Tag: SEO

Your Site on Google

Here’s something I’ve never seen before.  When searching for something on Google, I got a new widget “Your Site on Google” right above the search results.  Erm … what?

It took me a second to figure it out.  Google, of course, knows who I am, since I am logged into my Google Chrome and into all of my Google Apps.  It also knows that I manage the “mamchenkov.net” website, via Google Search Console.  So when I search for something on Google and first page of results includes a page from my own blog, it must be thinking that I’m there to monitor, test and improve my SEO.  It then provides me with some metrics and handy links to do so.  It also mentions that these are only visible to me, not the rest of the people searching.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, but it is weird for a second for sure.

 

How Voice Search Will Forever Change SEO

Search Engine Optimization is not one of my favorite subjects to talk about. But I think this article is worth the time.  It explains some of the challenges with voice search in very simple terms, and shows how voice search is growing and affecting the web.

Voice search is the fastest growing type of search, according to the keynote speech given by Behshad Behzadi at SMX West in March, Principal Engineer at Google Zurich. Already, 55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search on a daily basis, and that number is only growing. The allure of voice chat is undeniable—it’s faster, it’s hands-free, it lets you multi-task, and (especially among millennials) it’s considered cool.

Voice chat is also becoming increasingly reliable as technology improves. In fact, two years ago word error rate was over 20%, but current speech recognition word error rate is as low as 8%—a huge leap in a short amount of time.

It’s Official: Google Says More Searches Now On Mobile Than On Desktop

Search Engine Land reports:

Last year we heard informal statements from several Google employees that mobile search queries would probably overtake desktop queries some time this year. Google just confirmed this has now happened.

The company says that “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.” The company declined to elaborate further on what the other countries were, how recently this change happened or what the relative volumes of PC and mobile search queries are now.

[…]

Google groups tablets with desktops. So this is just smartphones and does not include tablets.

There’s also an interesting misalignment of this report with some Comscore reports.

HTTPS availability affects website’s Google ranking

Google has been pushing for wider HTTPS adoption for a while now – converting its own services, working on the SPDY/HTTP 2.0 protocols, etc.  Now, it seems, they want other people to start adopting HTTPS too.  And what’s better way than add it as a signal to Google Search rankings?

[…] over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal—affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content—while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

Nice!  Especially for those selling SSL certificates…