Weekly SEO news: 28 January 2020
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Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

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Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Google updates mobile-first indexing best practices

Google has announced an update to their mobile-first indexing best practices on Twitter:

Google: new mobile-first indexing best practices

What is new?

There are a few changes compared to the previous version of the guidelines. Most of the recommendations are obvious:

  • The mobile version and the desktop version of your website should have the same content.
  • Your pages should be crawlable.
  • Invisible elements such as meta robots and structured data should be the same for desktop and mobile.
  • If you use structured data on mobile pages, the URLs should point to mobile pages.
  • Use high quality images and the same img alt texts on mobile and desktop.
  • Ensure that hreflang implemantation and canonical attributes are correct.

If you have a mobile website, Google will ignore your desktop website. Google's John Mueller confirmed this on Twitter:

Optimize your website for mobile

Google's John Mueller keeps telling webmasters and Google that they should use responsive website design to create their mobile websites.

Theoretically, you could have dedicated mobile pages (for example on an m.example.com subdomain). However, John Mueller strongly recommends avoiding dedicated mobile pages because they make things too complicated.

Having one responsive website that works with mobile and desktop is the best option.

Mobile SEO tools

SEOprofiler offers mobile SEO tools that help you to get better rankings in the search results for mobile devices. You also get SEO audits for mobile websites:

Optimize for mobile

2. Internet marketing news of the week

GoogleGoogle: featured snippet URLs won’t be repeated in the regular results from now on
 
"Google’s Danny Sullivan said on Twitter that URLs that are shown in featured snippets won’t be repeated in the regular results from now on. Until now, websites that owned the featured snippet often appeared twice on the first results page. The change has rolled out globally."


Google: data-vocabulary.org markup will no longer be eligible for rich result features

"Google announced in their official blog that, as of April 6, 2020, data-vocabulary.org markup will no longer be eligible for Google rich result features.

In order to be eligible for Google rich result features Google recommends converting your data-vocabulary.org structured data to schema.org. You can do this with the rich results creator tool in SEOprofiler."

John MuellerVideo: Google image search tips

"When it comes to images the number one thing to consider is how you'd want to be found in image search? What you expect users to search for? And how can your site be useful to them when they find you?"


Google: hidden text does not make or break a website

"Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit that Google uses many different signals for ranking and that a website won’t outrank your site just because of hidden text."


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

  • Google desktop favicon search results study.
  • John Mueller: the number of 404s you have on your site doesn't matter.
  • Can we ever trust Google with our health data?
  • Same site requirements for cookies: What SEOs and developers need to know.
  • Government sites do not get a ranking boost.
  • Google’s ads just look like search results now.
  • Google’s latest user-hostile design change makes ads and search results look identical.
  • How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

3. Previous articles

Do you need better rankings for your website?

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