+Chenthil Vel SEO Analyst Latest SEO News 2019 | 2015

Latest SEO News Updates

Thursday 24 December 2015

SEO is an ever-changing industry as search engines (Google in particular) evolve to some extent every single day. Google makes algorithm changes on a daily basis, and every now and then it makes major changes that cause massive shake-ups in search results as well as SEO strategies 2016.

What do you expect to change the most about optimizing for Google in 2016?

Mobile has been a major focal point of Google for much longer, but in 2015 it was as big a focus as ever. Early in the year, Google announced two significant ranking factors – app indexing and mobile-friendliness – both aimed at improving the mobile experience for users and getting them the content they want/need in the best way possible.

This will (unsurprisingly) continue to be a major focus on Google’s heading into 2016.

In a recent webmaster hangout on Google+, Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller spoke a little about what to expect for SEO in the coming year (via Barry Schwartz).

The relevant portion of the video begins at about 26 minutes in, but you’re probably only going to get more by watching the entire video.

Mueller answers a question about general SEO tips for 2016 (as transcribed by Schwartz):

Oh man… I don’t have any magical SEO tips for next year. I can’t tell you about that high ranking meta tag that we’ve been working on [sarcasm].

But in general, I think, next year you’ll probably hear a lot about from us about AMP, mobile friendly, we’ve been doing over the years. It is still a very big topic and we still see a lot of sites not doing that properly. Those are probably the bigger changes, but other things will definitely happen as well. More information about JavaScript in sites so that we can really figure out how to handle these better in search and make a better recommendation on what you should do or shouldn’t do.

But past that, of course, high quality content is something I’d focus on. I see lots and lots of SEO blogs talk about user experience, which I think is a great thing to focus on as well. Because that essentially kind of focuses on what we are trying to look at as well. We want to rank content that is useful for them and if your content is really useful for them, then we want to rank it.

We’ve covered mobile-friendliness a great deal throughout the year, so if this is something you’re still struggling with as Mueller implies, I’d encourage you to read back through the content found here.

AMP of course refers to Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is a new open source project and basically Google’s answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles, which is being supported by a number of other internet players including Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, WordPress.com, ChartBeat, Parse.ly, and Adobe Analytics.

You can read more about this here, but Google recently said it will begin sending search traffic to AMP pages beginning in late February. So that’s one major change you can expect in 2016 (and early 2016 at that).

Another big SEO change coming in early 2016 is Google’s next Penguin update which is supposed to update in real time moving forward.

Reference Source: http://www.webpronews.com/what-google-says-about-seo-in-2016-2015-12/

Wednesday 8 July 2015

The movement to make the Internet more secure through HTTPS brings several useful advancements for webmasters. In addition to security improvements, HTTPS promises future technological advances and potential SEO benefits for marketers.

HTTPS in search results is rising. Recent MozCast data from Dr. Pete shows nearly 20% of first page Google results are now HTTPS.

Sadly, HTTPS also has its downsides.

Marketers run into their first challenge when they switch regular HTTP sites over to HTTPS. Technically challenging, the switch typically involves routing your site through a series of 301 redirects. Historically, these types of redirects are associated with a loss of link equity (thought to be around 15%) which can lead to a loss in rankings. This can offset any SEO advantage that Google claims switching.

Ross Hudgens perfectly summed it up in this tweet:

Ross Hudgens


Many SEOs have anecdotally shared stories of HTTPS sites performing well in Google search results (and our soon-to-be-published Ranking Factors data seems to support this.) However, the short term effect of a large migration can be hard to take. When Moz recently switched to HTTPS to provide better security to our logged-in users, we saw an 8-9% dip in our organic search traffic.



Problem number two is the subject of this post. It involves the loss of referral data. Typically, when one site sends traffic to another, information is sent that identifies the originating site as the source of traffic. This invaluable data allows people to see where their traffic is coming from, and helps spread the flow of information across the web.

SEOs have long used referrer data for a number of beneficial purposes. Oftentimes, people will link back or check out the site sending traffic when they see the referrer in their analytics data. Spammers know this works, as evidenced by the recent increase in referrer spam:



This process stops when traffic flows from an HTTPS site to a non-secure HTTP site. In this case, no referrer data is sent. Webmasters can't know where their traffic is coming from.

Here's how referral data to my personal site looked when Moz switched to HTTPS. I lost all visibility into where my traffic came from.

Enter the meta referrer tag

While we can't solve the ranking challenges imposed by switching a site to HTTPS, we can solve the loss of referral data, and it's actually super-simple.

Almost completely unknown to most marketers, the relatively new meta referrer tag (it's actually been around for a few years) was designed to help out in these situations.

Better yet, the tag allows you to control how your referrer information is passed.

The meta referrer tag works with most browsers to pass referrer information in a manner defined by the user. Traffic remains encrypted and all the benefits of using HTTPS remain in place, but now you can pass referrer data to all websites, even those that use HTTP.

How to use the meta referrer tag

What follows are extremely simplified instructions for using the meta referrer tag. For more in-depth understanding, we highly recommend referring to the W3C working draft of the spec.

The meta referrer tag is placed in the section of your HTML, and references one of five states, which control how browsers send referrer information from your site. The five states are:

None: Never pass referral data

None When Downgrade: Sends referrer information to secure HTTPS sites, but not insecure HTTP sites



Origin Only: Sends the scheme, host, and port (basically, the subdomain) stripped of the full URL as a referrer, i.e. https://moz.com/example.html would simply send https://moz.com



Origin When Cross-Origin: Sends the full URL as the referrer when the target has the same scheme, host, and port (i.e. subdomain) regardless if it's HTTP or HTTPS, while sending origin-only referral information to external sites. (note: There is a typo in the official spec. Future versions should be "origin-when-cross-origin")



Unsafe URL: Always passes the URL string as a referrer. Note if you have any sensitive information contained in your URL, this isn't the safest option. By default, URL fragments, username, and password are automatically stripped out.



The meta referrer tag in action

By clicking the link below, you can get a sense of how the meta referrer tag works.

Check Referrer

Boom!

We've set the meta referrer tag for Moz to "origin", which means when we link out to another site, we pass our scheme, host, and port. The end result is you see http://moz.com as the referrer, stripped of the full URL path (/meta-referrer-tag).

My personal site typically receives several visits per day from Moz. Here's what my analytics data looked like before and after we implemented the meta referrer tag.

For simplicity and security, most sites may want to implement the "origin" state, but there are drawbacks.

One negative side effect was that as soon as we implemented the meta referrer tag, our AdRoll analytics, which we use for retargeting, stopped working. It turns out that AdRoll uses our referrer information for analytics, but the meta referrer tag "origin" state meant that the only URL they ever saw reported was https://moz.com.

Conclusion We love the meta referrer tag because it keeps information flowing on the Internet. It's the way the web is supposed to work!

It helps marketers and webmasters see exactly where their traffic is coming from. It encourages engagement, communication, and even linking, which can lead to improvements in SEO. Original Source Posted by: https://moz.com/blog/meta-referrer-tag

Wednesday 4 March 2015

The Best 7 SEO Strategies
  • 1. Optimize for mobile search
  • 2. Focus on a variety of keywords
  • 3. Don’t ignore social media
  • 4. Ditch complicated UX and URL
  • 5. Don’t sweat the small stuff
  • 6. Long tail SEO still matters
  • 7. Pair up with PR