Google has announced removing of the FAQs from SERPs

What’s up with the FAQ schema?

Google just dropped the bomb that they’re ditching the FAQs that pop up below your search results. Before, you could add fancy code to your page to display questions and answers. But now, they’re only showing them from super official sites like Gov.uk and NHS. Check out the full scoop here: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes

So, what does this mean for you?

Well, if your site had the FAQ schema markup, those questions and answers won’t be showing up anymore. You can hop into Google Search Console and see if they were appearing by checking the Search Results Performance Report. Make sure to apply the “FAQ Rich Results” search appearance filter to see the data.

But hey, don’t worry too much about losing all those clicks. The clicks shown in the FAQ Rich Results report are only when someone saw your site in the search results with FAQs attached and clicked on the link to go to your site. The good news is that your page’s ranking won’t be affected, so if people were clicking on it when the FAQs were there, they’re likely to keep clicking even when they’re gone. The only difference is that the report in Google Search Console will show zero impressions and clicks when the FAQ Rich Results search appearance filter is applied.

What do I do now?

Right now, there’s nothing to worry about. If you have FAQ schema code on your website pages, there’s no need to get rid of it. Google will still go through and understand the schema, even though the FAQs won’t appear below your website in search results. Those FAQs could still be useful because they give more information and show your expertise. So, removing them might not be a good idea. If you’re currently adding FAQ schema, keep going because of the reasons mentioned earlier.

Why Web Hosting is Super Important for SEO

Listen up, folks! If you want your website to shine on search engines, you absolutely must have stellar web hosting. It won’t magically make your site rocket to the top, but it lays the foundation for rockin’ SEO. Let me break it down for you.

When you choose a web hosting service, you’re basically choosing the home base for your website. Your site lives on servers, and when people type in your web address, the server sends your pages to their browsers. It’s like having a sweet home for your website to party and show off its stuff.

A lot of businesses concentrate on things like design, development, digital marketing, and SEO, but they often forget about web hosting. Oops! But let me tell you, having a fast, functional, and flexible website is just as vital. And not just any web host will cut it – you need a top-notch one to boost your conversion rates and bring in other perks too.

Here’s why having a reliable web host is a genius move:

  1. Better site performance: Picture this – a good web host makes your site load super fast and smooth, so users have a blast browsing your stuff. No more frustrating loading times, my friend!
  2. Smart data management: Web hosting providers can help you keep your website data organized and easy to find. Say goodbye to the headache of hunting down your important files.
  3. Extra security: Trustworthy web hosts have your back with strong security measures that give hackers, spam, and malware a run for their money. Ain’t nobody messing with your site!
  4. Maximum uptime: With a reliable web host, your site will be up and running all the time. No more embarrassing mid-party crashes – you’ll always be online, pulling in the crowds.

Oh, and that’s not all! A good web host should offer you email accounts, FTP access (geeky stuff), support for WordPress (a must-have), and top-notch security features like SSL certificates (fancy shmancy stuff).

Now, let’s talk SEO. Google wants users to have a mind-blowing experience, and a solid web host sets the stage for that. Websites that load fast and give users a smooth ride often get a big boost in rankings.

Speed is a huge deal for SEO, my friend. If you’re stuck with a slow and cheap web host, it can totally tank your rankings, murder your traffic, and leave you in despair with fewer leads. But fear not! A good web host with high speeds can slash your page load time and keep Google happy. And hold on to your hats – in 2022, Google says your mobile speed should be two seconds or less. That means you gotta make sure your site loads faster than a rocket ship. Zoom!

Now, let’s talk security, baby! It’s a big deal when it comes to web hosting and SEO. Without a badass security system in place, your site becomes easy prey for hackers, spam, and malware. Yikes! Trust me, you do not want that mess ruining your SEO and possibly getting you kicked off search engine pages. But listen up again – a reliable web host with robust security, like SSL certificates, can keep your site locked down tight and protect your precious rankings. Phew!

