On the Mis-Named Mobilegeddon

If you are a web pro then it is likely that you heard that Google's search results were going to change based on how mobile-friendly a site is (you probably heard a couple months ago even). This change took effect yesterday.

As with almost all things in the tech world that affect clients, the press hit yesterday as well, and today clients are looking for more information. Conveniently, our clients are golden as we went all-responsive years ago.

If you already built sites to be responsive, ideally mobile-first, then you needn't worry. Your clients have probably already noticed that the text "mobile-friendly" appears in front of the results for their sites in Google and have been comforted as a result.

If you have not built sites to be responsive, or have had no mobile strategy whatsoever, then you may be among those calling it, or seeing it referred to as, mobilegeddon. A terrible name that clearly comes from FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).

If you are someone who relies on a firm to build and/or manage your site, then you should also beware the SEO snake oil salesman who may knock on your door and build on that very FUD to sell you things you don't need.

From Google Webmaster Central

For that latter two cases, I have pulled the first three points from Google's notes on the mobile-friendly (a much better term) update. I recommend reading the whole thing, of course.

1. Will desktop and/or tablet ranking also be affected by this change?

No, this update has no effect on searches from tablets or desktops. It affects searches from mobile devices across all languages and locations.

2. Is it a page-level or site-level mobile ranking boost?

It’s a page-level change. For instance, if ten of your site’s pages are mobile-friendly, but the rest of your pages aren’t, only the ten mobile-friendly pages can be positively impacted.

3. How do I know if Google thinks a page on my site is mobile-friendly?

Individual pages can be tested for “mobile-friendliness” using the Mobile-Friendly Test.

FAQs about the April 21st mobile-friendly update

From Aaron Gustafson

Aaron Gustafson put together a simple list of four things you as a web developer can do to mitigate the effects of Google's changes, though the simplicity belies the depth of effort that may be needed for some sites. I've collected the list, but his post has the details for how to approach each step:

1. Embrace mobile-first CSS
2. Focus on key tasks
3. Get smarter about images
4. Embrace the continuum

Tips for Surviving Google’s “Mobilegeddon”

What Is Your Mobile Traffic?

I've been asked how to find out how much traffic to a site is from mobile users. In Google Analytics this is pretty easy:

1. Choose Audience from the left menu.
2. Choose Mobile once Audience has expanded.

Bear in mind that this just tells you where you are today. If that number drops then it may be a sign that your mobile strategy isn't working. At the same time, if that number is already low then it may not drop any further owing to unintentional selection bias in how your pages are coded.

Oh, By the Way

Google isn't the only search engine. When I mentioned that on this blog before, Google had 66.4% of the U.S. search market. As of January 2015, that's down to 64.4%. Bing is up from 15.9% to 19.7%.

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in January with 64.4 percent market share, followed by Microsoft Sites with 19.7 percent and Yahoo Sites with 13.0 percent (up 1.0 percentage point). Ask Network accounted for 1.8 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.1 percent.

comScore Releases January 2015 U.S. Desktop Search Engine Rankings

While I Have Your Attention

Two days after the initial announcement of this change, word also came that Google is working on a method to rank pages not by inbound links, but by trustworthiness, in essence by facts.

When this finally hits, pay attention to those who refer to the change as Truthigeddon. Be wary of them.

SEO Isn't Just Google

This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in Buffalo's first WordCamp for WordPress users. Before my presentation I made it a point to sit in on the other sessions that were in the same track as mine.

When discussing SEO, all the sessions I saw mentioned only Google. The Google logo appeared throughout, Google's PageRank was discussed, Google search result screen captures were used, and so on.

The presenters for an SEO-specific session even went so far as to embed a video of Matt Cutts (from Google) in their presentation and declare that Matt Cutts stated that WordPress is the best platform for SEO.

For context, Matt Cutts appeared at a WordCamp in May, 2009 to discuss his search engine (Google) for an audience using a particular platform (WordPress). Matt even said, WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues. Instead of doing it yourself, you selected WordPress (at about 3:15 in the video). He's pitching his product to a particular audience to validate their technical decision (he's just saying they don't need to manually code these tweaks).

