It’s Mobilegeddon hot in here: Google strengthens its mobile-friendly ranking signal

If you have a mobile-friendly website, stand down. This news is not for you.

If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, my goodness what the hell are you doing!?? Have you not had enough warnings already? Stop reading this right now and go get a responsive website immediately you maniac!

So for anyone else reading this news – probably one person: my boss, the editor-in-chief of ClickZ (hi Graham!) – here’s a quick update to one of the biggest changes in the way Google ranks your website made in the last few years.

According to an announcement yesterday, from the beginning of May 2016, Google will increases the effectiveness of its ‘mobile friendly’ ranking signal.

Google launched “Trash Can” Which Recovers your Deleted Analytics

A new recovery feature for Google Analytics means that users will never again have to worry about deleting data or accounts. Today, Google launched “Trash Can,” which allows users to undo deletes in Google Analytics.

Trash Can is a safety net that saves information each time users delete a view, property, or account from Google Analytics. To use Trash Can, Analytics users simply select an account from the Administration tab and click the Trash Can icon. Then a list of deleted information appears, and users simply check off the information they want reclaimed and hit restore to return the document to its previous state.

The only catch is that Trash Can only stores information for 35 days. After that, it gets deleted permanently.

While the feature hasn’t officially launched for Google Analytics, information is being stored in Trash Can as of today. When the product does appear in Analytics accounts, all deleted information should appear in the Trash Can folder.

Trash Can is a direct response to user feedback, according to a Google rep. “We heard from a lot of users that had mistakenly deleted their accounts, properties, and views. Especially in a multi-user environment, mistakes like this happen too often. Trash Can gives users a safety net, a chance to recover things before being deleted forever.”

Google Webmaster Tools Has Announced a New “Index Status” Feature

Google Webmaster Tools has advertised another “Index Status” offer now tracks a site’s listed Urls for every convention (HTTP and HTTPS), and in addition for checked subdirectories.

“This makes it easy for you to monitor different sections of your site,” Google’s announcement said. “For example, the following URLs each show their own data in Webmaster Tools Index Status report, provided they are verified separately:”

The announcement highlighted the change in the reports if you have a website on HTTPS, or if some content is indexed under different subdomains. The reports will have an annotation, and look something like this:

Google’s New Search Layout

The new Google search layout users began seeing a couple weeks ago on a limited basis has now gone live to all users.

Google’s new layout, which changes the font and removes underlines from links, as well as displays the AdWords ads at the top differently, has definitely been getting poor reviews as it rolled out to everybody.

The headlines are larger the description text seems to be slightly lighter and they have adjusted the fonts with the wider typeface.

For AdWords ads, gone is the light yellow in the background that we have long associated as being advertising space for many years now. The new style doesn’t have any shaded background, instead it has a tiny yellow “Ad” marker next to the green URL. There is also an underline separating the ads from the organic search results.

Beyond the cosmetic change, the new search layout is affecting SEO in a pretty pronounced way. Titles that were optimized to the maximum 70 allowable characters for SEO purposes will now find the same headlines truncated in Google’s new results, giving everyone about 59-60 characters to work with. This means you might have a lot of work ahead of you trying to rework titles so they don’t appear poorly truncated in the search results, which could impact click-throughs to your site.

The first time many user saw the changes, many users thought they actually had their search hijacked or were falling victim to Google spoofing, because the search results looked completely different. And the reviews definitely aren’t good across the board, judging from all the comments by very upset searchers, something that actually made the switch to another search engine strictly because of the new look.

To me, it looks like a throwback to how search engine results looked 10 to 15 years ago, such as on Webcrawler or Hotbot, not something that has been refreshed for 2014. And I do agree with many people who say the new font makes it much harder to read and scan when on a desktop.

Google’s logic behind the new change was that they make the changes for mobile and tablets, and they carry out over several the design changes to desktop users. Google said they feel this creates improved readability and a much cleaner look. And they had an end goal of creating a consistent user experience across multiple devices (desktop, mobile tablet):

Towards the end of last year we launched some pretty big design improvements for Search on mobile and tablet devices (mobile first! :-). Today we’ve carried over several of those changes to the desktop experience.

We’ve increased the size of result titles, removed the underlines, and evened out all the line heights. This improves readability and creates an overall cleaner look. We’ve also brought over our new ad labels from mobile, making the multi-device experience more consistent.

Improving consistency in design across platforms makes it easier for people to use Google Search across devices and it makes it easier for us to develop and ship improvements across the board.

