Insights from SMX Advanced 2013 Day One

SMX Advanced 2013 is off to a great start and I wanted to share a few insights that I picked up throughout the day based on the sessions I attended.

  1. Google is really focused on mobile and your non-mobile friendly web pages will have lower rankings
  2. Improper handling of your m.site.com type sites can result in a penalty. The most common server errors Google highlighted were:
    • redirecting more than one (or all) desktop sites to the homepage of your mobile site
    • accidentally redirecting users from mobile, then to desktop, then back to the mobile homepage
  3. Google predicted that page speed of mobile pages will become a ranking factor in mobile search. Most users only have a 3 second attention span, so you want your pages to load under that time.
  4. Google is able to now predict which site is an authority based on semantic topics
  5. Matt Cutts again confirmed that they don’t look at user behavior as a ranking signal (bounce rate back to search, time on page, social “likes”, etc).
  6. Matt also confirmed that the use of Google Analytics or surfing for a site in Chrome does not lead to web page indexing
  7. If you use Open Graph Facebook markup on your pages, and a user likes your location, Facebook will automatically create a location based Facebook page for that location using your meta data to populate the page.
  8. Rich snippets created by using schema.org coding will increase the CTR of pages even if the ranking doesn’t change.
  9. With rich snippets= higher CTR in mind, you might want to check to see if the reporter you are pitching is a part of Google Authorship. Reporters with Google Authorship who are building Author Rank will have more online visibility.
  10. Google is automatically showing authorship for the author mentioned in the document copy who is the “presented by” or “authored by” mention, regardless of additional rel=author coding.
  11. Google+ profiles, pages and communities have and share PageRank.

That’s it from today, I’ll share more tomorrow!


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