Weekly SEO news: 20 October 2015
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Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Official: Google recommends 'progressive enhancement' for your web pages

Google is discontinuing its supports for its previous proposal to make AJAX web pages crawlable by Googlebot. In the official Google blog post, Google's Kazushi Nagayama said that they are "no longer recommending the AJAX crawling proposal we made back in 2009.”

progressive enhancement

Does this mean that Google no longer indexes AJAX pages?

Google continues to index AJAX pages. As long as you do not block Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript or CSS files, Google can index the AJAX pages on your website. Google is able to render and understand your web pages like modern browsers.

Google now recommends 'progressive enhancement' for your web pages

Although the old method for AJAX pages won't cause problems, Google now recommends that you use 'progressive enhancement' for your web pages.

Progressive enhancement is a strategy for web design that emphasizes accessibility, semantic HTML markup, and external stylesheet and scripting technologies.

What is progressive enhancement?

Progressive enhancement uses web technologies in a layered fashion that allows everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, using any browser or Internet connection, while also providing an enhanced version of the page to those with more advanced browser software or greater bandwidth.

Progressive Enhancement consists of the following core principles:

  • basic content should be accessible to all web browsers
  • basic functionality should be accessible to all web browsers
  • sparse, semantic markup contains all content
  • enhanced layout is provided by externally linked CSS
  • enhanced behavior is provided by unobtrusive, externally linked JavaScript
  • end-user web browser preferences are respected

Does this mean that you have to adjust your web pages?

As long as search engine robots can index your web pages, you do not have to adjust them. In general, it is highly recommendable that the most important contents of your web pages are accessible to all web browsers.

If advanced technologies are necessary to view the contents of your pages, chances are that many visitors won't be able to view them.

The website audit tool in our Internet marketing tool SEOprofiler analyzes all pages of your website. It discovers problems on your website that can lead to bad rankings on Google and other search engines. If you haven't done it yet, try SEOprofiler now:

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week
Google link value loss when switching to HTTPS from HTTP

"It is true that there is a very small bit of value that kind of gets lost with any kind of redirect there. But if you are doing this within your website, that’s not something you really need to worry about.

So if you are redirecting from HTTP to HTTPS then that’s definitely not something that I would see as holding me back from moving to a secure protocol, to making my site a little bit more secure for my users.

So that’s definitely not something where you’d expect to see any kind of visible change or say my site has dropped in ranking because I redirected it, that’s definitely not going to happen."


GoogleDiscussion: has Google penalized another link network?

In an online discussion, many black hat SEO webmasters report that their websites have lost their rankings. It looks as if the SAPE link network has been penalized by Google as all of the penalized websites used links of that network.


Why Google devaluing spammy queries is great for website owners

"When a site gets hacked, you can almost always count on it being used to promote one of several market areas.  Google recently announced their hacked site algo, which would see hacked results removed from the search results.  But Gary Illyes from Google revealed another interesting fact about it… that it impacts spammy queries only. [...]

It would potentially allow sites to still be shown for their usual set of keywords but wouldn’t show or rank for the keywords that were added when the site was hacked."


GoogleGoogle: when migrating to HTTPS, you need to move your disavow file

"When you migrate your web site from HTTP to HTTPS with the sole reason of gaining the HTTPS Google ranking boost - okay, you can have other reasons, then you must also make sure your disavow file is accessible on the HTTPS version."


No, what Facebook hears on your phone isn’t triggering ads


"Is Facebook listening through your phone to target you with ads? No. But it is listening sometimes for other reasons, and that is causing confusion with some that the 'audio discovery' feature could be being used for ad targeting. [...]

The microphone is activated only under those limited constraints, Facebook says, insisting that it’s not eavesdropping on your conversations and definitely not targeting ads based on what you are talking about in the privacy of your own domain."


Search engine newslets

  • Wix web sites dropping from Google's search results.
  • Google Search now indexes iOS 9 apps with deep links, Safari will show app content by end of the month.
3. Recommended resources

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Back to table of contents - Visit SEOprofiler.com
4. Previous articles
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