With 2016 looming, it can be tempting to kick back and celebrate the New Year and successful holiday season. But, as any seasoned marketer can tell you, there is never any time for rest in the world of SEO.
The past year has seen huge changes in the world of SEO, with a newly emboldened emphasis on mobile optimization and responsive design, the change to 3-pack results in local search, and the expected new algorithms running over at Google.
With that in mind, it’s time to start looking forward and preparing for a booming 2016 by predicting the biggest trends likely to define the coming year. CJG Digital Marketing is doing just that with a new infographic detailing the hottest SEO trends in 2016.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2015-12-30 16:00:502015-12-30 16:00:50Get Set For 2016 With The Hottest New Trends In SEO [Infographic]
The holiday shopping season is in fever pitch, which means most business owners and marketers are going full-steam-ahead on their online marketing strategies to rake in their piece of the $650 billion predicted to be spent this year.
So how can you get in on the action? Pixel Road Designs recently shared an infographic that can give your holiday marketing strategies the extra boost they need to make this holiday season a huge success.
Check out the infographic below, or at Pixel Road Designs’ website here.
Since launching in spring, Google AdWords’ structured snippet extensions have shown themselves to be a powerful tool in the AdWords arsenal.
Structured snippets add an extra line of information with your text ads which specifically highlight important information for searchers. When implemented well, this can boost click-through rates for ads.
Now, Google has made these structured snippets even more visible in the search results by doubling the amount of information that can accompany text ads.
To do this, advertisers can select two predefined “Headers” which act as structured snippets. Then, those headers can be customized with two unique sets of values. Depending on the search results, these snippets have the potential to be displayed at the same time.
Google does say that each structured snippet extension is treated as its own ad auction, and like other ad extensions, may not always appear together.
You can boost the chances of having both extensions display at the same time by being thorough and providing as much information as you can. With more information, the ad auction is better able to select the highest quality combination of extensions. Not only does this improve your chances of having both snippets show at the same time, it also increases your overall ad performance.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2015-12-08 12:16:572015-12-08 12:16:57AdWords Doubles Amount of Info In Stuctured Snippets
For the first time, Google has released the full version of their Search Quality Rating Guidelines, a document used by Google Search Quality Rates to help determine how to rate the search results they are testing.
The document has become public in the past, through several leaks. Just this week, the October version was leaked. The search engine also released an abridged version in 2013, but now the company has decided to officially release the entire 160-page version previously only available to Search Quality Raters.
Google’s Mimi Underwood said that “ratings from evaluators do not determine individual site rankings, but are used help us understand our experiments.” She added, “The evaluators base their ratings on guidelines we give them; the guidelines reflect what Google thinks search users want.”
As expected, Underwood also implied the document will be updated over time, “as search, and how people use it, changes.”
You can download the full Search Quality Rating Guidelines here.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2015-11-20 15:14:222015-11-20 15:14:22Google Shares Search Quality Rating Guidelines For The First Time
Like Google, Bing has been increasingly focused on delivering a mobile-friendly version of the web to its growing number of mobile users. Now, Bing has released a tool to help webmasters ensure their site meets the search engine’s standards for mobile-friendliness.
Specifically, the tool reviews your site based on the following criteria to decide if your site is mobile-friendly:
Viewport and Zoom control configuration
Width of page content
Readability of text on the page
Spacing of links and other elements on the page
Use of incompatible plug-ins
The tool will also notify webmasters if any of the above criteria were inaccessible or blocked, so you can remedy the problem.
Like the tool Google offered shortly before it released its “Mobile-Friendly Algorithm”, Bing’s tool delivers an overall verdict as to whether you site would be considered mobile-friendly by the search engine.
It will also explain what issues it detects and explain why your page fails, if that is the case.
Both Bing and Google’s tools reportedly detect essentially the same things, with little difference between the ultimate results. However, Bing’s tool is significantly faster and easier to use.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2015-11-13 16:02:442015-11-13 16:02:44Bing Launches Its New Mobile-Friendly Tool For Testing Websites
Move over Penguin and Panda, Google’s newest search signal doesn’t rely on engineers to keep it updated and refreshed. RankBrain, a new artificial intelligence system, is already processing a “very large fraction” of searches on Google every day.
RankBrain was announced in an exclusive report from Bloomberg and has already been implemented to help Google address and better understand the large number of ambiguous queries made on the search engine every day.
RankBrain isn’t a complete algorithm, but instead acts as one of the “hundreds” of signals Google uses to rank sites and content for users. Reports estimate Google uses over 10,000 signals and sub-signals, but RankBrain isn’t your average signal.
According to Greg Corrado, Google senior research scientist, RankBrain is now the third most important signal in matching results to a search query. He would not say what the other two more important signals were.
RankBrain basically extends Google’s ability to understand associations between words and use those associations to provide better results. For example, in the past a search for “Barack” would pull results from pages and content that contain that specific word. Now, the same search might also include results which include information related to “US President,” “Barack Obama,” or even possibly “Michelle Obama’s husband.”
