Category: Blog

Everyone who has had some involvement with SEO in the last 10 years should know Matt Cutts. He’s been the face of Google’s web spam team for years now and often offers sage like advice for SEOs.

Back in July he announced that he was going on leave for “a few months” and that is should last through October. Well October came and went over the weekend and with it a small note added to the original blog post that Matt Cutts used to announce his leave.

The note read:

Added: When I went on leave, I wanted to see how webspam would go without me. I’ve been talking to people on both the algorithmic and manual webspam teams during my leave, and they’ve been doing a top-notch job. So I’m planning on extending my leave into 2015.

Normally this wouldn’t be a particularly large deal, but such is Matt Cutts’ position of power and reverence in the SEO world that this has conjured up a lot of questions, including some who question whether he will come back at all.

The reasoning behind that sort of thinking is that Matt acts as a focal point for Google. This focal point can be used for good, such as congratulating the Webspam team for a job well done taking down lots of spam or finding and destroying a link network. But it can also act as a focal point for all the rage and angst of Webmasters who are affected by algorithm updates / ranking fluctuations or just general conspiracy theories.

As such, taking away Matt Cutts face could also take away a lot of the vitriol that Google receives. Personally, I think Matt is too much of an asset to lose. They could simply replace his regular answering webmasters’ questions with some of their Google Hangouts. This way there is no one person that webmasters can attack for the perceived injustice of bad rankings.

Do you think Matt Cutts will return to Google?

People in the SEO world are very aware of the Penguin algorithm. The reason being that this was the algorithm that, when updated initially, caused the most uproar we’ve seen from any algorithm update previously.

Back in October we informed you that Penguin 3.0 was set to be released within 2014. The weeks passed and on Friday, Google finally announced that they had released the latest version of their link analysing algo.

The last couple of times Google updated this algorithm there was fury from all sides of the SEO world. This time however, it seems that Penguin 3.0 is a softer version of 2.0 and 2.1. It’s either that or after the earlier versions Webmasters finally got round to doing some housekeeping on their links.

When the algorithm was released on Friday there wasn’t much detail really released with it. Usually when google announces a fresh algorithm they give a bit more info with it. Such as how many queries will be impacted, which languages will be affected etc etc.

That data didn’t really emerge until today with Google’s giving the following summary:

> All versions of Google around the world will be affected by the updates
> The whole of the algorithm hasn’t been released yet and will take a few weeks for it to be complete.
> Less than 1% of English language queries will be affected but all other languages could be more or less.
> Google have confirmed that the implication of the new algorithm began on Friday.
> The update has been specifically termed a “refresh” by Google engineers.
> Main losers will be websites with bad link profiles.
> Main winners will be websites with good link profiles and profiles that have been cleaned up since the last update of Penguin.

So what do you think of the new algorithm?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

You’ve probably experienced it before. You’ve loaded up a website on your phone looking forward to a nice little browse. Unfortunately the website you want to browse isn’t particularly mobile friendly.

Well now, Google is testing having icons directly in mobile search results that help tell you whether the website you want to visit is or isn’t mobile friendly. Check the images below:

What do you think of these updated icons?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

As we all know, there’s a huge invisible, intangible creature roaming the web reading everything out there! But the Google spider really isn’t that bad. All it’s doing is reading your website, jotting down the key points and then storing this information somewhere else. In fact, the Google spider is somewhat like a librarian.

For this purpose, part of SEO is to make sure your website is as easy to read for Google’s spider as it is for a human to read your site. For example your site could look amazing to the user, but the code used to write the beautiful landscape of words and pictures dedicated to your services could be as muddled and confusing as one of Dan Brown’s books.

Another one of the main points for optimising your site for the crawler is making sure that your site can be read as frequently as possible. Because you want to update that site a lot with fresh, valuable and quality content.

Two main factors of this, as confirmed by Gary Illyes (Googles Webmaster Trends analyst), are the following:

HTTP Status Codes

There are a range of different HTTP Codes. The most common is 404 (Page Not Found). But there’s also 301s, 302s, 200s and a lot more. Google can handle these codes quite well, but when it starts to get http codes in the 500 range, this could spell trouble.

The 500 range indicates that there’s something wrong with the server. As such, Google won’t want to risk any further harm to your website so will stop crawling you for a while, giving your website time to recover/get fixed.

If you do have 500 error codes, make sure you get them fixed right away and then “fetch” your website in webmaster tools to make sure that Google can now read your website again.

Connect Time

As above, when Google detects a slow connection to your web server it will assume the worst. That your website is experiencing issues and any further connections to the site will cause further issues to your server and then break it.

Due to this assumption, it will again limit the number of crawls that it will run on your website.

So, all in all, if you want Google to read your site correctly and frequently clean up your 500 error codes and make sure that your server is in tip top condition.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey