How to Google To Rank Sites Based On Accuracy Of Information

In recent months, Google has become increasingly focused towards the quality of search results pages. It always was, but there has been talk of new ranking signals being incorporated into the search engine. Where certain signals were merely guidelines in the past, they'll soon geared to become direct signals. One example is mobile-friendly design. Another is security. This leads us to believe that a major algorithm update might be in order pretty soon.

Latest rumors have it that Google may start counting the accuracy of information as a ranking signal. According to a paper published by researchers within the company, it may now value accuracy over the quality of backlinks.

Reliability?

So far in test conditions, Knowledge-Based Trust score has been able to reliably predict the trustworthiness of millions of websites. This sounds impressive on paper, and I’m sure the SEO community would appreciate an alternative to links as a ranking signal. However, a lot of questions remain unanswered.

For one, not every website exists to report facts, so how will trustworthiness be determined in those cases? Well that’s when the research paper says Knowledge-Based Trust isn’t necessarily a replacement for current ranking signals, but a supplement to them.

Knowledge-Based Trust

Google is working on a system where it can determine the trustworthiness of a page not by who is linking to it, or how many incoming links it has, but by the number of facts it contains.

How it works

A score, called a Knowledge-Based Trust score, would be computed for each page by cross-referencing the content with facts stored in Google’s Knowledge Vault. The Knowledge Vault is a database of 2.8 billion facts extracted from the web, and is the primary source of information behind the boxes that appear on the right side of some searches.

The more facts contained on a page, the better it will rank. In instances where few facts are found on a page, Google will check the accuracy of other content contained on the site to determine how well it can be trusted overall.

There is also cause for concern for pages written around new technology and new discoveries, with information that hasn't yet been entered into Google’s Knowledge Graph. If Google started to rely on Knowledge-Based trust to rank web pages, would it then focus additional effort on revising and updating the Knowledge Graph?

We are eagerly looking towards Google for answers. What do you think about this new development? Share your views in the comments section below!

First Steps To Recovering From Google's Mobilegeddon

SEO First Steps To Recovering From Google's Mobilegeddon

Mobilegeddon is the nickname give to Google's latest mobile-friendly search algorithm that promised to uproot rankings for websites that weren't mobile-friendly. But in reality, it’s not quite as potent. We recently discussed the effects of this algorithm thus far on websites, and they have not been catastrophic as Google has threatened. However, a lot of websites did get hit. Let's talk about how to take the first steps towards recovering from this penalty.

Mobilegeddon is the next big thing in Google algorithm updates. Unlikes Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, Hummingbird and the other algorithms, you might have noticed it’s not an animal name. This is because the people who name things aren’t really consistent or original. Don’t worry about it.

This particular update, as the moniker implies, deals heavily with mobile SEO. Specifically, it makes “being mobile-friendly” a ranking factor. If your site is mobile friendly, congratulations; you’re perfectly safe. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll be hit by the penalty, which might be pretty bad depending on how far from mobile friendly you are.

Fixing a Mobile Penalty

Step 1: Figure out how bad the hit to your traffic was. The Mobilegeddon update rolls out over the course of a week, so choose a 2-week period both before and after the date to get an idea of your traffic. Use whatever analytics program you want, though Google Analytics is probably the best for diagnosing a Google penalty. If your traffic wasn’t actually hit all that hard, you can get away with taking your time on a mobile update. Of course, you’ve had plenty of time already.

Step 2: Determine the scale of the changes you need to make. This is a pretty complex step, and step three will depend on what you determine here.

Step 3: Implement whatever level of fix you need to. This might mean tweaking your existing site, or it might mean implementing an entirely new responsive redesign. How quickly you need it, and how harshly it hurts you to not have it, depends on how badly you were hit. If you’re using WordPress, WP Touch Pro is an easy solution.

What does Mobile Friendly Mean?

Google has a list of mobile guidelines, but they can all be summarized fairly easily.

• Avoid anything that doesn’t work on mobile. This means Flash, primarily, though it also includes custom code and JavaScript that doesn’t render properly.
• Use text that’s properly sized for small devices. If the user has to zoom in just to read your site, it’s not going to be very useful to them, and they’ll find another resource.
• The same goes for other content. Make sure everything fits on the screen. If the user has to scroll horizontally, you’re going to earn a penalty.
• Make sure your links and navigation are spaced out and easy to use. The user should never be able to “fat finger” the wrong link because two are too close together.

If you want to test to see if your site is mobile friendly, you can use Google’s testing tool.

At the smallest level, use tools like Google’s pagespeed ranking to see if your site is fine, but just a little slow. Sometimes you’ll see a drop in traffic because your mobile site is a little slow, but there’s nothing technically wrong with it. Just work to speed up your side by making code a little more streamlined, maybe cutting a bit of the heavier multimedia content, that sort of thing.

A step up the chain, maybe you have a mobile site but it breaks several of Google’s best practices. Maybe you have too many links and they’re too close together. If your links are hard to tap accurately, you’ll be penalized. Remove or space out your links. The same goes for too-small fonts or multimedia content that doesn’t load. You can’t force iPhone users to view a Flash site, and Google will penalize you for it.

At almost the top level, you have the lack of a mobile site at all. Maybe users can use your desktop site via a phone through liberal use of zoom and magnification tools, but at least it functions. You’ll be penalized pretty hard for this, but the most necessary visitors can still use your site. Take the time to develop a responsive redesign, and hurry to implement it, but make sure it works before you throw up some hastily and shoddily coded substitute.

The absolute top level is when you have a no mobile site at all, and your desktop site doesn’t work for mobile devices. This might be because it’s too small or hidden behind code a mobile device can’t parse. This also affects heavily Flash-based sites. If this is the case, you might as well be completely deindexed from the mobile search results. You have some serious work to do to get your traffic back, though to be fair, you probably didn’t have anything other than bounces from mobile sources to begin with.