And hey, let’s not forget about location. Search engines take into consideration where your site is hosted when they’re figuring out search results. Hosting your site in a data center that’s close to your target audience can crank up its speed and performance. And if you’re conducting business all over the world, a content delivery network (CDN) with hubs in different areas will make sure your hosting is speedy no matter where your users are. It’s like having a global fiesta, my friend!

So there you have it. Web hosting is the bee’s knees when it comes to nailing SEO. Don’t skimp on a reliable web host with lightning-fast speeds, ironclad security, and the perfect location. Invest in greatness and get ready for your site to soar, climb those rankings, and rule the web. Game on!

Can you make your SEO goal SMART?

In SEO, it’s important to have clear goals in mind. Setting vague goals like “get more leads” or “get more traffic” won’t give you focus or direction. These vague goals waste time and result in generic SEO work that doesn’t help your mission.

Goals provide you with a target to work towards. Having a target allows you to check if your actions align with your goal. Goals also help measure your progress. If you’re not making progress, you may need to change tactics or update your goals. On the other hand, seeing progress towards a goal gives you a sense of accomplishment and motivation.

SEO goals aim to improve your SEO and support your wider marketing and business objectives. This involves targeting awareness and engagement with potential customers on search engines. When improving SEO, you’ll look at factors like rankings, impressions, click-through rates, and clicks. You might also consider keyword volume and impressions.

To set practical goals, follow the SMART goals framework:

Specific: Clearly define your goal so that it can be measured.
Measurable: Make your goals quantifiable so that you can track progress.
Achievable: Ensure your goals are realistic within your resources.
Relevant: Align your goals with higher-order business and marketing goals.
Time-bound: Set a deadline to aid in measuring progress.

SMART goals are widely used in project management, personal development, and psychology. They can be applied to SEO to drive performance. Let’s break down each stage of SMART goals and see how you can create your own SMART SEO goals.

S: Specific
Make sure your SEO goals are specific and actionable. Avoid broad goals like “better rankings” and instead aim for something like ranking in the top 3 results for a specific keyword.

M: Measurable
Ensure that your goals can be measured. There are various SEO metrics you can track, like rankings, organic clicks, impressions, CTR, and more.

A: Achievable
Set goals that are challenging but still within reach. Consider your resources and the competitive landscape. Focus on what you can do better compared to your competitors.

R: Relevant
Make sure your goals align with your overall marketing goals. Explain how your SEO goals contribute to the larger picture and use conversion data from paid search to support your reasoning.

T: Time-bound
Set a target date to achieve your goals and create milestones along the way to track progress.

Remember that SEO takes time, so be patient and review your goals as you make progress.

Google Complementary Robots.txt Protocols & AI

Hey guys! Google just dropped some big news last night. They’re working on developing a new protocol to go hand-in-hand with the good old robots.txt. Why? Well, it’s all because of the fancy new generative AI technologies that Google and other companies are putting out these days.

This comes right after Open AI made waves by getting access to paywalled content for their ChatGPT service. But honestly, I’m not surprised that Google and others are exploring alternatives to robots.txt considering all the wild generative AI stuff happening on the web.

Now, don’t get too excited just yet. This announcement doesn’t mean anything is changing immediately. All Google is saying is that they’re gonna have some discussions with the “community” in the “coming months” to come up with fresh ideas for a new solution.

In Google’s own words, “Today, we’re kickstarting a public discussion and inviting members of the web and AI communities to chime in on complementary protocols. We want a diverse range of voices, from web publishers, to civil society, academia, and everything in between, to join the conversation. We’ll be getting these interested folks together over the next few months.”

On top of that, Google believes that it’s high time for the web and AI communities to explore other machine-readable ways to give web publishers more choice and control for all the new AI and research cases popping up.

So, there you have it, folks. Google’s looking to shake things up a bit and get some input from all the different peeps in the web and AI worlds. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. Stay tuned!

5 steps effective brand SERP strategy

So, you wanna know how to analyze your brand search engine results pages (SERPs) and build a killer digital strategy, huh? Well, you’re in luck! Today, we’re gonna break it down for you in simple terms.