Will we see any changes reverted back? Hard to say, but Google doesn’t too often revert back on their changes once they’ve jumped in and made them.

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Google Starts Penalizing Sites for Rich Snippet Spam

If you use rich snippets on your websites, you should be aware that Google is now penalizing websites for spamming structured data markup.

The new warning was first mentioned in a forum post on the Google Webmaster Central forums from a user who is asking for clarification about the warning and what the issue could be. It is a manual action penalty based on incorrect usage of markups, regardless of whether it was deliberate spam or simply a mistake.

The warning that would appear in a user’s accounts if they have manual action taken is:

Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google’s Rich Snippet Quality guidelines.

The writing on the wall for penalties related to rich snippets was back in October at Pubcon when Google’s Matt Cutts talked about changes Google was planning in regards to rich snippets and dealing with related snippet spam.

Rich snippets could get a revamp and they will dial back on the number of websites that will be able to display rich snippets. “More reputable websites will get rich snippets while less reputable ones will see theirs removed,” says Matt.

The new penalty seems to affect websites that are misusing rich snippets, such as including authorship on homepages and reviews on pages where there are no reviews. But there was evidence that Google was attempting to educate webmasters on how to use it correctly when they made changes in December to add debugging support for structured data.

If you’re unclear if you’re using rich snippets correctly, you should first check your Webmaster Tools account and see if there’s any issues that show up, either as issues or in the structured data debugging area. Google also has the pretty significant help area for rich snippets, including with videos, to help webmasters implement structured data correctly.

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Google’s Matt Cutts: We Don’t Use Twitter Or Facebook Social Signals To Rank Pages

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video today answering the question, “are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm?” The short answer was no.

Matt said that Google does not give any special treatment to Facebook or Twitter pages. They are in fact, currently, treated like any other page, according to Matt Cutts.

Matt then answered if Google does special crawling or indexing for these sites, such as indexing the number of likes or tweets a specific page has. Matt said Google does not do that right now. Why?

They have at one point and they were blocked. I believe Matt was referring to Google’s real time search deal expiring with Twitter. Matt explained that they put a lot of engineering time into it and then they were blocked and that work and effort was no longer useful. So for Google to put more engineering time into this and then be blocked again, it just doesn’t pay.

Another reason, Google is worried about crawling identity information at one point and then that information changes but Google doesn’t see the update until much later. Having outdated information can be harmful to some people.

Role & Benefits of Business Intelligence Services in Current & Small Enterprises and Databases

With the regular ups and downs in the economy, businessmen have to look for the better and effective business solutions. Business intelligence services are one of them. A business intelligence service is the service in which all the processes of the business are joined together to present a unified development for the entire organization, by using current technology. Business and technology have been working together for quite some time now so that they can contribute in the growth of the nation with the growth of the organization as a whole.

The needs of the business and the companies keep on changing with time. It is essential to have the latest technology and machinery so that a particular company does not lag behind in the race of becoming number one. It can be better software, finances, machines, better resources, cheaper storage options and data usage for the entire organization. Data storage and its easy availability is a must for the development of the company.

Technology firms who provide business intelligence services are aware of the need of data storage for business houses, thus they provide online data storage services. By opting for these services you can store data of your entire organization in form of bytes as digital files so that you can save as much data as possible. To have these services it is not necessary to upgrade all the systems. Business process automation system will take care of it. All data files will be available online to every employee of the company. To make sure that the data is safe and secure you must get it locked and accessible to anyone only with id and password.

Data can consist of the details of the new project, clients, what is currently happening in these projects, who all are working on them, financial details of the company and the details of the resources. All the different departments can save their data online from where other departments who reԛuire the data can access it easily with their id password.

Moreover the business intelligence services are affordable and cheap. For small scale companies, they provide custom web applications and software. The entire program or the software will be customized as per your requirement so that unnecessary charges can be avoided. Use this business intelligence program intelligently with help of the technological firm and find out what more they can do to make your company generate more profits.

It wont be exaggerated to say that technology has intervened in every part of our life and business world, both online and offline also are witnessing new concepts everyday which promises to make business better and easier as well.

It is a lot economical these days to outsource data warehousing due to firm competition between numerous online firms offering the services at very competitive rates and the trend is still on increase. While talking about data warehousing one cannot simply avoid the possibility of data integration problems in case it couldnt be done in improper manner or order. So, the need of services of data integration consultants gets inevitable who have effective as well as economical solutions to the problems of a business.