The Quality Update: Google Confirms Changing How Quality Is Assessed, Resulting In Rankings Shake-Up

It’s not your imagination. Google’s results have changed since the beginning of this month, and Google’s officially confirmed to Search Engine Land that this is due to a change with how it assesses content quality. Call it “The Quality Update,” if you will.

Read the full post at http://selnd.com/1Aiw0od

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Every second your website takes to load can cost you millions.

Now Google is making that cost even more severe.

Google’s newest ranking factor is called Core Web Vitals.

Now, if you’re website is slow and clunky, Google won’t show it to searchers.

In this 85 second video, you’ll see 3 free tools you can use to check your website’s speed and performance.

You’ll also see how a lightning fast website scores as a best case scenario.

P.S. If you’d like us to take a look at your website, we’re happy to help.

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The Team Investigates an Impressions Spike

When people think of SEO, they tend to think primarily of on-page elements—keyword density, alt-tags on images, H-tags, and so on.

Google’s algorithm is quite a bit more nuanced than that, however. [Tweet:] Getting a page to rank well and to get a high number of impressions means going beyond the obvious on-page elements.

In this video, the team discusses a previously under-performing page that has recently seen a huge increase in its number of impressions.

Over the course of the discussion, we identified three often-overlooked factors that were changed just prior to the page taking off: Schema markup, meta titles and meta descriptions, and the anchor text used to link to the page from other law firm websites.

Is Your Law Firm Ready for Google’s New Mobile Index?

A separate mobile index. That’s what Google has been saying it plans on rolling out (or more than likely, already has).

I didn’t really understand what that meant when I first heard it. With regard to links and content, the mobile version of our site is the same as the desktop.

Especially since our site is responsive and not a separate site shown only to people on a mobile device.

Both have the same URLs, the same content, the same internal page structure, the same internal links, and (usually) the same navigation.

So what difference does it make if Google has one index for mobile webpages and another for desktop pages?

Especially if the only difference between the pages in each index is the way they appear to visitors based on the device that they’re using to view it.

And that right there is the difference that matters: user activity.

We’ve known that user activity and people finding what they’re looking for on your site has been a ranking factor increasing in weight over the past few years.

Google measures this according to metrics such as time on site, bounce rate, and pages visited, just to name a few.

Up until now, Google ranked your site based on how people used your law firm website on a desktop computer.

That is what will be changing this year.

Google is flipping the type of device-use measured so that your site will now rank according to how people use it on a mobile device—not a desktop.

That’s HUGE!

How many law firm websites do you know of that were built with the mobile user as the primary focus?

Right . . . not many at all.

Every other huge company (think of Facebook and their most recent acquisitions) is putting mobile first. It’s about time that Google did, too.

How are you serving mobile users?

What’s on your mind? Tell us below.

What Does Hummingbird Have to Do with Law Firms?

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, which they started using near the end of 2013, rearranged the way that the search engine delivered results.
As an attorney, you want to attract Hummingbird. It’s good for your site – provided your site has what it wants.

So what does Google’s Hummingbird want from your website?

What Hummingbird Has to Do with Law Firm SEO Hummingbird changed the entire search landscape. Prior to its release, you could get all the wrong results from a search query. Back then, SEO professionals were stuffing keywords into every nook and cranny they could; that inevitably meant unpredictable results that may not ever lead searchers to an answer.

The new algorithm jostled the rankings, and sites that had been using the old method of over-optimizing webpages with keywords saw an immediate decline in traffic; sites that provided real value started to climb.

How Does Hummingbird Work?

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm combines the best technologies to help the Googlebot – the crawler that visits, indexes and ranks pages – understand what pages are about. These functions are called semantic search and latent semantic indexing, and they’re remarkably good at helping law firms with great content rise to the top.

According to Danny Sullivan, Hummingbird lets Google “combine meaning and predict how to match your query to the document in terms of what the query is really wanting and are the connections available in the documents – and not just random coincidence that could be the case in early search engines.”

How Can Law Firms Benefit from Hummingbird?

