Introduction: A New Way to Search and Listen

Google has always been at the forefront of innovation when it comes to making search results more user-friendly and accessible. In its latest move, the tech giant is testing a new feature that adds audio overviews to search results. This development means users may soon be able to listen to summaries of information rather than just read them. It’s an exciting step, particularly for users who prefer consuming information through sound or have visual impairments. This experimental feature reflects how search engines are adapting to changing user behavior and technology trends.

Understanding the Audio Overview Feature

The idea behind audio overviews is fairly straightforward. When you search for something on Google, instead of only seeing a written summary, you may also have the option to hear a voice reading out a short explanation or a brief summary of the content. These audio snippets appear to be automatically generated by Google’s AI-powered systems, pulling together key information from reliable sources and presenting it in a way that’s easy to understand.

This isn’t the first time Google has played around with audio in its products. Google Assistant has long been capable of reading articles or answering queries verbally. However, bringing this capability directly into search results opens up an entirely new way for people to interact with information on the internet.

Why Audio Summaries Could Be a Game Changer

Adding voice summaries to search results can significantly improve accessibility for a wide range of users. People with visual impairments or reading difficulties often struggle to navigate traditional web content. With audio overviews, they can access information faster and more easily.

But it’s not just about accessibility. The trend toward audio content has been rising steadily. Podcasts, voice assistants, and audio-based social media apps like Clubhouse have shown how users are increasingly comfortable engaging with content through sound. Audio summaries are in line with this trend, providing a method for consuming search results that is hands-free and suitable for people on the move. Whether someone is driving, walking, or multitasking, they can still learn and stay informed just by listening.

How It Works: A Glimpse Into Google’s AI-Powered Voice

Though the feature is still in the testing phase, early reports suggest that the voice used in the audio summaries is generated using Google’s advanced text-to-speech technology. The system takes content from high-authority pages, summarizes it, and reads it out in a clear, neutral voice. These overviews are concise, designed to give listeners the most important points within a few seconds.

As of now, the feature seems to be visible only to a limited set of users and on select queries. This suggests that Google is still collecting data, analyzing user behavior, and working on refining the quality of the audio summaries before considering a broader release.

What It Means for Website Owners and SEO

For website owners, bloggers, and digital marketers, the introduction of audio summaries could bring some new opportunities and challenges. If Google is pulling summaries from websites and converting them into audio, the structure and clarity of your content will become even more important. Well-written, concise, and informative content may be more likely to be selected for audio overviews.

This could mean a shift in how content is optimized. Rather than just focusing on keywords and metadata, creators may need to think about how their content will sound when read aloud. Simple language, short sentences, and clear structure may become even more valuable than before. Voice search optimization is already a growing field, and this new feature might accelerate its importance.

User Reactions and Accessibility Impact

Initial feedback on platforms like Reddit and Twitter has been mixed but mostly positive. Users who have tried the feature seem to appreciate the added convenience. Some have mentioned that it’s particularly helpful when doing searches during activities that require their eyes and hands elsewhere. Others have expressed concerns about voice accuracy or the possibility of over-reliance on machine-generated summaries that could misinterpret complex topics.

From an accessibility standpoint, however, the feature has been praised. Organizations that advocate for digital inclusivity see this as a big win. Giving more people the ability to access information in various formats helps create a more equitable internet for everyone.

Will This Feature Replace Traditional Search? Not Likely

Although audio overviews are innovative and helpful, they’re unlikely to replace traditional search results entirely. Most users still prefer to skim or scan information quickly rather than listen to a full summary. Moreover, when researching in-depth topics, users usually want to read multiple sources, dive into detailed explanations, and cross-reference information. That’s something a short audio clip cannot replace.

Instead, this feature will probably function as a complement to the standard search experience. It’s perfect for quick answers and casual browsing but will likely sit alongside text-based results rather than replace them.

Looking Ahead: What’s Next for Audio in Search?

As artificial intelligence and machine learning evolve, we can expect more audio features to be integrated across Google’s products. This experiment could be the foundation for more advanced voice-search experiences, where users engage with the internet using natural language and receive intelligent, contextual responses.

If the audio overview test proves successful, Google may roll it out across more devices and languages, integrate it more tightly with the Google Assistant, or even introduce customization options such as voice tone, pace, or language preferences.

