Google Publishes – SEO For Startups
Google provides a nice 10 minute guide for small company to optimise its website for Google:
Including:
Registering Webmaster Tools;
Performing a Background Check;
Using View as Googlebot Tools;
Information on Site Strategy – including Navigation ideas;
Defining Conversions;
Writing Copy – Including what every page should include;
Anchor Text recommendation;
Potential pitfalls;
Page Load Time;
Ranking;
Social Media Marketing.
New Crawl Error Alerts
Google have continued to improve the Crawl Error alerts in Google Webmaster Tools. Google will now send you alerts to let you know if your website isn’t performing as it should. This is great because almost every website we analyse has crawl errors so it’s good to monitor these closely. Google will send an alert if:
There are site-wide issues such as DNS errors;
There are URL Anomalies such as misconfiguration pages.
You can now set up Google Forward Messaging to get these alerts sent directly to your email address or your Developers email address.
39 Recent Google Algorithm Changes
Most of these changes are related to Google US but most fo the times these roll out to the UK soon after:
Deeper detection of hacked pages;
Autocomplete predictions used as refinements;
More predictions for Japanese users;
Improvements to autocomplete on Mobile;
Fewer arbitrary predictions;
Improved IME in autocomplete;
New segmenters for Asian languages;
Scoring and infrastructure improvements for Google Books pages in Universal Search;
Unified Soccer feature;
Improvements to NBA search feature;
New Golf search feature;
Improvements to ranking for news results;
Better application of inorganic backlinks signals;
Improvements to Penguin;
Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated;
Efficiency improvements in alternative title generation;
Better demotion of boilerplate anchors in alternate title generation;
Internationalizing music rich snippets;
Music rich snippets on mobile;
Improvement to SafeSearch goes international;
Simplification of term-scoring algorithms;
Fading results to white for Google Instant;
Better detection of major new events;
Smoother ranking functions for freshness;
Better detection of searches looking for fresh content;
Freshness algorithm simplifications;
Updates to +Pages in right-hand panel;
Performance optimizations in our ranking algorithm;
Simpler logic for serving results from diverse domains;
Precise location option on tablet;
Improvements to local search on tablet;
Internationalization of “recent” search feature on mobile.
Read more on Google’s Search Quality Highlights page.
Google Penguin
Back in April Google released an update to improve link quality in the websites that are shown on Google: you might of heard of it… Well the truth is that this is just the start and Google will continue to upgrade this update as they have started to on 24th May: High Quality Sites
A Matt Cutts Interview
This month Eric Enge interviewed Matt Cutts – A top Software Engineer at Google on some key topics that are worth reading about: What Makes a Quality Website
Disavow Links with Bing
Following the Google Penguin update Bing has now added a Disvow links option in its webmaster Tools. This new tool allows you to highlight links you don’t trust which is fantastic. It would however be great if Google released a similar tool.
“It’s very important folks keep an eye the bigger picture,” said Forrester. “Everything is about signals and balance. This new disavow tool, like all the rest of Bing’s Webmaster tools, helps Bing to understand a webmaster’s intent around its site, and its links.”
Blekko SEO Tool
Blekko introduces some new SEO Tools that look fantastic:
Continuous updating of its crawl and index;
Hourly updates for top ranked sites;
Continuous updating of SEO data, including page content, meta data, and duplicate text;
Continuous updating of inbound link counts;
More than 4 billion page indexed, and more than 100 million pages updated daily.
On the surface this looks amazing, however: how good are they? We were excited to see these new tools but the truth is Blekko just doesn’t have the crawl power of Google, so although this is a fantastic set of tools it just isn’t reliable enough. It’s getting better though so it’s worth keeping an eye on it.
