Google’s Avalanche of Changes.
Google made a whopping 30 changes in December last year. While not all of them relate specifically to ranking, there are definite themes emerging. Today Google also started rolling out “Search plus your world“, a major change to the way Google formats and personalises results for it’s users.
To make sure you’re ready for both Google’s new algorithm changes and their “Search plus your world” rollout, here’s the top three things you need to check and implement on your site.
1. Is you audience mobile?
Well let’s face it, whose audience isn’t. Purchases on mobile devices grew by a huge 200% last year. If you want to turn up in mobile search results you have to have a site that is at the very least mobile-friendly but preferably optimised for mobile. Google will not send it’s mobile users to sites that are not at the very least mobile friendly.
2. Google+ and authorship.
@joshrowe and @jjprojects pointed out to me last night that people are already ripping complete blog posts, posting them to Google+ and then getting ranked above the original post. This is ironic, as one of the aims of Google profiles and authorship markup code is to establish the original creator of a piece of content. My guess is the results @jjprojects is referring to did not have authorship set up and connected to their Google profiles. This example and todays announcement that Google+ results are going to feature even more heavily in search results is a very good argument for getting your Brand Page setup and your Google profiles . Even if you don’t have regular content updates on your site (which you should) you need to get Google+ setup properly before your competitors do.
3. 404s
This may not seem that important but it is a pet peeve of mine. One of the changes Google made in December was concerning “soft 404s”. A 404 is an error code that a web server returns when a request for a page is made that it can’t find. Some web developers and systems believe that instead of returning a 404 they’ll just send you to the front page of the site or another page. The problem with this is that when the Googlebot encounters this it sees the same page at multiple addresses and crawls it multiple times so you site looks like it has lots of duplicate content and maybe a little spammy or repetitive. Not good for your rankings 🙂
Are you using Google+? Love to know if you have seen anomalies like @jjprojects or how you see it changing your search results.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
