The week’s coming to an end but before you grab your beer and cheerfully greet the weekend, let’s recap on what’s been happening in the world of SEO this week.
With Google announcing the death of page rank, Lisa Gevelber’s guide on building a mobile-centric strategy, and referral spam no longer being reported, it’s been a busy couple of days for all SEOs.
Those of you who got excited at the prospect of Google removing PageRank score as reported by Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller, may end up slightly disappointed. While PageRank will indeed disappear from the toolbar, Google will continue to use it as a part of its ranking algorithm. The question is, how will this change affect SEOs? The SEMPost asked Google this exact question and here’s what their Spokesperson had to say:
“No, this update does not change anything for webmasters or SEOs in how their sites show up in search. Webmasters can use Search Console to get details about their content’s presence in Google Search, including information about links pointing to their sites. As the Internet and our understanding of the Internet have grown in complexity, the Toolbar PageRank score has become less useful to users as a single isolated metric. Retiring the PageRank display from Toolbar helps avoid confusing users and webmasters about the significance of the metric.”
Moving onto spam referral, which we discussed in our previous post, Google has finally taken care of spammers causing havoc in traffic reporting. Since February, Google has blocked sites accessed through spammy referral links, which means more accurate data reporting and less hassle for SEOs and website owners – hurrah!
Last but not least, Google offered a helping hand to everyone struggling with putting together a great strategy for mobile, something that should definitely be on your “to do” list in 2016. In this week’s Think With Google post, Lisa Gevelber spills the beans as she suggests concentrating on mobile-centric searches, that is “searches which happen 75% of the time or more on a mobile device”. Lisa points out that mobile makes up 88% of all ‘near me’ searches, offering powerful insights into your audience’s behaviour which, once analysed, can be used as a great business advantage. Giving your audience exactly the kind of experience, product or service that they are after lies at the heart of customer service and hence your SEO strategy!
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This Week in Search… SEO News Recap
