Weekly SEO news: 8 May 2018
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1. Google: mobile first indexing is not mobile-friendly indexing

Last week, Google started to send out mobile first indexing notices. The notification informs website owners that the search results will now reflect the mobile version of the website instead of the desktop version.

mobile SEO

Webmasters noticed that they also received that message for websites that weren't mobile-friendly at all. So what does this mean for your website? Do you have to change something?

Mobile first indexing is not mobile-friendly indexing

In a webmaster hangout on YouTube, Google's John Mueller explained that mobile first indexing is not mobile-friendly indexing. If Google finds that the website delivers the same (or nearly the same) content for mobile devices as for desktop computers, the website will be switched to mobile-first indexing:

"Desktop only is essentially a unique form of a responsive design, right? It's like the same design on mobile and on desktop so I I could certainly see our algorithms saying well nothing breaks when we switch the site over to mobile indexing, so might as well do it."

He explained that being indexed by the mobile bot does not mean that the website will get ranked in the mobile results:

"The other thing to keep in mind is that the mobile first indexing is not mobile-friendly indexing. So it's not related to whether or not a site is mobile-friendly.

It's really just the indexing part that's switching over to mobile and the friendliness aspect is something that's still a ranking factor in the mobile search results but it's independent of their indexing."

Mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor in the mobile search results. Even if your website gets indexed by the mobile bot, Google won't rank it if your website isn't mobile-friendly.

What you should do now

If you haven’t done it yet, you should make sure that your web pages work on mobile devices as soon as possible. The easiest way to support mobile devices is to use responsive website design. SEOprofiler offers several tools for mobile SEO. You can create your SEOprofiler account here:

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2. Internet marketing news of the week

John MuellerGoogle: indirectly, ugly websites might get lower rankings
"In a webmaster hangout on YouTube, a webmaster asked if ugly websites, or difficult to use websites, have ranking issues on Google. Google’s John Mueller said that these websites could get bad rankings because there aren’t many positive signals (such as recommendations through links)."

Google: do not use 403 HTTP status codes on your website

"On Twitter, Google’s John Mueller said that your website should not use 403 HTTP status codes. Pages that deliver a 403 status should be removed [...]

A 403 HTTP status code means that the server could not handle the request. This is not a good code and it sends the wrong signal to Google."

GoogleWhat’s the impact of Google’s ‘More results’ on mobile ads?

"Instead of the ‘next’ button we’re used to seeing at the bottom of mobile search pages, which allowed users to navigate to the next page of results, you’ll now see a ‘More results’ button that creates a single page mobile SERP. [...]

There’s not much point in making changes to your strategy until you have more data available and a clear picture of what the impact on performance is. You might find certain ads perform better after the change or see that things level out across all of your campaigns, which means any strategic move at this stage could be counterproductive."

Google sends out mobile-first indexing notifications

"Google has started to send out notifications that websites have been enables for mobile-first indexing. The notification informs website owners that the search results will now reflect the mobile version of the website instead of the desktop version."

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

  • AdWords is fully switching to the new experience.
  • Google: Making Google My Business work for agency and platform partners.
  • Four publisher groups to Google: Your GDPR proposal ‘severely falls short’.
  • EU privacy rules may give Google more power.
  • Google Search in India adds Knowledge Graph cards to quickly find exam results.
  • Facebook introduces new analytics features.
  • Google can select one country hreflang url to index from across multiple urls in the same language.

3. Previous articles

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