This Week In SEO 46
SEO Mistakes, Google iOS Keyboard, and More
How NOT to do SEO
https://www.seroundtable.com/a-local-seo-got-60-clients-suspended-overnight-21828.html
Look, we’ve all made dumb mistakes and nobody’s perfect. I’m not highlighting this post to kick someone when they’re down, because I’m sure this person had the worst week ever.
But if you don’t learn from the mistakes of others, you’re definitely at risk to make similar mistakes, so here we go…
A consultant had over 60 clients on one account, and they were all suspended overnight. In general, if a single business gets picked up for spam, any other businesses owned by the same Google account can get suspended as well. For those of you working in bulk with many locations on the same account, there might be other rules there, I’d be interested to hear if that’s a danger for larger organizations as well. Either way, for those of you with just a lot of different clients, always make sure to keep them on their own designated account.
All 60 clients had their businesses suspended from Google Local. The SEO consultant had listed himself as the owner of all accounts instead of the manager. Either this in itself (it’s not a best practice) or some disavow/spam report/sketchy link building (it’s unclear) got the account pinged, which affected 66 different businesses.
Ouch
Bonus tip: PLEASE never put multiple sites into any kind of the same Google account (analytics/webmaster tools/etc). There have just been too many reports of this causing mass slaughterings.
A Buffet of SEO Tips
http://www.matthewbarby.com/seo-tips/
Matt Barby is one of the people’s whose updates I never miss. He publishes helpful, in-depth content, and it is usually worth the read.
This post is no exception. Some topics included in the 19 tips:
From an organic search point of view, video has a few issues, especially if you’re not hosting your video content through YouTube. The biggest problem is that search engines can’t understand the content within video (yet).
One way to maximise the amount of keywords that your video content can rank for is to create full text transcripts to accompany them.
If you’re a hardcore SEO, a lot of these will be good reminders of tactics you already know/have thought of/haven’t used in a while. If you’re in the beginner or intermediate SEO stage, you’ll find a lot of gold in this here post.
RankBrain and Google’s Top Ranking Signals
http://searchengineland.com/now-know-googles-top-three-search-ranking-factors-245882
Last year, when Google debuted RankBrain, they claimed it was the 3rd-most-important ranking signal, but declined to say what number one and two were.
This week, Andrey Lipattsev, (Search Quality Senior Strategist) says the two most important ranking signals were…
Links and Content.
I’ve also seen a lot of chatter this week about RankBrain not actually being the 3rd most important ranking factor. There’s a lot of conjecture about all this, but links and content have always been the big focus, and, for me, they will continue to be.
Google Testing Images in SERPs
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-tests-images-search-result-snippets/160382/
Not a lot is known about this test, but it makes sense in certain search queries, right? If this sticks it’ll definitely be something to pay attention to where click-through-rate is concerned (speaking of important ranking signals)…
We’ll be keeping an eye on it.
Google is consistently testing new features, so this could be just one more in a series of tests. However, it is possible it is related to Google authorship, which Google keeps telling us not to remove, even though the program has been decommissioned. Only time will tell.
Google’s Latest Attempt to Not Lose to Apple
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/22/11287220/google-keyboard-iOS-search
Apple has made some moves in the last few years aimed at taking some search marketshare from Google using captive iOS/OS users (such as Spotlight), but so far, we’ve seen nothing from Google to try and balance those moves.
Until now.
Google has announced a custom keyboard for iOS which will have several search features built in.
Like its Android counterpart, the Google keyboard for iOS employs gesture-based typing, so you can slide your finger from one letter to the next and let Google guess your intended word. Tap the Google logo and you can access traditional web search. It also appears to have distinct buttons for pictures and GIF searches, both presumably powered by Google image search.
The keyboard, which has been in circulation among employees for months, is designed to boost the number of Google searches on iOS. While the company all but holds a monopoly on the global search market, there’s evidence that mobile search is proving much less lucrative for Google than the desktop.
