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.
- Google is really focused on mobile and your non-mobile friendly web pages will have lower rankings
- 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
- 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.
- Google is able to now predict which site is an authority based on semantic topics
- 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).
- Matt also confirmed that the use of Google Analytics or surfing for a site in Chrome does not lead to web page indexing
- 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.
- Rich snippets created by using schema.org coding will increase the CTR of pages even if the ranking doesn’t change.
- 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.
- 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.
- Google+ profiles, pages and communities have and share PageRank.
That’s it from today, I’ll share more tomorrow!