Ever since Google’s Gary Illyes dropped his mobile first index announcement at Pubcon, there’s been lots of theorizing, conjecture, rampant speculation, panic, and confusion about what exactly that means. Will desktop users get mobile sites? Will sites without the mobile friendly designation suffer? Do we need to change all of our canonical tags? How will Google handle the reduced token corpus? What the hell are tokens and a corpus? Google has gone on record that they are still figuring out exactly how to handle some issues, but that’s probably not comforting to many businesses who rely on Google traffic to pay their bills. As a recovering software engineer turned SEO, I’d like to try and tackle some of these complaints head on and reason through just exactly what may change, how Google might handle them, and what exactly some of these things mean. At the very least, I will add to the theorizing, conjecture, rampant speculation, and panic. In the spirit of TAGE … [Read more...] about What Does Mobile First Index Actually Mean?
What does mean
What does Google AMP mean for ecommerce?
As of the August 22, the AMP project now provides the option to build aspects of ecommerce sites, such as product and category pages. It seemed only a matter of time before this would occur, especially after eBay announced the launch of 8 million AMP-enabled pages, but what exactly does it mean, and how should retailers react? What are the key changes for retailers? Anything that can increase conversion rates will always be welcome news for retailers, and the improvements in page load speeds that AMP brings will most likely help to achieve this. Furthermore, Google will display AMP pages in the search results, rather than just in the carousel. It’s important to note that this update does not affect rankings directly (yet), although site speed and on-site engagement metrics, which AMP is focused on, could have an impact on your rankings. Over time, it is also possible that Google will favour sites running AMP as they will cater for the growing mobile audience too. Although AMP … [Read more...] about What does Google AMP mean for ecommerce?
What does Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) mean for marketers?
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project has launched, taking a huge stride towards Google’s stated goal of a “better, faster mobile internet.” But just what does AMP consist of, and what will it mean for the marketing industry? Last October, Google announced the introduction of its Accelerated Mobile Pages project, a new open-source initiative aiming to “dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web.” This latest move towards a more mobile-friendly web is Google’s answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News. But while both of those initiatives require entering into a dedicated partnership with Facebook or Apple, anyone can get on board with Google’s AMP and use it to create web pages. In the months since the announcement, we’ve seen a lot more information released about what AMP will consist of, its key features and how it will alter the experience of the mobile web. So what is the significance of … [Read more...] about What does Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) mean for marketers?
Google kills Right Hand Side Ads: what does this mean for marketers and users?
As we reported over the weekend, Google has removed all PPC ads from the right-hand side of the search engine results page with immediate global effect. There’s been a great deal of speculation on what this means for businesses, advertisers and users alike, with many postulating that the top-of-the-page paid search is going to become even more cutthroat (and expensive), organic listings will be pushed even further off the first SERP (Google will start to show four ads at the top instead of three for “highly commercial” search terms) and that Product Listing Ads will gradually take over the SERP (PLAs are still allowed on the right-hand side). The change has already happened. Here’s a search for ‘london hotel’ carried out two days ago… And here is the same search today… There are now four paid search results at the top, with nothing on the right. It looks oddly blank now, and worryingly the entire above the fold space is entirely … [Read more...] about Google kills Right Hand Side Ads: what does this mean for marketers and users?
How does RankBrain work and what does it mean for search marketers?
It’s hard to meet anyone in the digital industry who hasn’t heard about RankBrain. And it comes as no surprise that this system along with its impact on search results raises endless questions and disputes. We’ve made an attempt to understand the way RankBrain operates and if there’s anything we can possibly do to optimize for it. Let’s start from the very beginning. What is RankBrain? RankBrain is a machine-learning system developed by Google to help improve search results and to interpret brand new queries that haven’t been previously searched for. Some experts consider it to be part of the Hummingbird search algorithm, which was launched to help Google better understand the meaning of the entire query behind exact keywords. The first official statement about RankBrain was made by Google senior research scientist Greg Corrado on October 26, 2015. Here’s how Greg explained the operating principle of the algorithm: “If you’re … [Read more...] about How does RankBrain work and what does it mean for search marketers?