Search Engine Land releases report on worthy SEO factors; Google reminds us of rules for putting links in large-scale audience development campaigns; Publisher fades in Google results after blocking Google users
It’s recommended to stay current with best-practice SEO if you want to rank organically in Google. Today we share news stories that look at these factors, including ones reporting on the positives and the negatives of search engine optimization for audience development.
We begin with news of an updated Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors from Search Engine Land. Let’s take a look at some highlights from the report, like the SEO factors with weight increases.
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“Mobile — Google continues to push for content to be mobile-friendly, no surprise given that more than 50 percent of Google searches are done on mobile devices. In addition, by the end of this year or in 2018, Google will use a mobile-first index, even for desktop users.”
“Speed — Google has continued to emphasize the importance of speed as a ranking factor, including widely implementing the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) format that it backs. AMP didn’t even exist when our SEO table was last updated in 2015.”
“Direct Answers — Both Google and Bing are increasingly showing direct answers that are culled from web pages above regular listings, something Google calls featured snippets.”
“Some publishers worry these are harmful, because if an actual answer is shown, why would people bother clicking to the source page? However, many others compete to be an answer, finding they do indeed drive traffic. Google’s featured snippets also serve as the single spoken answer that’s often given by the Google Assistant on mobile devices or in Google Home.”
We move to a message from the Google Webmaster Central Blog about the audience development process for linking in large-scale articles. Here’s what Google has to say.
“We’ve seen an increase in spammy links contained in articles referred to as contributor posts, guest posts, partner posts, or syndicated posts. These articles are generally written by or in the name of one website, and published on a different one.”
“Google does not discourage these types of articles in the cases when they inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company. However, what does violate Google’s guidelines on link schemes is when the main intent is to build links in a large-scale way back to the author’s site.”
The article continues with factors that can lead to being in violation of Google’s guidelines. These include:
- “Stuffing keyword-rich links to your site in your articles
- Having the articles published across many different sites; alternatively, having a large number of articles on a few large, different sites
- Using or hiring article writers that aren’t knowledgeable about the topics they’re writing on
- Using the same or similar content across these articles; alternatively, duplicating the full content of articles found on your own site (in which case use of rel=”canonical”, in addition to rel=”nofollow”, is advised)”
Are you attracting the type of website traffic you need from your audience development strategy? If not, set up a time to chat with us. We have established audience development strategies for major content publishers and can help you too.
