Mobile SEO: After Google's Panda / Penguin latest updates

Mobile especially smartphone usage in India will soon exceed the internet usage on desktop. Mobile SEO is a complicated area. As mobile devices are controlling the web day by day, marketers have started creating mobile websites. In this hustle, the best procedures of SEO are repeatedly ignored in support of fast deployment.

However, ‘search’ is the best way to reach the mobile users. Mobile search does not give just one result. It displays many results and different presentations based on whether the search query is from a basic phone or from Smartphone’s or from tablets. The mobile companies are now estimating the mobile websites from SEO’s point of view. Luckily, Google’s mobile services and guidelines are released; these guidelines help the marketers to understand and apply solid mobile SEO.

One major issue that has been discussing for many years is that if the mobile sites should be developed on unique mobile URL’s or should these mobile sites use responsive web design to assist both the mobile and the desktop content under the same set of URLs.

Google has finally worked on this issue and came up with a clear guideline. Google says ‘ mobile sites that  assist both the desktop and the mobile content under the same URL, with every URL assisting the same HTML for all the mobile and desktop devices and just making use of CSS to redesign the mobile content. This is the best way of serving mobile content.

This is not the only option that Google supports. Few other options include: mobile sites having separate URL’s to both the mobile and the desktop. One other option is that the mobile sites that assist all the devices under the same URL, but each of these UMLs assist different HTML based on whether the user agent is a mobile device or desktop.

Even if Google prefers using responsive design, sites that have already started using mobile URLs don’t have to redesign their entire site. Google does prefer the responsive design but not at the cost of user experience.
There are few marketers who are confused between dynamic HTML serving and responsive design. The difference is that responsive design just affects the CSS of a page and the actual HTML remains the same. On the other hand, dynamic serving is intended for HTML content and CSS to change based on user’s device, even while the URL of the page is same.

One of the interesting features that Google is now supporting is the ‘Switchboard tags’. For the sites, that need to keep mobile unique URL’s, marketers can now send signal to Google to help it identify mobile content from the desktop content. Few of the other SEO notes include Mobile SEO for Bing, Optimization beyond responsive design and stay away from Robots.txt blocks.

Using Common sense SEO to avoid Over-Optimization Penalty

Google's series of updates: Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Transition Rank Patent etc. have made a positive mark for quality and original content and also created a threat to online spammers.

The popularity of any brand/company these days is not just dependent on physical survival but has to survive over the Internet. To be more precise, a company is said to be doing good if its website is ranked better in Google search. Due to this, there has been tremendous stress on companies to maintain the content in their sites so that they are ranked well in Google searches. Hence SEO (Search engine Optimization) came into picture allowing websites to place keywords, links strategically over their site so that its rank is improved. As like any other thing, even SEO has limits and when the limit is crossed, there is a possibility that Google blacklists such sites. Google has its own algorithms to identify such over-optimization techniques done by the websites and has ways to penalize such sites.

There have been many updates done by Google to its search engine to identify the over-optimized sites and penalize them. These Google Algorithm changes resulted in more stringent rules to be followed by websites so that they don’t fall under the Google scanner. While Google Panda is targeted at identifying sites low on content and reduces the rankings, Google Penguin is aimed at reducing web spam. Both these algorithms can adversely affect a site if the over-optimization is not taken care. Most of the things can be handled just by applying common sense. Let’s go through few tips to avoid any such over optimization penalties…

1)    Authentic Titles:

This is a very basic and easy to follow tip. Websites rather than concentrating on keywords should put more emphasis on the meaning and authenticity. This not only improves the readability for the site but also attracts many viewers for its authentic content.

2)    Manipulative Internal Links:

Many sites as part of SEO try to improvise the rankings by placing many internal links that point to different locations of the same site. One can have internal links but need to be controlled and multiple internal links for the same anchor needs to be avoided. It’s known that multiple links pointing to same anchor will be counted only once while calculating the rank and further can get caught by Google Panda or Google Penguin due to the over-optimization techniques.

3)    Penalty Likely Sources:

This is one of the tough things that a website has to take care so that it doesn’t get penalized. Back links from other sites/sources, which are likely to be blacklisted by Google algorithms. Once the source is blacklisted, there is a very good chance that the sites back linking to these blacklisted sites will also get penalized. It’s advisable for the websites to avoid such back links especially to so called private link networks. These private link networks boast of many links that can be used but one has to be aware that such links are prone to Google penalties.

Tips to save your site from Latest Google Updates (Panda & Penguin)

The need to save your site from updates

The idea of having a site is quite good as it brings along quite a number of benefits. For instance, you can use it as an income generating activity amongst other things. It is in this light that one ought to know how to save their website from the latest Google updates. This is more so because whenever Google provides your site with an update, it always cuts down on the online returns accrued from this venture. This therefore calls that such updates should be ignored once they show up on your computer. It is also important to have unique ideas when creating your site as a major step to save your site from updates.

The need to be on alert

Google is the largest search engine in this modern age and time. It is therefore important to post quality and unique contents in their site. Another quite important tip that site owners should be cautious about is to avoid spinning. This involves having articles written in different versions and in this case the Panda and the Penguin updates are there to catch and penalize such people. It is also quite important to avoid keyword stuffing whenever discussing about a given matter in your site. The keywords used by any individual should sound natural in their context. This encourages originality and avoids the idea of producing spam content. The Panda and Penguin updates have a way of identifying spam content. However, this ability is enhanced with the experience that one has. It is also advisable to avoid the use of many back links in your website.

 Tips to follow in order to avoid updates

It is now quite evident that running a site can be tricky especially if you are doing it for the first time. This requires one to be able to gather enough information about how well to run a site. This is enhanced through following the above mentioned tips to the letter in order to be successful. Another important tip that one ought to put into consideration is the idea of averting the use of automated software. This can be tempting when one wants to have things done the easy way. The Google search engine will quickly pick up such software and this may end up causing trouble to your site. It is thus required that you should be able to avert the use of such software as much as possible. These are some of the important tips that must be followed in order to avoid Google updates.