First things first, let’s talk about what a brand SERP is. Basically, it’s what shows up when someone searches for your brand on a search engine. It includes all the information and links related to your brand that appear on the search results page.

Now, why should you care about your brand SERP? Well, my friend, it’s all about reputation. The way your brand is presented on the search results page can make or break your reputation. It’s like your online business card. So, it’s crucial to take control of your brand SERP and make sure it reflects positively on your brand.

Alright, let’s get to the nitty-gritty of analyzing your brand SERP. First, you need to conduct a thorough search for your brand name on different search engines. Look at the top results and see what information is displayed. Take note of any negative or irrelevant information that may be harming your reputation.

Next, it’s time to take action and build your digital strategy. Here are a few tips to get you started:

  1. Optimize your website: Make sure your website is search engine friendly. Use relevant keywords in your content, meta tags, and URLs. This will help improve your ranking on the search results page.
  2. Create high-quality content: Producing valuable and engaging content is key. Write blog posts, create videos, or share infographics that are relevant to your brand. This will not only attract more visitors but also improve your SERP presence.
  3. Leverage social media: Social media platforms are a great way to boost your brand’s visibility on the SERP. Create and optimize your social media profiles on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Remember to engage with your audience and respond to comments and messages.
  4. Manage online reviews: Online reviews can heavily influence your brand’s reputation. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and respond promptly to any negative feedback. This will show potential customers that you value their opinions and are committed to providing a great experience.
  5. Monitor and adapt: Keep a close eye on your brand SERP on a regular basis. Set up alerts and use monitoring tools to stay informed about any changes. This will allow you to quickly identify and address any issues or opportunities that may arise.

So, there you have it! By analyzing your brand SERPs and implementing a solid digital strategy, you’ll be well on your way to building a strong online presence and positive brand reputation. Good luck, my friend, and may the search engines be ever in your favor!

Google’s Core Web Vitals INP

Hey folks, let’s talk about this recent email from Google that has got some website owners a little worried. It’s all about their Core Web Vitals and a specific issue known as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). So, in a nutshell, Google sent out an email highlighting problems with Input responsiveness on certain websites, pinpointing specific elements that are causing issues.

Now, this email might have caused some panic, but don’t sweat it too much. The main goal here is to inform website owners about potential performance problems, particularly related to CLS and Input responsiveness. You see, Input responsiveness is all about how quickly your website responds to user interactions like clicking buttons or filling out forms. Google wants to make sure that sites are providing a seamless and smooth experience to users.

The email is not meant to be a punishment or a slap on the wrist. It’s more like a heads-up and guidance from Google to help you improve your site’s performance. They even give you examples of the elements on your website that are causing the CLS issues, so you know exactly what to focus on.

The bottom line is, if you received this email, take a close look at it and make sure you address those input responsiveness issues. Google recommends testing and optimizing the problem areas to minimize CLS problems and improve your overall site performance.

So, breathe easy! Google is just trying to help you out here, nudging you in the right direction to make your website better. Time to roll up your sleeves and get to work on those optimizations!

Google deprecating AJAX crawling scheme

On Wednesday the 14th of October Google are no longer recommending the AJAX crawling proposal we made back in 2009 (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html)
They openly advise now to use #! in URLs over ?_escaped_fragment_= .

“Times have changed. Today, as long as you’re not blocking Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript or CSS files, we are generally able to render and understand your web pages like modern browsers. To reflect this improvement, we recently updated our technical Webmaster Guidelines to recommend against disallowing Googlebot from crawling your site’s CSS or JS files.”

Questions and answers

Q: My site currently follows your recommendation and supports _escaped_fragment_. Would my site stop getting indexed now that you’ve deprecated your recommendation?
A: No, the site would still be indexed. In general, however, we recommend you implement industry best practices when you’re making the next update for your site. Instead of the _escaped_fragment_ URLs, we’ll generally crawl, render, and index the #! URLs.

Q: Is moving away from the AJAX crawling proposal to industry best practices considered a site move? Do I need to implement redirects?
A: If your current setup is working fine, you should not have to immediately change anything. If you’re building a new site or restructuring an already existing site, simply avoid introducing _escaped_fragment_ urls. .

