August has been a uniquely busy month in regards to SEO. Daily updates from Google, interesting reading material, and nothing remotely close to a summer vacation. So, this monthly roundup will revolve mainly around the topic of SEO and will include important answers to questions our clients are bound to ask…
The life and death of links and 404s
Links on 404s and soft 404s are not crawled and do not pass link juice. It is important to make sure to fix these pages.
From the other side, links pointing to either 404s or soft 404s are not counted by Google, which is another reason to fix them.
Once and for all: 404s on the site do not lead to a penalty (It has now been officially tweeted.)
The mobile monster
End of desktop websites? Google's John Mueller says you can have only a mobile website, and it will not hurt you in any way.
Mobile view - Google’s new interface makes it harder to find organic results. In other words, mobile searches show only ads in first look. For organic results, users need to scroll. What does this mean for businesses? Mobile ads are quickly becoming a must-have.
Mythbusters!
Google’s John Mueller says that they can’t see if a person fills out a form, buys something, or converts, therefore these are not ranking factors. On the other hand, he says that if end users perform any of those actions, it means you are doing something right, so “it’s a positive thing in general”.
Guess who’s caving in?
Very interesting news: Tweets are now shown on Google desktop results. In other words. High engagement tweets are breaking the boundaries of Twitter.
Google kicks where it hurts
There is a Google hell! It’s called Google’s Penalty Server. They have tools to monitor if you have been penalized (but they won’t necessarily tell you that you have been).
Google is also now showing only 3 results instead of 7, making the first-page competition a bit tougher. For example:
Who cares?
Pipes (| | |) can be used in URLs. Who would even want to? In any case, as they say: “What works for browsers, works for us.”
PR Obstacles
This one’s for everyone! Find out what to do when the annoying editors publish articles without links, here.
Poll of the month: How many times does “Google” appear in this blog post? Anyone who answers correctly will win….nothing, but check out this cool video!
