other hand have been using BERT since April 2019. Not only that, they use it on all searches not just around 10% that Google does.
Flash, saviour of the universe!
Well not in the case of the software language Flash as by the end of the year Google will no longer support and try to index content using Flash.
Flash is quite old technology now and to be honest I haven’t seen a Flash website for a long time, this latest news will most likely need the help of Prince Valtan and his Winged men if it is to survive.
That’s it, no more Flash Gordon references.
Links
Last month I reported that links lose their SEO value over time – head over to the SEO report for October for more details on this.
Something to bear in mind with links is that just becase the amount of traffic coming from a link reduces over time the SEO link juice value may not reduce. Remember humans clicking on a link is different to search engine algorithms.
Bing Penalties
It makes a nice change to write about another search engine other than Google in my monthly report.
Bing have announced they will be rolling out a new set of penalties aimed at targeting link building networks.
Bing have yet to say when the penalties will be sent, I will let you know as soon as I know.
Speed
My favourite SEO subject.
Google have added a new speed report facility to search console. It helps you see which pages are slow in an easy to use UX.
There isn’t a date yet for an API for the speed report.
Remember, speed of your website is a ranking factor, so this report might help you understand why some pages are not ranking well.
Page Titles
By now you should know how important page Titles (META) are for SEO.
Google have said they only change the page title in their search results for a very few websites.
So, keep adding them!