As long as you have well-rounded content on your site (and you’re not cannibalizing your keywords), you’ll be able to surpass your competitors when it comes to quality. If Google believes you have a quality page, they’ll deliver it to searchers long before they’ll dish up a thin, somewhat useless page.

Naturally, there are plenty of other factors that come into play, too – but you won’t get anywhere unless you start with improving user experience.

Google has repeatedly insisted that they want websites to focus on users, not search engines. (Matt Cutts even said that we should stop calling it “search engine optimization” and start calling it “search experience optimization.”)
One of the best ways to do that is to answer their questions by providing knowledgeable, valid and in-depth answers.

You really only have 3 to 5 seconds – 10 if you’re lucky – to convince users that you have the answer they need, that you’re trustworthy and that they can find the answer easily. If you can capitalize on those things, Hummingbird will help you get your firm’s site in front of all the right people.

Natural vs. Unnatural Links – What Does Google Say

Google wants people to link to quality websites – after all, part of the algorithm they use to judge whether a site is valuable to searchers uses inbound links to determine its popularity within the Internet community.

So when Google talks about avoiding unnatural links, what do they mean? More specifically, what do they have to do with law firm search engine optimization?

What is a Natural Link in SEO?

When you find a webpage that’s useful to your readers and adds authority or believability to what you’re writing, you might choose to link to it. Law firms often link to statutes and other helpful pages, and when that happens, Google considers it a natural link.

A natural link is something that will help your readers delve deeper into a topic or clarify what you mean. (The links in the first two paragraphs of this post are natural links because they’re there to help you.)

When a reputable website naturally links to your site, Google sees that as a point in your favor.

What is an Unnatural Link in SEO?

An unnatural link is one that doesn’t belong there and doesn’t make sense – and it certainly doesn’t add value for searchers.

We’ve all been to websites that have odd-looking links that don’t belong there. Some examples of this are blog comment spam, which looks like this:

Natural vs. Unnatural Links – What Does Google Say

This comment was posted to create a backlink to this essay service, but the comment has nothing to do with the blog post, which was about creating invoices for freelance services. It’s clearly spam, and when Google sees unnatural links such as this one splattered all over numerous websites, they can tell – and that will most likely spell disaster for that essay service’s rankings.

The same type of unnatural linking is used as a black hat SEO technique on webpages, in blog posts, and in user-powered forums.

Should You Buy Links?

For the most part, Google has identified ways to zero in on websites that have the sole purpose of selling links. Many of these sites have been penalized, but there are still businesses out there that offer to sell links to webmasters who don’t know any better.

What happens when a webmaster pays for links?

It’s not pretty. Google’s algorithm will notice the sudden influx of links and determine the quality of sites they’re coming from – and if they’re not coming from sites that Google already trusts, your website could be penalized and be knocked out of the search engine results pages altogether.

In most of these cases, purchased links are placed on sites that Google already considers “spam,” so you’ll get hit twice: first, you wasted money on the links, and second, you damaged your site’s ranking in the process. This has happened to law firms all over the country because at one time, Google didn’t punish sites for purchasing links… but now they do.

What is a Link Scheme?

When links are designed to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results, they’re considered to violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Any linking scheme that doesn’t have searchers’ best interests in mind is a “no-go” as far as Google is concerned.

Link schemes include:

  • Buying or selling links
  • Using automated programs that create links
  • Linking to other websites only so they’ll link to you
  • Putting keyword-rich anchor text in mass-distributed press releases

The key is that you’re not adding links to your site to build in value; you’re doing it for the sole purpose of creating a link.

What Does Google Do About Unnatural Links?

When links to your website show up on disreputable pages, or when they’re splattered all over the Internet without any clear purpose, Google can tell that they’re spam. When they find that artificial, manipulative or deceptive links point to your site, they can apply what’s called a “manual spam action.”

A manual spam action will penalize your website in the search engine results pages by lowering its ranking. It makes sense if you look at it from Google’s standpoint; if your site was high quality, links would be natural rather than paid for.

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