Weekly SEO news: 3 April 2018
Welcome to the latest issue of our newsletter!

Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please forward this newsletter to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Local search engine optimization and your website

Local rank tracking is is important if you have a brick and mortar business. You have to be found for searches that are done by potential customers in the area where your business is located. Fortunately, SEOprofiler offers several tools that help you to get better local rankings.

Your website in Google's local results

The Ranking Monitor in SEOprofiler enables you to track your rankings in all areas. You can specify the exact location from which your rankings should be checked (cities, zip codes, airports, etc.).

The Ranking Monitor does not only track regular listings. It also informs you about the position of your business in Google's local pack results, even if your business is listed without a website URL.

If you do business in multiple locations, you can track all the locations in one campaign.

local rankings and local SEO

Rank tracking for all locations that are supported by Google

Different regions have different search results. For example, searchers in New York get different results for the keyword "plumber" than people in San Francisco.

The Ranking Monitor checks your rankings in 161 countries and languages. You can check your local rankings from all locations. The ranking monitor supports all 85.000+ cities that are also supported by Google.

all countries and all languages

Local results tracking for businesses without websites

Google also shows businesses that do not have a website in the local results.

The Ranking Monitor monitor enables you to track the positions of these businesses in the search results, even if Google does not show a website address.

Just enter the business name and the Ranking Monitor will take care of it. It's really easy.

track mentions of businesses that do not have a website

Create rich results code for local businesses

The Rich Results Creator tool helps you to create JSON-LD markup code that will be used for 'rich results' on Google's search results pages.

Your website will look much better in Google's search results

You can create markup code for your local businesses with the Rich Results Creator. It also creates code for persons, products, organizations, events, websites and recipes.

rich results

Optimize your web pages now

SEOprofiler offers many different tools that help you to get higher rankings on search engines and more customers. You can create your SEOprofiler account here:

Try the tools

2. Internet marketing news of the week

John MuellerHow Google approaches ranking algorithm updates

"Google’s John Mueller did an AMA (ask me anything) on reddit. He explained that Google does not target individual websites. Google’s engineers focus on the quality of the results for search queries. [...]

Sometimes it turns out that sites are actually much more relevant to some queries than our algorithms initially thought, sometimes it turns out they’re not actually that relevant. It doesn’t mean they’re bad or good sites, they’re just not the best answers to some queries/users."


Google: manual reviews cannot lift algorithmic search penalty

"If you are hoping Google can do something on their back end to lift an algorithmic penalty, you are out of luck.  Google does not have something that can remove an algorithmic penalty – such as from impacted by Panda, Penguin, or the many other algo signals – so a site will rank better in the search results. [...]

On the same note, triggering a manual action won’t fix algo issues even when the reconsideration request is accepted."


GoogleGoogle XML sitemap auth bypass

"Google provides an open URL where you can ‘ping’ an XML sitemap which they will fetch and parse – this file can contain indexation directives. I discovered that for any site that has an open redirect (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook and 1000s of ecommerce sites) it is possible to ping a sitemap that you (the attacker) are hosting in such a way that Google will trust the evil sitemap as belonging to the victim site."


Google: rolling out mobile-first indexing

"Google announced in a blog post that they’ve started migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing.

Previously, Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have used the desktop version of a page’s content. Mobile-first indexing means that Google will use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking."

Related: Google: the mobile-first rollout is unrelated to the latest ranking algorithm update

+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++

  • Another Google ranking algorithm update?
  • You can now add a description to your Google My Business listing.
  • Bing: Sidebar text ads retiring in the US market.
  • Google Maps learns 39 new languages.
  • Notice to stakeholders: withdrawal of the United Kingdom and EU rules on .eu domain names.

3. Previous articles