Conclusion: A Small Change with Big Potential

Google’s test of audio overviews in search results may seem like a small tweak, but its impact could be significant. By giving users the ability to listen rather than just read, Google is embracing the future of multi-format content consumption. For users, it offers more flexibility, accessibility, and convenience. For content creators and marketers, it introduces a new layer of optimization and engagement strategies.

Whether you’re someone who prefers to read, listen, or do both, this innovation is one more example of how Google continues to adapt search to the needs of the modern user. As the feature rolls out to more users, it will be interesting to see how it shapes the way we discover and consume information online.

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In June 2019 Google has announced a new core update, codenamed: June 2019 Core Update

While officially Google has not mentioned what the update is about, it is widely believed that the update relates to improving the quality of content and engagement.

Therefore, as a proactive measure, it is a good idea to audit the SEO content of your website and ensure that it doesn’t violate the parameters set by Google. You can do this easily by using a content quality checklist (below) that helps audit SEO content in a few minutes. This checklist is quite comprehensive for two reasons:

– It is based on the guidelines set by Google’s Search Quality Evaluator that are quite popular among content evaluators globally.

– It incorporates Google’s very own E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines for content scoring.

Checklist to audit SEO content:
Below are some recommended parameters that you can use to check the quality of your SEO content. You can reach a maximum score of 30 points if you meet all parameters. Even if you reach a score of 27, it means that your content is good enough to be posted.

From an SEO perspective:
– Check whether primary keywords are written in the title and sub-headings.

– Ensure that internal links referencing relevant information on the page are not broken and function properly.

– Review the content to see that it is well structured and formatted with appropriate tags (example: H1, H2, H3, P).

– Make sure that the main content is unique and not copied from any other sources online.

– Check whether all images have Alt tags, titles and descriptions

– Ensure that meta title and description have primary keywords.

– If you are publishing a blog, then a table of contents should be visible.

From Content perspective:
– Whether the title of a content piece corresponds with the content (example: Title: “Dog Grooming Guide”” – content includes “a step by step…”)

– Whether the main content provides a clear topical structure including key points?

– Does the supplementary content supports the key points of the main content?

– If the content is text-based, then does it have images that make it easier to understand the content?

– Check whether the content is promotional, sponsored, or paid. This should be clearly specified on the page. Some common types are advertisement, sponsored article and guest post etc.

– Last but not the least, checked whether the content is relevant and interesting for the audience.

From the perspective of audience satisfaction:
– As the content is meant for the audience, it is important to ensure that it is of high quality and meets their expectations in terms of relevancy and timeliness. It should not be old and picked from other sources, especially when it relates to topics such as education and entertainment.

– The content should make audience read it again and again and should keep them engaged.

– Whether the writing style and font is good enough to make the content legible across multiple devices that include a desktop PC, laptop, tablet and mobile devices.

– The more thought leadership the author exhibits, the higher trustworthiness he or she will establish, and correspondingly higher will be the “connect” that he or she will establish with the audience.

From the perspective of intent:
– It is important to ensure that the main content is well-written and therefore easy- to-read. A reader should be able to locate it easily on a page.

– Take care to ensure that the ads on the page are relevant and not distracting or gaudy.

– Be careful to ensure that the content is neutral and does not provoke readers, or promote hate, violence, deception or political manipulation.

– Ensure that the content does not cause physical or mental harm, and is otherwise not malicious or deceptive.

From the perspective of trust:
– The source of the content should not be anonymous. Check to ensure that the name and Bios of the author is available and easy to find.

– It should be easy to locate the link or the information source that pertains to the business on the page.

– Ensure that there are negative reviews or condemnation of the content. Take care to include only the positive reviews, recommendations and good comments appearing online at other places.

From the perspective of authority:
– The content should have trustworthy citations displaying authority.
– The reader should perceive the content to be legitimate and a source of truth.
– Ensure that as far as possible, the page is cited elsewhere online for the information provided.

From the perspective of expertise:
– It is a best practice to have the content written by a person who has a high level of expertise in the subject.
– Ideally speaking, the author should have a formal education on the topic and in the subject related to the content.
– The author should be an expert in the subject and this should appear elsewhere online.

Conclusion:
In case you are unsure about the quality of content in your post, then this checklist will be ideal for your needs. This audit can be completed in less than 5 minutes per 2000 words and will provide you extensive feedback about your content.

