Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience
Google’s latest update, Hummingbird, rewrites the way search works from the ground on up.
We may at last, have arrived at the point where manipulating a page to pack it with keyword terms is pointless. If this is true, it means we can get back to crafting well-written, informative content. We can once again produce work to share and create value, and to communicate ideas.
Where have I been? Well, aside from working, my wife and I are renovating our Victorian home. It’s…epic. We’ve taken walls out, we’ve put some in. It’s all very messy.
It goes without saying that we love Google Authorship, and the snippets produced by having it set up.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s all you need to know in one photo:
Having this set up grabs peoples’ attention.
Part of the process of setting these up is to have a link on your pages back to your Google Plus profile. All the guidance from Google, and therefore most online sources, is to have an icon or short piece of text that links to your profile.
Not everyone wants to link to their Google+ page. And for good reason; a lot of website authors only have G+ accounts for the sake of getting these authorship snippets working. They certainly don’t want to drive visitors to a social profile they aren’t actively using.
Here’s a solution I worked out myself. As far as I know, I’m the first to be publishing this.
Simply drop this code into your website, anywhere at all. It doesn’t display anything on the site—it just sits in the code, but works 100% as a Google Author link.
<a href=”your-profile-url?rel=author” />
So for example mine is:
<a href=”https://plus.google.com/u/1/110002801838494280534?rel=author” />
It’s that simple!
It really started to take hold in 2012, and by now is an absolute must for your website. Basically it means regardless of what sort of device your site is being seen on; a tablet, phone, laptop or desktop, it looks great. The text is readable, even the layout adjusts (or responds, see how that works!?) to suit the display.
I just created this site today (so the client still needs to populate the content a fair bit), but you can see from the picture above it looks just as nice on mobile as a full screen.
I love web design.
Nice.
Basically, if you violate Google’s webmaster guidelines, such as acquiring shoddy paid links pointing to your site, publishing spammy content, using hidden text, or engaging in other SEO sins of the sort, your site may be flagged by Google’s algorithms, triggering a manual action.
via Google rolls out manual action notification & response tool.
Jokes about the Internet being a series of tubes aside, I do draw an analogy between plumbing and search engine optimisation.
What I can do is make sure your website is up to date with current SEO best practice. Everything will be in place to optimise your site for their indexing.
This is where the analogy comes in. A plumber can make sure your house is 100% ready for water to flow to all the places it needs to. But they should never guarantee that the local water board will never have a supply problem at their end.
If anyone ever guarantees you a position on a search engine ranking, please keep them away from your digital stop cock.