As Bloomberg explains in the report:
RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.
It may not seem like a huge revelation for the search engine, but RankBrain plays an important role in filtering the results users see. It is still unclear just how far RankBrain extends and how it processes signals such as links or photos on pages, but chances are RankBrain has already had an impact on your results you are seeing when you perform a search.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2015-10-27 13:30:462015-10-27 13:30:46Say Hello To RankBrain, Google’s New AI Search Signal
Last week, during Recode’s Code/Mobile conference, Amit Singhal, senior vice president of Google Search, announced that over half of all searches conducted on Google each month are coming from mobile devices.
Mobile has quickly become a dominant force in search, but it has only overtaken desktop in both search and ad volume over the past year.
For this count, Google is not including mobile devices with screens over 6 inches in size, such as tablets. According to the company, Google is primarily counting mobile views as those coming from smartphones.
During his announcement, Singhal explained how the definition of search is changing as the way people interact with their devices and the internet evolves:
“Search as we think about it is fundamentally how you will interact with computing. Computing may live in a 4-to-6-inch device, it may live in a desktop, it may live on a 1-inch round device.”
The news was leaked by John Mueller on Google+ this week, while offering a warning to those who have yet to make their sites mobile-friendly:
“More than half of Google’s searches are now coming from mobile. If you haven’t made your site (or your client’s sites) mobile-friendly, you’re ignoring a lot of potential users. “
According to Search Engine Journal, Google also announced it has indexed over 100 billion links within apps, showing how Google is growing beyond the traditional idea of the web page.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2015-10-19 14:44:512015-10-19 14:44:51Google Announces Over Half Of All Searches Are Coming From Mobile Devices
Google is launching a new set of algorithm changes intended to remove hacked sites that spew spam from the search engines. According to the company, the changes will affect approximately 5% of queries and has already begun rolling out.
Google says it is cracking down on hacked spam to protect both searchers and site owners, but the move could have consequences for legitimate site owners unaware their site has been hacked. These sites are dangerous to those who visit them as they can lead to malware downloads, marketing of illegal goods, or completely redirecting people to unintended, low-quality sites.
For queries with a particularly large amount of hacked spam present in the SERPs, Google says you may see an overall reduction in the amount of results shown. According to the announcement, this is because Google is working to make sure users only see the most relevant results for their queries.
In some particular searches, as much as a quarter of the search results have been removed.
Google has said these changes will be part of an ongoing effort to continuously refine its algorithms to improve SERPs and cut out bad content.
Google made big news earlier this year when it declared it would favor sites that switch to HTTPS, and now Twitter is taking a similar path. A member of Twitter’s development team published a thread on the Twitter Community forum explaining the company’s future plans for HTTPS and setting a deadline for the company’s switch the HTTPS.
Starting October 1st, Twitter will begin utilizing HTTPS for all new outbound links, meaning any new link you share will be packed in “https://t.co”. This way Twitter can securely send users to their intended destination, even when the destination page is not an HTTPS link.
Similar changes have been made by popular sites such as Reddit and Wikipedia, however in those situations the sites began using HTTPS site-wide.
This will also have the added side effect of increasing URL lengths in the future, depriving you of one more character to write with when sharing a link.
This also causes issues with tracking referral traffic to non-HTTPS sites, as Twitter explains non-HTTPS sites may see an apparent decrease in referral numbers.
“Web browsers drop the Referer header from a request by default when downgrading from an HTTPS t.co link to an HTTP destination in compliance with the HTTP specification for the Referer header… Based on our estimates you may see a 10% drop in traffic attribution from Twitter as a result of this security change.”
The company also warns that sites will see a steady decrease in referral traffic recorded from Twitter in the future, as users update to the latest browsers that support this policy.
Google has issued a stern warning against those who repeatedly try to game the search engine. In a blog post published at the Google Webmaster Blog, Google’s Search Quality Team said any webmaster who repeatedly violated the Google Webmaster Guidelines and gets caught will face “further action” against their sites.
In the post, Google explored how site owners are getting hit with manual penalties, going through the extensive efforts to get the penalty revoked, and immediately going back to their old spammy ways.
However, Google says these people aren’t slipping under the radar like they may think. The Search Quality Team explains even the most subtle changes get picked up by the search engine:
“For example, a webmaster who received a Manual Action notification based on an unnatural link to another site may nofollow the link, submit a reconsideration request, then, after successfully being reconsidered, delete the nofollow for the link.”
These type of shenanigans won’t get anyone on the friendly side of Google, and repeat violators will see further reconsideration requests become harder and harder to earn. While they won’t say exactly what penalties to expect, they also say that sites it determines were deliberately attempting to spam will be hit with “further actions”.
It can sound tempting to try to earn some short-term gains by bending and breaking the rules, but in the long run you are digging your own grave. Google doesn’t forget, and it certainly won’t stop checking on your site after you get a penalty removed. If you want to stay out of trouble, make sure you stay on the right side of the Webmaster Guidelines.