Q: I use a JavaScript framework and my webserver serves a pre-rendered page. Is that still ok?
A: In general, websites shouldn’t pre-render pages only for Google — we expect that you might pre-render pages for performance benefits for users and that you would follow progressive enhancement guidelines. If you pre-render pages, make sure that the content served to Googlebot matches the user’s experience, both how it looks and how it interacts. Serving Googlebot different content than a normal user would see is considered cloaking, and would be against our Webmaster Guidelines.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages Project

Revolution is coming as Google announces a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which is designed to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web.

For many, reading on the mobile web is a slow, clunky and frustrating experience – but it doesn’t have to be that way. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere. (https://www.ampproject.org/)

Aim is to enable webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to load instantaneously and also work with smart ads regardless of mobile device used. Such move will further expand Google advertising real estate and is definitely a smart move.

Google heralds AMP project as “the start of an exciting collaboration with publishers and technology companies, who have all come together to make the mobile web work better for everyone.”
At the moment Twitter,Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn are among the first group of technology partners planning to integrate AMP HTML pages.

AMP project will be focused on providing functionality focused on some key areas:

1. Content: The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project will provide an open source approach, allowing publishers to focus on producing great content using the shared components for high performance and great user experience. The initial technical specification is now available on https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml

2. Distribution: Google has designed a new approach to caching that allows the publisher to continue to host their content while allowing for efficient distribution through Google’s high performance global cache. This means that Google will follow up by opening their cache servers to be used by anyone free of charge.

3. Advertising: Google declares they will work with publishers in the industry to help define the parameters of an ad experience that provides the speed we’re striving for with AMP.

 

Questions? – Explore common FAQs around AMP

Original source: https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages.html

Google aggressively tackles hacked web spam

On Monday October the 5th Google has officially confirmed that it has been rolling out the updated algorithms geared more specifically towards identifying spam in SERPs coming from the hacked sites.
With large amounts of legitimate sites being hacked by spammers and used to engage in abusive behaviour Google has been “forced” to take decisive action. Common practices such as malware download, promotion of traffic to low quality sites, porn, and marketing of counterfeit goods or illegal pharmaceutical drugs are some of the most common offences Google is currently paying attention to.

As per information on Webmaster Central Blog. The algorithmic changes will eventually impact roughly 5% of queries, depending on the language. Webmasters are being warned as Google rolls out the new algorithms, users might notice that for certain queries, only the most relevant results are shown, reducing the number of results shown.
Google also indicated that due to the large amount of hacked spam being removed and fine tuning of their systems to weed out the bad content while retaining the legitimate results some of the SERPs may effectively clear out substantially.

cleared SERPs

All these changes put now more and more responsibility on webmasters to ensure they are site security up to date.

Google Mobile Friendliness and App Banners

Google have just posted about new update to mobile friendliness indicating that in order to provide good user experience on mobile devices app install interstitial can not any longer cover/hide significant amount of the on-page content.

“Starting today, we’ll be updating the Mobile-Friendly Test to indicate that sites should avoid showing app install interstitial that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page. The Mobile Usability report in Search Console will show webmasters the number of pages across their site that have this issue.”

In terms of the timeline for this update Google says that after November 1 any mobile web page that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered as mobile-friendly.

Google won’t punish sites using the standard app install banners in Chrome and Safari; this is aimed at the huge annoying overlays purposely blocking access to the desired content.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/mobile-friendly-web-pages-using-app.html

HTTPS Content Mismatch Errors May Not Earn Ranking Boost

In recent August 28th Google hangout on Google+, John Mueller indicated a very important fact by saying at 18:30 mark that Google may not give HTTPS web pages the desired HTTPS ranking boost in case the page serves up HTTPS content mismatch errors.

What does it actually mean? It’s relatively simple, when your web page uses HTTPS protocol but somehow there are some elements on the page that are not secure e.g. images not over HTTPS or any social media plugins etc.
So far Google has been quite liniment and your pages might have benefited from move to HTTPS, even if they are not fully HTTPS secure.

