Category Archives: Search Engine Optimisation

Google Panda Refresh In Progress

After months of relative quite, Google announced last week that they had begun rolling out the newest update to the infamous Panda algorithm, designed to reduce search engine rankings for low quality sites. This update brings Panda (first released in 2011) to version 4.2, and is the 29th official update to the algorithm.  According to […]

Could Facts Become Google Ranking Signal?

Google has recently published a paper that could look to drastically shake up the way they rank their index in the future. While the level of data handling in the paper is still somewhat hypothetical, Google is looking into using the validity of content on a webpage as a primary ranking signal. In basic terms, […]

Mobile Friendly Sites To Rank Better In Mobile Search

In a post on the official Google Webmaster blog yesterday, Google announced that as of the end of April, (the 21st in fact), the mobile friendliness of sites will be a ranking factor for websites in mobile search. According to the post, the change will affect mobile search results world wide and in all languages, […]

Mobile User Experience May Affect Rankings

At a recent search marketing expo, Google engineer Gary Illyes spoke extensively about user experience, saying that webmasters should be focusing more attention in this area. But why the stress on user experience? Well it seems that Google may use mobile user experience as a part of its ranking algorithm. Google Webmaster Tools Fetch and […]

The Power of Subtlety in Web Copy – Speaking Your Clients Language

Let’s set the scene of a somewhat typical buying process. A prospective client discovers a need, carefully researches their options, enquires with a few suppliers, compares their favourite options and then making the purchasing decision. It’s a seemingly logical and linear process. As we know, in online marketing there are various factors that impede and […]

Google Structured Snippets

It was announced yesterday in a post on the Google Research Blog that Google has rolled out a new feature that can show tabular data from your page under the description in the search engine results. That means that if you have a table of product specs, for example, on your page, relevant information from […]

Google Penguin Update – Finally

In early 2012, Google released an algorithm update that was codenamed “Penguin.” This update was touted as an anti-spam measure, apparently mostly aimed at bad linking. Another thing about Penguin was that it wasn’t something you could recover from, (they said), without cleaning up your previous spam. But there was nothing you could do once […]

Google Drops Authorship Markup

Just over 3 years since Google first announced in a 2011 blog post that it would be supporting authorship mark-up and including rich snippets showing it in search results, authorship has become the latest feature they’ve dropped support for. In a Google+ post last night, John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools announced that Google would […]

HTTPS Becomes Ranking Factor

On the 6th of August, Google announced on their Webmaster Central Blog that as of this month, having an SSL certificate (effectively encrypting your URLs and adding the HTTPS protocol to them (rather than the standard HTTP) will be a ranking factor. It’s a very minor factor right now. In fact, Google estimates that it […]

Google Webmaster Tools Releases Robots Testing Update

The robots.txt exclusion standard is a bit of an ambiguous convention, acting as sort of the opposite of a sitemap. But while one might see the value in telling a web crawler what pages are on your site, and how they’re structured, it’s more difficult to see the value of telling them where they can’t […]