As the year draws to a close, we start to see an influx of posts talking about what marketers, SEOs and small businesses can expect in 2015. Although these articles do a good job of predicting the year-over year evolution of online marketing, they don’t tell us much about the long-term trajectory of things – and that’s what really matters. If businesses want to ensure long-term success, they need to be agile, adaptable and proactive.
This week, Bing Senior Program Manager Michael Basilyan shared some really great insights into how Bing vets content quality and what factors are used in their ranking algorithms. He explained the Bing focuses on three main pillars to determine content quality — authority, utility and presentation.
In recent years, mobile optimization has been a pretty hot topic for SEOs, web developers and online marketers. As mobile usage increased, more and more businesses switched to responsive and adaptive designs to improve the user experience on tablet and smartphone devices. Back in June of 2013, in an effort to improve the search experience for mobile users, Google announced that they would start demoting sites that weren’t deemed mobile-friendly.
Google is always testing new ways to display information in search results to provide more value to the user. Back in August, Google started testing a new layout that removed the horizontal local carousel results. It now appears that Google has made this change permanent and officially removed the carousel-style results for restaurants, hotels and other local entities.
Although Google hasn’t officially confirmed anything yet, many SEOs and webmasters have reported some serious changes in the SERPs today – too much movement to be dismissed as day-to-day fluctuations. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise for most SEOs, since just last month, Google’s John Mueller said that we can expect to see Penguin 3.0 roll out before the end of the year.