If while watching that video you heard Matt Cutts declare that WordPress is the best platform for SEO, then you are engaging in selection bias.

This same selection bias is also happening when developers work so hard to target Google and not any other search engines. If you convince yourself that Google is the only search engine because you don't see other search engines in your logs, then perhaps you are the reason you don't see those other search engines.

To provide context, this table shows the ratio of searches performed by different search engines in August 2012 in the United States. These are from comScore's August 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings report.

Google Sites	66.4%
Microsoft Sites	15.9%
Yahoo! Sites	12.8%
Ask Network	3.2%
AOL, Inc.	1.7%

It's easy to dismiss 16% when you don't know how many searches that translates to.

More than 17 billion searches were performed in August 2012. Google ranked at the top (as expected) with 11.3 billion, followed by Microsoft sites (Bing) at 2.7 billion. The breakdown of individual searches per engine follows:

Google Sites	11,317,000,000
Microsoft Sites	2,710,000,000
Yahoo! Sites	2,177,000,000
Ask Network	550,000,000
AOL, Inc.	292,000,000

To put this another way, for every four (ok, just over) searches using Google, there is another search done in Bing. For every five searches using Google, there is another one done using Yahoo.

If your logs don't reflect those ratios in search engines feeding your site, then you need to consider if you are focusing too hard on Google to the detriment of other search engines.

Now let's take this out of the United States.

Considering Bing's partnership with the Chinese search engine Baidu, contrasted with Google's battles with the Chinese government, it might be a matter of time before Bing tops Google for Asian searches. Given the size of the Asian market (over half a billion users), if you do any business there it might warrant paying attention to both Baidu and Bing.

Related

• Selection Bias When Reviewing Browser Stats, March 13, 2011.

Update: May 15, 2013

Bing is now up to 17%, having taken almost all of that extra point from Google.

We Really Still Have to Debunk Bad SEO?

I've been doing this web thing from the start (sort of — I did not have a NeXT machine and a guy named Tim in my living room) and I've watched how people have clamored to have their web sites discovered on the web. As the web grew and search engines emerged, people started trying new ways to get listed in these new automated directories, and so began the scourge of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) peddler.

The web magazine .Net posted what to me is a surprising article this week (surprising in that I thought we all knew this stuff): The top 10 SEO myths. I am going to recap them here, although you should go to the article itself for more detail and the full list of reader comments. Remember, these are myths, which means they are not true.

1. Satisfaction, guaranteed;
2. A high Google PageRank = high ranking;
3. Endorsed by Google;
4. Meta tag keywords matter;
5. Cheat your way to the top;
6. Keywords? Cram 'em in;
7. Spending money on Google AdWords boosts your rankings;
8. Land here;
9. Set it and forget it;
10. Rankings aren't the only fruit.

The problem here is that for those of us who know better, this is a list that could easily be ten years old (with a couple obvious exceptions, like the reference to AdWords). For those who don't know better or who haven't had the experience, this might be new stuff. For our clients, this is almost always new stuff and SEO snake oil salesmen capitalize on that lack of knowledge to sell false promises and packs of lies. One of my colleagues recently had to pull one of our clients back from the brink and his ongoing frustration is evident in his own retelling:

I have a client who recently ended an SEO engagement with another firm because they wouldn’t explain how they executed their strategies. Their response to his inquiry was to ask for $6,000 / month, up from $2,000 / month for the same work in two new keywords.

This kind of thing happens all the time. I recently ran into another SEO "guru" selling his wares by promising to keep a site's meta tags up-to-date through a monthly payment plan. When I explained that Google doesn't use meta tags in ranking, his response was that I was wrong. When I pointed him to a two-year-old official Google video where a Google representative explains that meta tags are not used, his response was to state that he believed Google still uses them because he sees results from his work. My client was smart enough to end that engagement, but not all are.