However according to John Mueller this may change moving forward;

I imagine at some point, we will say you will have to serve really clean HTTPS for us to show that in the search results. I don’t know. I don’t think that there will be any kind of penalty around that. Just that we may say, we won’t count this as HTTPS, so it won’t get that small HTTPS ranking boost.

Summarising, think twice when planning to move to HTTPS as many of my industry piers have been already noticing site visibility drops after move to HTTPS even despite keeping all clean and tidy in the process. I’m still of the opinion that there always should be strong business case to support move to HTTPS rather that doing it for the sake of compliance with Google’s advice.

Trail Marathon Wales 2015

On Saturday 20 June 2015 I had run my first marathon. I wanted to choose the course I will remember forever and I have to say Trail Marathon Wales has actually surpassed my wildest imaginations. The course is in the most beautiful mountains of the Snowdonia National Park Coed y Brenin. The 42km course features single track paths over 3500ft elevation gain across up 20% inclines. I made it in 4:49 minutes which gave me 167 place out of 340 participants. Testimony to how hard the marathon was that some of the previous marathon runners didn’t manage to finish the full race. After talking to some of the fellow runners pre and post race it was necessary to add on average 1 hour to the regular marathon time to cope with TMW.

For running down hills which are abundant and steep there I used sound advice on technique from Sage Canaday https://t.co/pxBIzDVPSE

A couple of pictures including course map and elevation profile of the race;

tshirt nearlythere crossingline screenshot-app.strava.com 2015-06-21 21-43-56screenshot-app.strava.com 2015-06-21 21-46-21

 

Sascon 2015

Today I had an opportunity to take part in the panel Technical vs Content during first day of Sascon Manchester ; We were discussing what has the biggest impact on organic performance, the technical architecture of a website, or the content.? A view on the market concensus on where you should be spending your time. Speakers included: myself on behalf of iProspect Manchester; James English, BBC and Edward Cowell, Mediacom.

Content below has been originally posted by Emily Diment on http://www.pushon.co.uk/blog/technical-vs-content-sascon-2015/

The panel for this session comprises of Radek Kowalski Group Technical Search Manager from iProspect Manchester, Teddie Cowell, Director of SEO at MediaCom and James English, Senior SEO Analyst for BBC Sport.

Everyone on the panel believes that the content vs technical debate is an interesting one. It’s something that is sometimes a bit of a contentious issue, but it’s one that always needs to be considered when planning an SEO campaign or organic strategy.

Technical SEO has moved away from just a tech audit to mobile, platform builds and commerce platforms which takes tech away from short term projects to more long-term tech SEO projects, according to Radek, which makes having technical knowledge a requirement for an SEO.

So, how much do other people within agencies know or care about SEO?

At MediaCom, SEO is a core focus within other departments’ agendas. There is a big desire within the industry to get content marketing to work harder. SEOs in general have a really good understanding of how the web works. The majority of the budgets being spent on brands aren’t being spent on SEO; they’re being spent on brand budgets.

SEO considerations are increasingly becoming a part of brand marketing conversations from the very outset because SEOs are good at joining the pieces of a campaign together from the beginning. SEO helps to maximise value from budgets.

There has been a huge change in SEO over the last three years, says Radek, moving heavily towards content. In fact, people are becoming obsessed with content: how to do it better, how to get better ROI. iProspect Manchester has become very good at creating SEO content which supports massive campaigns. Technical optimisation can’t be forgotten. It’s almost like a vehicle for how content can be deployed. If the range of clients is small it can be very easy to technically deploy content, but if you’re trying to work on massive eCommerce systems for very large brands it can be difficult to deploy content. The technical element to content-based SEO is now more important because it has to work with your content.

You could have good content with a good awareness but it could be more successful if you have the technical element sorted.

Whatever you do for a project you have to make key stakeholders happy by educating them about how SEO can make things better but still keeping technical standards high.

