Industry News, SEO
The Latest in Search from Google: Matt Cutts shares what you NEED TO KNOW #PubCon
Oct 23 2013
This is “straight from the horses mouth” – meaning I’m at Pubcon listening to the updates from Matt Cutts who heads webpsam at Google…. This is where google is going. The Key messages: Social impacts search, identity matters, mobile will be huge so start thinking about it mow and the algorithm is getting better.
Social Authority – Social signals will continue to impact search. Likes, +1s, Tweets and Pins are relevant signals that can impact search rankings. This means that search and social continue to get closer together. Social traction shows that content is important.
Identity – Google is very interested in knowing who you are online and connecting your assets throughout the web with a singular idea of identity. Add authorship to your site (learn more about it here if you haven’t heard of it). This is a mail push of Google+ – it isn’t just “the Google version of Facebook” it is an identity network. Use it to identify yourself and your business with Google.
Mobile: Start thinking about mobile. Google predicts that mobile will outpace desktop in a few years. This means that you have to be thinking about your mobile strategy NOW. Get familiar with mobile and start testing a mobile optimized site. If you use flash, this would be a good time to stop (or maybe 2 years ago would have been).
Learn about requestAutocomplete: You can annotate your forms, which will allow people to autocomplete your forms. This means that people won’t have to re-complete their information (name, address, credit card, etc) across sites. This will allow for one-click form completion across multiple sites. To take advantage of this, annotate all of your forms. It should launch in a few months. More info on that here.
Ad-heavy pages above the fold: A new algorithm change may discredit websites with too many ads above the fold. Be cautious if your site has too many ads above the fold as this is a signal that you may not have the highest quality content.
Tightening Authorship: Google wants to make sure that there is quality on authorship. Expect changes to how they view authorship – they want to make sure that there is high quality content.
Rich snippets: May depend on site quality. If you have a high quality site you will be able to add rich snippets. If you have low quality content you may not be able to use them.
Google will get smarter on JavaScript: Google is starting to be able to index JavaScript well and they are planning to continue to build on this.
Try FREE for 5 Days!