Because I cannot protect my clients in person all the time, I have tried to write materials to educate them. For our content management system, QuantumCMS, I have posted tips for our clients, sometimes as a reaction to an SEO salesman sniffing around and sometimes to try to head that off. A couple examples:

• Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords
• SEO Spammers Using Your Contact Form

Along with these client-facing tips I sometimes get frustrated enough to write posts like this, trying to remind people that SEO is not some magical rocket surgery and that those who claim it is should be ignored. I've picked a couple you may read if you are so inclined:

• Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords
• Derek Powazek on SEO as Snake Oil

And because I still have to cite this meta tags video far far too often, I figured I'd just re-embed it here:

Related

My ire doesn't stop at SEO self-proclaimed-gurus. I also think social media self-proclaimed-gurus are just the latest incarnation of that evil. Some examples:

• Followers, Likes and +1s as Meaningless as Hits
• Social Scoring As the New SEO
• Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing

Recent(ish) News on Google, Bing, SEO/SEM

I have written many times here about SEO/SEM and how so much of it is sold to organizations by scam artists (though I recoil at the thought of calling them "artists"). Too often it includes demonstrably false claims, like how meta keywords and descriptions will help your site and that you should invest in the SEO vendor to do just that.

I also try hard not to spend too much time addressing the ever-changing landscape of the search engines, let alone focusing on just one of them. However, sometimes it's worth wrapping up some of the more interesting developments because they can genuinely affect my clients who aren't trying to game the search engines.

Content Farms and Site Scrapers

If you've spent any time searching through Google you may notice that sometimes you get multiple results on your search phrase that look the same in the results, but when visiting the site you find they are just ad-laden monstrosities with no value. Sometimes one of these spam sites would appear higher in the Google search results than the site from which the content was stolen.

Google has now taken steps to not only push those sites back down to the bowels where they belong, but also to penalize those sites. These changes started in late January and went through some more revisions at the end of last month.

I think it's fair to expect Google to keep tweaking these rules. Given all the sites that offer RSS feeds of their content (along with other syndication methods), it's likely that many sites integrate content from external sites into their own. The trick here will be for Google to recognize a site that has a original content that also syndicates third-party content from a site that has nothing but content taken from elsewhere. If you do syndicate content, then you should be sure to what you site stats and your ranking in the search results to see if you are affected at all.

Additional reading:

• Finding more high-quality sites in search
• Google Changes Algorithm To Penalize Site Scrapers
• Do You Republish Other People's Content? You'll Want to Read This
• Google Declares War on Content Farms
• Google Announces Massive Algorithm Change, Declares War On Content Farms, Including Demand Media

Page Titles

Perhaps you have spent a great deal of time carefully crafting your page titles (specifically the text that appears in the title and which displays in your browser title bar). Perhaps you have noticed that in Google the title you entered is not what appears on the search results page. This isn't a bug, doesn't mean your site was indexed improperly, and doesn't necessarily mean your page title had some other affect on your page rank. This is done intentionally by Google.

This does imply, however, that your titles are unwieldy. Google does this when titles are too short, when they used repeatedly throughout a site, or when they are stuffed with keywords. If you find that your title is being cut off (implying it's too long) then you may want to limit your title to 66 characters, or at least put the most important information in those first 66 characters.

Additional reading:

• Dynamic Title Snippets on SERPs
• When Google Rewrites Your Title Tags
• When Google Titles Don't Match Page Title

Social Media

It wasn't that long ago that Google and Bing said that links in social media (think Facebook and Twitter) will affect a site's position in search results (PageRank for Google). Some people may even be tempted to run out and post links to every social media outlet they can find, hoping that the more inbound links, the better for their site. Thankfully it's not that simple.

Both Google and Bing look at the social standing of a user when calculating the value of an inbound link. This can include number of followers (fans/friends on Facebook), number followed, what other content is posted, how much a user gets retweeted or mentioned and a few other factors. In short, those Twitter accounts that come and go in a matter of hours that tweet a thousand links into the ether aren't doing any good. A good social media strategy that is garnering success, however, should also give a boost to the sites it links.

What is not clear, however, is how URL shorteners (and which ones) affect the weight of those links.

Additional reading:

• What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?
• The Straight Dope on Facebook, Twitter, and SEO
• Google + Bing Confirm that Twitter/Facebook Influence SEO

Random Bits

These are some random articles I collected for posts that never happened. I still think there's good stuff in these and warrant a few minutes to read.

Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results and Bing: Why Google's Wrong In Its Accusations should be read together. The accusation from Google that Bing is stealing its search results is fascinating on its own, but reading Bing's response demonstrates a host of things Bing also does differently. For me it was an entertaining battle, but that's about it.

HuffPo's Achilles Heel discusses how Huffington Post relies on questionable SEO techniques, which I equate to spamming, and wonders how long the site will be viable if AOL isn't willing to keep up the SEO game as the rules change. It could be a great purchase for AOL, or a dead site full of brief article stubs.

Is SEO Dead? 1997 Prediction, Meet 2009 Reality is a two-year-old article dealing with a twelve-year-old argument. And still relevant.

When A Stranger Calls: The Effect Of Agency Pitches On In-House SEO Programs should be particularly interesting to people who are charged with some form of SEO within an organization. Too often the unsolicited call or email comes in making grandiose promises and citing questionable data and results. This article provides a good position from which to push back and make sure you and your employer aren't taken to the cleaners.

A 3-Step SEO Copywriting Confession almost sounds like an admission of wrongdoing, but instead talks about how to structure your content for SEO without completely destroying it.

Additional reading (that I wrote):

• Negative Reviews Can Now Affect Site Rank Downward
• Your Site Speed to Affect Its Google Rank
• Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords

Mapping Location-Based Social Media

If you have been paying any attention to the social media space for the last few years, then you've watched the rise in location-based social media. A few years ago Loopt and Brighkite offered the ability for users to check in to a physical location. Then came Google Latitude, Foursquare and Gowalla. Each one had its selling point — games, competition, badges, pins, notifying when your friends are near, creating a history of your travels, and so on.

Part of the appeal of these tools is seeing where you have been, almost like a travelogue for a person, as well as tracking others (friends or family). Brighkite, for example, has offered a GeoRSS/KML feed for some time that you can feed into Google Maps or MapQuest, or really anything that can read the geo-tagged posts. It has taken some time, but the rest of the web is finally catching up:

• Twitter is asking for your location, and displaying map links with tweets.
• Facebook has announced its intent to track location.
• Smart phone utilities are popping up to make it easier to track activity in a place.

Go ahead and read the rest of the article (and see the swanky screen shots) at evolt.org: Mapping Location-Based Social Media

Bing and Google Add Social Search

Google and Bing have been locked in a struggle recently for search engine dominance. Bing came out of the gates fast and gained a lot of market share, but has appeared to level off recently (another link, and another link). Neither of them wants to lose any ground. Factor in the recent explosion of Twitter and other near-real-time social media outlets on the web and people's desire to search them all, and you have two search giants salivating over new opportunity.

Both Microsoft and Google announced partnerships with Twitter yesterday. There had been fears of one making an investment in Twitter and locking the other out from search results, but those fears appear to have been assuaged. At least for now. Consider that Microsoft already has a sizable cash investment in Facebook ($240 million, or 1.6% of Facebook's valuation at the time) giving them a leg up over Google on searching within Facebook. It seemed that the same thing might happen with Twitter (a company that just closed a deal for another $100 million in funding, pushing its value to ~$1 billion).

Google made its announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo, showing off its Social Search feature from Google Labs. The same presenter, Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience, then posted this to the Google blog:

...[W]e are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.

Mashable has some more detail on what was discussed at the in-person announcement, including some information on linking your social media profiles in to Google to allow searching across them as well

Microsoft signed two deals on this same day, one with Twitter to bring its tweets to Bing, and one with Facebook to bring status updates to the search engine (another link). The Bing blog reports its Twitter search:

...[T]oday at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now).

Essentially the Twitter search has been rebuilt within Bing, including the real-time updates. Bing also includes relevancy, based on things like number of retweets, keywords and the quality of the tweets (who decides this?). Bing also shows the trending topics as a tag cloud. In case you haven't tried it yet, head on over to Bing.com/twitter

The next few months should be interesting as both Bing and Google tweak and enhance they new offerings. Given their same-day announcements, we can expect both teams to be watching the other closely and responding to changes quickly.

In the meantime I'll be scratching me head on why Twitter, a place solely for me and millions of others to spout our own brand of crazy in real-time, is valued at $1 billion.

UPDATE: Read this swell article, just posted: Social Search: Customers Influence Search Results Over Brands.