Educating clients of the value of SEO is one of the most important aspects of any SEO campaign, says Teddie.

SEO at the BBC

One of the most interesting things about doing SEO at the BBC is being able to see that they are competing on a different landscape – they’ve got the brand authority but it’s more about the way people are able to find the content that is becoming one of the challenges, as is the growing amount of competition the BBC has for news. They can’t just rely on the fact people will be searching for their content via brand searches. Its easy to become complacent but it is a highly competitive landscape.

Some big technical SEO priorities for the BBC at the moment are sitemaps and newsfeeds as well as being able to react quickly to big news stories and high profile events such as the World Cup or Olympics.

Educating clients

We can create a piece of content that is technically sound but it still needs to go on a client’s website and that is generally when errors and problems appear, says Radek. Changing wireframes can be expensive and daunting for clients. Similarly, UX does not always go alongside technical SEO priorities. Some elements that are great for UX may not work well with the UI and can break on different devices such as mobile or tablet.

Teddie believes it is an ongoing process because IT professionals sometimes have different ideas and different priorities to people working in and doing SEO.

What would you say works well for smaller websites? Should they focus on technical or content?

According to Radek, small sites with fewer than 500 landing pages should choose a good platform like WordPress with free plugins which can do 80% of technical work for you.

The smaller the site is, the more important the technical excellence is for you. He has seen small sites with no backlinks and a really well optimised technical elements that are ranking really well. Sites need to comply with technical SEO standards and make sure themes pass site validations for mobile friendliness and page speed amongst others.

Teddie agrees: there is still the role for technical SEO for smaller sites. They need to consider essential technical things including consistency for URL and header elements like h1s.

When you see content being produced that is great, what do you see are key technical elements that are often forgotten or missed?

With storytelling content using parallax pages, which is a popular design trend, the technical issue for SEOs is that is parallax pages are losing performance for searchers and some search queries.

James feels that it is important to experiment with different content formats to try to give the best experience for the user online. We are always trying to match the best experience for the user and match it with the site hierarchy.

Something designers love is Flash and JS but try to stick to HTML5. This is because it’s very flexible and easy to digest for the search engines. Sometimes different types of content make a page not mobile friendly and you are running the risk of making the page unconsumable on certain devices, says Radek.

70% of your audience may access your content using mobile (think about that). If you work in an industry that focuses on young adults they don’t really care about desktops, laptops or even tablets. They see the world via mobile phones and any campaign should be mobile friendly.

You have to remember that different clients have different issues, says Teddie. Not every brand was well prepared for the mobile update app. What Google did by forcing the point of the mobile agenda was a really good thing to do. Brands needed a wakeup call and that’s what the Google update did.

How much of a role does UX play for SEO?

SEOs need to define the two different elements – UI and UX. User interface will help to make your site more accessible and more compliant. BBC has been focused for years on making their website accessible for different users. BBC creative should be used as a standard for accessibility UI.

Google has been giving people massive amounts of technical information and guidance which people should be listening to. Google will start to become more and more picky, and is giving messages like “be mobile friendly”, “be clean”, “provide a good UX”. This is because they care, but they want to save their own money because their infrastructure to crawl the www most likely costs billions.

What is content to you? What is a good piece of content, what are you talking to clients about?

At MediaCom content can be lots of things, says Teddie. Anything that connects a brand to their consumers or something that people choose to engage with such as YouTube, press partnership or the website itself. It’s about how the users are moving around the content.

James believes like Teddie that it is anything that connects users to the brand. He tries not to use the word content much around journalists because to journalists content is like a dirty marketing term. They call content other words such as features, articles, interviews, video content, TV content.

The final question for the panel was a good one.

Where do you spend a limited budget that has to get results? Technical or content? Consider that the client is a retail company of a medium size.

James: Technical

Teddie: Depends on the nature of the business. but for medium size retail, technical.

Radek: investing in technical can be immediately seen as having a positive impact.

 

Better presentation of URLs in mobile search results

Google has announced today that in order to help mobile searchers understand your website better in mobile search results they’re updating the algorithms that display URLs in the search results to better reflect the names of websites, using the real-world name of the site instead of the domain name, and the URL structure of the sites in a breadcrumbs-like format.

