Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience
It makes their last major update well timed – just a couple of weeks ago they made sure mobile friendly sites would have priority in mobile-based search results over sites that are not.
But this does mean if your site isn’t mobile friendly, we have the stats to hand that show you ARE missing out of search engine potential. Contact me and I can help.
Google has been sending out millions of these messages over the past couple of months.
Google systems have tested 177 pages from your site and found that 32% of them have critical mobile usability errors.
Google Webmaster Tools has long pointed out the important of having a mobile friendly site–but now Google is taking it seriously. When you’re looking at search results on a smart phone (which accounts for a huge percentage of people) you’ll see a little notification if a site is mobile friendly. Funnily enough, those sites will be getting most of the organic traffic.
There has never been a better time to get a mobile friendly, responsive website.
All the sites I build are responsive, and you’re welcome to ask for my help.
Google to prioritise secure websites
🙂
Seriously, despite the way the articles is written, this could be very big news for the world wide web. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. Most likely soon. Maybe six months.
The trouble is it’s all LIES.
I know I bang on about the trouble with buying backlinks to try to help your SEO. Regular readers will be familiar with my disdain for people selling the impossible—since Google’s Panda algorithm tries very hard to find people buying links, saying any scheme like this is “Panda safe” or even worse, “Panda friendly” is a massive fib.
So at the risk of repeating myself, I’m going to say some things I’ve said before – albeit in a more concise and succinct form.
It is true that Google does like to see links to your site. But they are excellent at discerning real links (where someone liked your site or service enough to link to it) from purchased ones. Those bought ones are usually just low quality directories and profiles. When I say profiles I really mean it, user accounts get created on the Apple website that have your domain in the user description and the scam-sellers have the nerve to say that’s a PR10 link from a high quality domain. As if Google can’t tell the difference between say, a news story on the BBC and a bunch of comment-user accounts.
I generally stand against buying backlinks because of my SEO ethos. My ethos is simple by the way – Google have given us a swag of information regarding what search engines do and do not want – so I say we give them what they’re after. But on the flipside we need to be sure to avoid what they don’t want.
I have about three jobs a week come in from people who bought back links and got caught – and dropped off Google completely. When they penalise you, they really hit you hard.
Technically speaking really awesome backlinks would certainly help your SEO. But 99% of the time buying them is not awesome, and I recommend avoiding it.
I (like Google) see SEO as a long game, if done properly. But also, if done properly, it “sticks”. A site with good SEO that’s risen to the top should stay at the top.
And with that, I shall get down from my well-trodden soap-box.
However, this post isn’t commenting on piracy as a topic, rather Ann’s own comment that a Google search for Netflix’s House of Cards (another very popular TV program) doesn’t even bring up the official site in the top 50 results.
On the surface, she’s saying “look at all the piracy sites that come before the proper one!”, but behind that is the idea that by default, the official site for anything should come top. The problem is, Netflix’s site for House of Cards has terrible SEO, that’s why it performs so poorly.
There’s not nearly enough textual content, and the meta tags are actually about Netflix, not the show, and therefore they score very poorly for relevancy (how many words in the tags also appear on the page) which is likely to have them penalised by Google, not shoved higher up the rankings.
This serves as an excellent cautionary tale. Just because you feel you deserve to be in the top spot, doesn’t mean you will be. If other people are writing about your industry, product or service, and do it better than you do—they will beat you in the rankings.
If you care about your position, invest in some proper, industry-leading SEO—and get where you want to be.
Using WordPress you’ll usually find this on each page and post in the Dashboard, in the settings for whichever SEO Plugin you use (All In One SEO pack, Yoast, etc.).
Most other content management systems will have their own setting, or if your site is totally bespoke you can add this to the code in the <head> section:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />
There are many reasons actually, but the most common is duplicate content. If you have two pages on your site that have similar content, you want to mark one as noindex so it doesn’t appear as though you’ve stuffed your site with multiple copies of the same thing.
Google and the other major engines see duplicate content as an attempt to make your site look fuller than it really is, or to have stolen content from elsewhere to try to fill your site up quickly, without much thought, and very little originality.
The other time to definitely use nofollow is if you have used a significant portion of content from another site. Sometimes there is a legitimate reason to grab content from elsewhere and publish it yourself, but you should always stop it from being indexed.
Now, before you get too excited and think “I’m fine, I’ve not got anything on my site that exists elsewhere at all”, let me ask you about your Terms and Conditions. Did you have those written from scratch? Or are they standardised, lifted from another site, or based on a template?
noindex them. Even though they’re just the legal bits, you don’t want Google to have any reason to think your site has a predilection toward duplicate content.