More Resources:
How To Prevent Google Penalties and Achieve A Natural Link Landscape
Publishing New Content On Your Site Can Lead To Extreme Ranking Fluctuations On Google
Debunking an SEO myth that Google gives an Authority score to a website

The post Auditing SEO content as per Google June 2019 Broad Core Algorithm Updates appeared first on Latest Updates On : SEO and Ecommerce & Apps Development.

For years people in the SEO world have been following a myth that Google gives an “Authority” score to a website.

SEO webmasters have always followed the golden rule that Google ranks websites based on certain parameters and based on how a website actually ranks on these parameters, it assigns an “Authority” score to the website.

What are these parameters that people believe impact the “Authority score” of a website?
Webmasters believe that these parameters normally comprise:

– Website content
What is the quality of content? Is it relevant, high quality and fresh? or is it plagiarized, low quality and copied from other sources.

– Freshness
This pertains to the Google Freshness algorithm that provides emphasis on value of recentness of content related to areas like latest news, events, politics, celebrities, trends and more. The purpose here is to address the user’s intent to want to know the latest information.

– Backlinks
Backlinks, especially from high ranking sites. To this day, backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking signals in Google’s search algorithm and lead to organic traffic growth.

– Mobile First approach
This approach involves designing website starting first with a mobile version and then adapting it to larger screens.

– Page Speed
Page speed measures how fast the content on your page loads. The higher the page speed, the higher the Google rank.

– Schema code
The schema code is a must for every website as it helps search engines understand the information on webpages and provide richer results.

– Brand Power and Social Signals
A brand’s social media “voice” defining it’s image and its social signals on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit etc.

Keeping these above parameters in mind webmasters have always tried to ensure that their websites come good and achieve higher rankings in search engine results.

Debunking the myth
While webmasters are not wrong in their approach and it is true that the above parameters do play a significant role in impacting a website’s rank, the fact remains that there is no “Authority” score given by Google to rank a website. This has been reiterated by experts that Google has not built any methodology or metric to measure the authority of a website.

This is quite contrary to the perception of most webmasters who have attributed the increase or decrease in their website traffic to the rank or domain authority of their websites.

What is done by Google?
As per Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller, ““In general, Google doesn’t evaluate a site’s authority. So it’s not something where we would give you a score on authority and say this is the general score for authority on your website. That’s not something we would be applying here.”

Google does have quality rater guidelines that contain a section on evaluating authority of a website, but these quality raters do not evaluate websites on an individual basis.

In other words, Google quality raters will not look at a site and assign an “authority” score to it just on the basis that it fulfills certain parameters mentioned above that make it appear to be authoritative.

Who should rate a site?
As per John Mueller, webmasters should actually get their sites evaluated by none other than actual users (current or potential) of the site. These folks are the best to be asked to share their feedback. Their perception of the site’s authority matters the most.

This is usually most effective when users compare sites in the same niche and share feedback on the positive and negative elements that they come across during their evaluation.

What do the ratings imply?
If the users feel that they can trust the content of the website, then this is valuable feedback on whether the site is authoritative. On the other hand, if users are unsure about the contents of a site and are reluctant, then this also feedback for the webmasters about the authority of their website.

More Resources:
Best Ecommerce marketing ideas to boost your online sales
Top 6 Latest WordPress Web Development and Design Trends Of 2019

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Attending to a site owner’s recent query, Google’s John Muller said extreme ranking fluctuations are quite normal on Google when a new content is published on the site. In some cases, this fluctuation can occur for up to one or two weeks following the publishing of the content.

The discussion came up during Google Webmaster’s Central office-hours hang out. The site owner stated his following concern. He said some of their visitors had asked for some information on a topic and hence the site owner created a page connected to answering their question.

After completing the page, they submitted it through Search Console. Almost all of a sudden, the site showed up number 12 for a search inputting a long-tail term connected to the topic. Nevertheless, the real shock came on the very next day when the page completely disappeared from the index and they could never find it back again.

Also, yet another page on their site, their index page, which was never related to the topic figured out within 200s in the ranking. The site owner was really confused what this situation indicates and what they must be doing with regard to their site’s ranking. Incidentally the answer to this query is a matter of immense importance in the domain of Ecommerce SEO services.