These changes are rolling out gradually and affect only mobile results.

Source:http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/better-presentation-of-urls-in-search.html

Google drive app installs through App Indexing

So far Google using App Indexing has already been helping people to engage Android app after they’ve installed it. Google also indicates that they have well over 30 billion links within apps indexed.

Google has now made next step, as of this week people searching on Google can also discover an app even if they haven’t installed it yet.

If you’re an app developer and have implemented App Indexing, then there is a big chance that if content from an app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for this app in search results. These buttons will take visitor to the Google Play store where they can install the app, then continue straight on to the right content within it.

Source:http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/drive-app-installs-through-app-indexing.html

Google Launches New Search Interface For Slower Mobile Connections

Google announced on Wednesday 8th April;

“To make sure you’re not waiting on Google when you need it most, we’ve rolled out a streamlined Search results page that loads fast, even on those slow connections. You’ll get all the info you need in a simpler format that’s beautiful and easy to use. Best of all: there’s nothing new to download or update — the lighter version will kick in automatically when needed!”

Source: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+google/posts/XZo6qgrNDE9

Taking into the account almost 7 billion mobile contracts and over 30% smartphone penetration plus unstoppable growth in Africa and Asian countries this is very important development.

Google Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Unlikely to Impact Brand Searches

With mobile algorithm update closing by (21st April) John Muller has confirmed during Webmaster hangouts on 7th April that brand terms are unlikely to be affected even for the sites which aren’t mobile friendly;

“So in general, what happens with these kind of demotions is that we try to demote the sites a little bit and what will happen with a branded query or one where we know it is very navigation is we know that this is a really strong result and even if we demote it slightly it will still be up top. So it’s something where I’d say there is no effect at all on branded queries because there is somehow magically different. It’s just that these sites are often very relevant for these queries and even if they are slightly demoted then it is not going to drop them from page one or drop them, sometime snot even from the first position. So that is something where we don’t treat the brand queries in any way special there, but these pages are really relevant and sometimes even if they are demoted slightly, then there still the top result.”

Source; https://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-mobile-friendly-algorithm-20115.html
Video source (John Muller 37:53) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipiV2EH8d-M#t=2273 ” title=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipiV2EH8d-M#t=2273

The upcoming mobile-friendly change is for mobile users not including tablet users

According to Google the upcoming algorithm update on the 21st will only impact searches done only on smartphones with exclusion to the tablet searches. This does not impact desktop searches and it does not impact tablet searches. That should definitely make life a bit easier and let’s hope Google will stick to its promise.

Source; https://twitter.com/googlewmc/status/583384126977363968

Mobile friendliness a ranking factor

As part of the mobile market’s evolution, Google recently announced changes to their SEO ranking algorithm that significantly improves the experience of using the web on smartphones.

The goal of these changes: to improve search results for smartphone-friendly websites and penalise sites that make mobile browsing difficult.

Big news: Expected Algorithmic update – April 21

Google has announced two major developments, regarding mobile friendly search results, in their Webmaster Central Blog.

1. Mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal

This update will definitely shake many webmasters;

Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.

2. More relevant app content in search results

Second announcement was focused on how Google includes and cross references app content in the SERPs;

It’s important to know that, moving forward, Google will be using mobile friendliness as a stronger ranking factor that will “significantly” affect rankings worldwide.Good news is that Google provides test which will analyse a URL (any given page of your site) and report if the page has a mobile-friendly design.

You can find more information regarding mobile SEO in dedicated section on this site.

Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries No Longer Rounds Data

In the recent days we’ve seen a very promising development in Google Webmaster Tools console. John Muller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst has announced that site data & metrics will be more actionable than ever with GWT search queries no longer be rounded & bucketed.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/search-queries-not-rounded.html

Google collects “impressions” & “clicks” to the site and displays in Webmaster Tools console for the last 90 days. This is definitely a great development in the light of sharp increase in the “not provided” dat