Answering the query, Muller said this was a completely normal behaviour expected of Google. When Google has to index a piece of content, it has to estimate where in the search results the content must be ranked. Often Google can either underestimate or overestimate the ranking position while trying to rank the site for the new content.
Eventually Google will keep deciding on the most appropriate ranking position for the given content. This process can even take up to several weeks. Before the ranking position finally settles down, there could be many fluctuations which can be extreme at times.

Adding to what he said, Muller told that with regard to new content, the site owners can expect the rankings to fluctuate to a considerable extent. This can also mean completely disappearing from the search rankings and then reappearing once again.

This behaviour of Google is quite normal, says Muller. He says there is a trickier part to the topic. With regard to a new content posted on a new site or an existing site, Google has to figure out where the content must be ranked depending on where it is the most relevant. Sometimes, we estimate fairly high and over a period of time, it can once again settle down. While settling down after a series of fluctuations, the results could be any one of the following:

• The ranking can settle back in a similar position
• It can fluctuate for some time and then once again settle in a similar position
• After fluctuating, it can settle in a higher ranking
• The fluctuation can be followed by settling down on a lower ranking

The idea to take home is this. Especially with regard to the ranking of the new content, the fluctuation noticed in every case is but normal. For things to come back to normalcy, it can take a week or two. This is because Google needs time to figure out the most appropriate ranking for a given piece of content and that is the reason why this delay happens.

Though this can be extreme at times, the possibility of this happening is almost certain in most cases of adding a new piece of content. It is also possible that the new content is ranked fairly high for a couple of days and then the index totally disappears only to appear back in the same position a few days later or in a lower or higher position.

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Sometimes, your link building agency can do more harm to your site than good. Some SEO companies implement risky and shady techniques to play with the search engines and find their way to the top of the search engine results. If these wrong practices are caught by the search engines, they will resort to taking manual action on the given website. Here are a few ways to appear clean and avoid Google Penalties.

Google’s Manual Actions
Some of the popular manual actions (penalties) imposed by Google include the following.

• Hacked Site: This is a very common kind of website compromise where the hackers target out-dated or vulnerable websites to drive traffic to malicious or deceptive sites.

• Snippets Spam: This is a kind of structured data spam wherein the invisible, misleading or irrelevant content is marked up.

• Thin Content: Google is known to penalize the sites that have low-quality pages including thin affiliate pages, cookie-cutter sites and doorway pages. In majority cases, Google is only found to exclude the thin content from the index rather than penalizing the whole website.

• Paid and spammy links: Though there are risks, SEO companies and site owners often wish to run faster and go for buying links which ends them up in link spam. While natural links give slow and steady ranking results over a long time, aggressive and spammy links give faster results of course with a great risk.

How to escape Google penalties
In order to avoid the negative consequences of a spammy link penalty from Google, actions like clean up and disavowal are required. Some of the popular clean up tools you can use for this purpose include Link Detox, Ahrefs, SEMrush and Kerboo. To start with, create a link clean up matrix. The clean-up tools in the above list can make it easy to create a disavow file for uploading to Google Search Console (GSC). After this, you must also forward reconsideration requests to Google. It is a time consuming process to escape from manual action.

Negative SEO Attacks
If you find your site victimized for a negative SEO attack that results in an unexpected spike on your link profile that consists of spammy anchor texts from other sites, you can submit a disavowal file to Google with a request to re-index your most important pages.

How to avoid link penalties
By tracking some important industry metrics, you can avoid link-based penalties. Some such metrics include Moz Domain Authority, Ahrefs Domain Rating, Majestic Citation Flow and Majestic Trust Flow. Here are other actions you can take to avoid getting penalised for unnatural looking links.

Develop a natural link landscape
Some of the characteristics of a natural link profile are images with links, subdomains and links that are not followed. The traffic will significantly improve over time when the link landscape grows eventually in a gradual manner.

Never over-optimize the anchor text
Generally, natural links do not have an anchor text that is rich in keywords. Make sure that your top anchor text terms are the brand names and your site name.

Ensure that the links look natural on the page
Links should not be hidden. They must be found within the text wherever relevant for the users.

Final word
While hunting for link opportunities, metrics prove to be a great route map. However, it is not good to dismiss the sites when they do not meet the precise metric threshold. Site relevancy and clean backlink profile are very helpful to identify a seeding site. Since these sites can give rise to trust flow and citation flow, these sites can be an asset for a bright future.

The post How To Prevent Google Penalties and Achieve A Natural Link Landscape appeared first on Latest Updates On : SEO and Ecommerce & Apps Development.

In a recent move, Google has officially announced the roll out of mobile first indexing. Though Google has been actually working in these lines for quite some time even before this announcement, this official announcement comes as the leading Search Engine’s acknowledgement of its stand via its own channels. Much earlier to this announcement, Google’s representatives have revealed that several sites have been migrated already to mobile-first indexing.

By way of confirming what we have already known in these lines, Google has not reiterated the fact that it is migrating the individual sites that have ably followed the best practices acknowledged by Google for mobile-first indexing. As per the rule, sites that make use of responsive web design or dynamic serving are the most suitable candidates for mobile-first indexing. If a given site has an AMP and a non-AMP version of the content, Google will make it a point to index the mobile versions of the non AMP page.

Understand what is mobile-fist indexing
Down the ages, one of the biggest concerns for Google is ensuring a great user experience. As part of its mission to ensure the best user experience for searches performed across all devices, Google is resorting to the measure of mobile-first indexing which will mean to us that Googlebot is now completely configured to crawl and index the mobile version of a page only.

Studies show that these days more searches are happening on mobile devices than on desktops. Google wants to ensure that a majority of the users will come across a content that is optimized for their user interface. In case a site lacks a mobile-friendly version of it, Google will overlook this fact and crawl and index the site in its existing form.

To make this initiative clearer, we can say that Google is not going to have a separate ‘mobile-first index’ that will run parallel to the other main index. All the content will be live within one single index only. However, henceforth Google will be making use of the mobile versions if they are made available by the site owners.

Google’s mobile-first indexing measures will not affect the site rankings
As part of its announcement, Google has made it clear to the site owners that the popular search engine’s mobile-first indexing efforts will never impact the site rankings in any way. However, there has been a significant change in Google’s approach to gathering content for its index.

The measures of Google need not alarm the site owners who do not have a mobile version of the site. The idea to understand here is that those sites that are migrated to mobile-first indexing will never enjoy any advantage over the other sites that have not been migrated so far.

Nevertheless, mobile-friendly content will secure higher rankings in the search results when the searches are performed on mobile devices. In fact, this policy has been adopted by Google way back from 2015.

Google’s notification to site owners
Sites that are migrated by the search engine giant to mobile-first indexing are being notified through Search Console. Also, the site owners can henceforth see a dramatic increase in the crawl rates from the smartphone Googlebot.

The post Why Mobile First Indexing Necessary? appeared first on Latest Updates On : SEO and Ecommerce & Apps Development.

Google considers page speed an important factor for ranking sites. This approach by the search engine giant puts mobiles first when it comes to accessing the information online. Since page speed is a crucial factor that decides the quality of customer experience, businesses cannot overlook this aspect while designing their sites. Studies show slow loading pages have very high bouncing rates and can adversely impact conversion rates as the users are today not prepared to wait.

What is the point we are talking about
A successful ecommerce venture is all about providing the users what they are looking for in terms of a good content and provide them a satisfactory experience across all platforms. Here are the ways to achieve these ends in the most effective way.

Offer the viewers a great content experience
Provide an appropriate, precise and high quality content that will satisfy the user. Know that the path to persuading a customer to buy your products is never linear, but only fragmented requiring a comprehensive approach. Get ready with a content that satisfies the customers during every stage of their journey towards giving you a sale.

Get a fast loading site
Take the right steps to make your pages load as fast as they can. Preferably this must happen within one or two seconds. Though the user is keen to find a solution to their needs and problems, they are not prepared to wait for more than just a few seconds. In order to remain competitive, your site must load faster than the nine other sites that are trying to grab the customer’s attention on a particular search query. The quicker your site loads, the more conversion it can bring you.

Make the best use of AMP
Accelerated mobile pages is going to be one of the most important ranking factors very soon. If you do not wish to use AMP, there are other ways too. However, the principal advantage of using AMP is to find the site load extremely fast which can help in boosting up your conversion rates and also bring about an enhanced search engine ranking once AMP is made a crucial ranking signal.

Approach the whole backlink workflow
It is very important to be able to analyse, clean, secure and track your backlinks from one tab. Make use of SEMrush to manage your link profiles.

Examine your site’s mobile-friendliness
Make use of the PageSpeed Insights tool or Gtmetrix tools to begin looking at your mobile page speed and ensure that each of your pages is mobile friendly.

Get ready with a compelling call to action
Tough this falls out of the SEO domain, it is important to show your users a strong call to action right at the time when they visit your site. If you wish to find them downloading a brochure or take some other action while arriving on your landing page, ensure the user finds the call to action very quickly.

How to test the results of mobile page speed
It is a difficult thing to test how the mobile page speed impacts your search engine visibility and performance. This can be probably done by setting up a logical A/B test by creating two similar pages on the same domain. Use the same template to create unique content with similar keywords. Observe how they rank. Then put some heavy scripts on one of the pages and check the outcome. Alternatively, you can also tank a well ranking page and removing most of the contents of the page except a few images and a simple content. Now check if you get more conversions.

Conclusion
While studies show that mobile speed and user experiences are crucial factors in page ranking, it is high time that businesses think of them seriously and take the right steps to enhance the user experience in order to increase conversion rates and retain the users for long on their sites to achieve more organic traffic.

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With just a few simple steps, you can get your web pages load four times faster than now. This discussion focuses on how Google’s AMP pages impact SEO.

Understanding Google’s AMP
The prime objective of the open source initiative launched by Google under the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is to make it possible for the publishers to create mobile optimized content just once and get it loaded everywhere instantly. The implication is that when the user inputs a query, Google will display a carousal highlighting the stories on websites enabling AMP.

The useful impacts of AMP on SEO

The article loads instantly when the user clicks on a news search term link in the carousel. Published are highly enamored by this development.

Commenting on this, Pinterest’s product engineer, Jon Parise says, “In early tests, we found that AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages. A better, faster mobile web is better for everyone, including users, platforms like Pinterest, and publishers.”

In an interview with Fortune, Jonathan Abrams, the founder of Nuzzel remarked, “A page loads in less than half a second when Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages is enabled instead of taking three seconds to load the average page”.

The most interesting fact here is that you can try all kinds of website speed enhancing tricks in this environment including reducing the server response times, image optimization, enabling browser catching and many others you know. Therefore we can say how Google’s AMP impacts SEO is something magical and highly beneficial to businesses.

The main thrust of the strategies employed by Facebook, Apple, Google is letting the websites work well on the mobile interfaces. Google claims, most users do not wish to stay on sites that take more than three seconds to load. Most mobile pages take an average of 8 seconds to load. There is however a stark difference between the three platforms. Google facilitates sharing content on the open web very easily without having to depend on an app.

Since the publishers’ websites are cached, they load in advance. Therefore the publishers can exercise more control over their pages. Going beyond what Apple and Facebook have achieved, Google lets the publishers place payrolls.

Most publishers focus more on Google today. The good news is that Google AMP lets web pages load faster. More than 5000 developers are working on the Google AMP Program and it is now gearing up to meet the comprehensive needs and expectations of the mobile users.

How it works
Since Google AMP version offers less design, it works faster. Since every Javascript is going to delay the loading speed by 100 milliseconds, the lesser the number of tags, the faster the loading speed. By creating the bare bones version of the mobiles, Google AMP has ruled out the need for third-party scripts like Javascript. Studies show that Google AMP optimized content is sitting on top of the search results.

Will Google AMP impact organic search results?
Note that AMP is never a ranking factor. However, it significantly impacts organic ranking by working from the peripheral aspects like clicks, impressions and user experience which all go into impacting SEO. The implication is that those sites that are not on the AMP bandwagon are sure to see a drop in the impressions, clicks and user engagement.

Final words
Most developers and site owners pay little thought to the viewing devices. Google has revealed that more than 50% of the search today happens over the mobiles. Irrespective of whether you are moving towards taking advantage of Google AMP, you need to let your sites load up faster to meet the evolving needs of today’s customers. The sure way to catch up with the trend is Google AMP.

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Mobilegeddon is the biggest update from Google so far. 
The internet world is buzzing with news that this update is the biggest one from Google so far and beats even the likes of Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird. It has been launched globally and affects all languages.

What is the significance of the Mobilegeddon update? 
Earlier on it was enough if a website had a “mobile friendly” tag but now it is clear that Google is changing the way it calculates mobile rankings. One of the biggest reasons for this change is the increase in the number of mobile and tablet users and the increase in demand for mobile devices including tablets. As per experts more than 60% of all searches on the web are now made through mobile devices including tablets and this number is bound to increase.

As per some experts, additionally Google has also started making changes in its ranking algorithm based on information from indexed apps of signed-in users. This will mean that apart from affecting what search results are displayed and how they are displayed in future, it is also possible that search results in the future will focus on different types of apps and other mobile tools.

Since most website owners have so far ignored the importance of having mobile friendly sites, it is now high time that they took concrete steps in this direction.

How to prepare for the Mobilegeddon update? 
It is important to plan in advance and prepare a strategy for the Mobilegeddon update. The following steps are useful in this direction:

• Ensure that your website is mobile friendly.
• Ensure that your website has a responsive web design that alters as per the size of the screen.
• Check to see that the Google mobile bot crawls your website.
• Ensure that all pages of your website are mobile friendly and not just the homepage.
• Do an audit of your website as per steps indicated below.

Steps suggested by Google to meet the challenge of the Mobilegeddon update.
As per Google, the following steps are suggested and advisable:

• Do the Mobile Friendly Test to ensure that your website meets the initial qualifications of Google. The test appears on Google Webmaster guidelines.
• Generate a Mobile Usability Report that will give a report on how your website appears as Google sees it.

Contact an SEO company to fix the errors and bugs on your website and make it mobile ready and mobile friendly
Based on the above two steps, website owners should contact reputed SEO companies in India to fix the issues in their websites and make them ready to meet the stiff conditions imposed by the Mobilegedon update. They should contact SEO companies that follow ethical and White Hat SEO strategies in their work and practice both onpage and offpage SEO strategies and have Google certified SEO professionals.

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Panda has been consistent in its objective to ensure that quality content is given a high rank that it deserves and bad sites with bad quality content are punished by way of lower rankings in SERPs. Earlier on, until Panda made its first appearance website, webmasters were having a good time because they were using content farms not only to automate the process of content creation but also to create large volume of content. Both these factors had resulted in an unfair advantage being enjoyed by webmasters that artificially boosted their SERPs. So far the Panda updates have reasonably helped in penalizing sites that have bad content and we can see that the updates are now becoming more like slight adjustments that though impactful still serve their objective.

Google Panda 4.1 is the latest version of Panda that rolled out in September and although it still targeting sites with bad content, it is said to promote small and mid-sized websites that have high quality content. This move is expected to help lesser known websites compete against large scale websites. How this works in future, only time will tell.

How to be careful and avoid the Panda penalty:

Do we exactly know what is considered as a bad content by Panda? Below are some pointers that provide information in this direction:

– User Experience is bad: Content that is un-engaging and uninformative and fails to provide any value comes in this category. Such content could invite a strike from Google.
– Very Thin Content: Thin content sites are liable to get hit by Panda as neither do they have relevant content, nor do they have a sufficient amount of content.
– Duplicate content: This is still a negative factor that leads to penalties by Panda.
– Stuffing of Keywords: As above, this is still a negative factor.
– Content that is outdated: This refers to content in websites that is not updated for a long time and sits idle.

Penguin’s role in low quality Content:

Penguin is poised to eliminate spammy and unnatural links. It penalizes sites that indulge in artificial link building through link farms. This is a fair measure because as per Google policies link building should be a natural process with no intervention from individuals or artificial means. Content is the key here and sites that have relevant content should in the natural course of business, build a link naturally that would be far stronger and valuable than a link that is built artificially. Penguin recognizes this fact.

10 ways to work as per Panda guidelines:
– Increase the quality of content. This can be achieved in multiple ways:
    o Do a thorough research and create the content that your audience expects.
    o Write on trending topics.
    o Be lavish with illustrations, graphics and examples.
    o Format your work and do checking, editing and proof-reading. Again and again.

– Do an audit of your website and pick out and remove content from it that is outdated and old. For example old and incorrect studies or reports.
– Opt for evergreen content that will always be relevant and never go out of style. This includes content that includes instructions, FAQs, reference material and top tip posts.
– Keep Keyword density around 2% – 4% to generate organic traffic to your website.
– Don’t indulge in plagiarism by copying content.
– Post content that is long and engaging. A length of about 2000 words per post is a good size.
– Stay on the topic of your website and don’t digress from it.
– Format your posts by adding Headers, sub Headers, bullet points and paragraphs.
– Create link worthy content so that it attracts outside content.
– Create content that is engaging and educating so that the user experience is good.

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