iOS Support Finally Comes To Google App Indexing

Finally, now iOS apps can benefit from Google's App Indexing protocol. Google announced this yesterday on the heels of Google I/O.

App Indexing is a way for app developers to feed Google the content within their native Android and now iOS apps. This way Google can index the content, rank it in the mobile results and trigger a command to open the app on your mobile device specifically to the page of content within the app.

This has been supported for Android apps for years and now it has come to iOS, at least for a select number of apps. More apps will be supported in the near future and you can get ready by adding the App Indexing mark up to your iOS and Android apps.

Here are the steps to get App Indexing for iOS:

1. Add deep linking support to your iOS app.
2. Make sure it’s possible to return to Search results with one click.
3. Provide deep link annotations on your site.
4. Let us know you’re interested. Keep in mind that expressing interest does not automatically guarantee getting app deep links in iOS search results.

With this, Google also announced support for deep linking via Google's short URL service. You can use one short Google URL and depending on the device clicking on the URL, it may open the content on the web, iOS app or Android app. It all works with the same app indexing protocol.

With App Indexing, Google may show your app as an option to install on mobile searches, which benefits from the new mobile friendly ranking factors.

Here are some pictures:

This is great news for iOS developers.

Forum discussion at Google+.

Google Local Search Results Update; Massive Ranking Changes

The local SEOs are buzzing big time right now. It seems like over the past few days, Google has done a major algorithmic change that has shifted how the local results rank in both Google Maps and the local packs in web search.

It is believed that the Google Maps Googlebomb fix led to this and I actually said then "expect the traffic change some for many local businesses in the near future."

It seems to be related, although Mozcast features shows the shift on the 15th. I cannot find any serious discussion around changes in local results as early as the 15th, only shortly after the Google apology after the 22nd.

The Local Search Forums has tons of local SEO experts documenting the change. You have Mike Blumenthal calling the location results screwy and the forums are simply lighting up around this.

I find it hard to believe it is not around the change Google made for the Google Maps bomb.

It seems like something went wrong with location detection and ranking of local results. It is almost believed to be a bug with Google's location detection systems. But it is awkwardly around the same time of the Googlebomb fix.

I'll try to find out more from the source, Google.

Forum discussion at Local Search Forums.

Google Diagnosing Algorithmic Penalties In Real Time

We know Google representative can fairly quickly tell if a site is hit by an algorithmic penalty - such as by Penguin or Panda. But when they do it in real time, it is pretty cool.

In a Google+ hangout this week, Google's John Mueller did it at least twice, once at the 16:24 mark and the other at the 17:44 mark.

The question came from Don who asked John, "would you be so kind as to tell me whether or not I still have a historic Penguin on my back, on this web site?"

John responded, "you don't have anything."

Then he told another webmaster after asking about their site a minute or two later, "I don’t see anything holding back your new site," even adding "it looks like traffic is going up as well."

Here is the video:

Here is the transcript:

(Q) Would you be so kind as to tell me whether or not I still have a historic Penguin on my back, on this web site?

(A) Ah, you don’t have anything where I would say you’d need to focus on links here.

So that’s something where if you’ve been focusing on links for Penguin or other web spam issues, that’s not something where at the moment I’d say you have to worry about that.

Then at 17:44:

I don’t see anything holding back your new site. So I think that’s kind of evolving as it organically would be evolving... It looks like traffic is going up as well.

We want an automated action viewer, Google.

Forum discussion at Google+.

Google SEO On-Page Ranking Factor List 2015 Version

Roger Montti, aka martinibuster, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld about a revised list of on-page SEO factors that he thinks are more important now in 2015, also with a list of those factors that are no longer important or as important.

The factors he put on the list as being more important in 2015 are:

• User experience metrics (all of them)
• Shorter title tags
• Original content
• Engaging content that provides an answer, teaches, informs, is useful, delights
• Original images
• Quality site design
• Descriptive meta description

The factors that he would go as far as to call deprecated, as in, no longer used by Google are:

• Keywords
• Focus on longtail phrases
• Focus on ranking for specific keyword phrases
• Lean code

The long tail does seem to be dead, it is more about the whole site experience and broader keywords than going after the big blue pineapple chair anymore.

Others added that responsive (mobile) friendly design and schema should be added to the list. I'd agree with that. But there is a lot more discussion around what should and should not be on these lists.

This is a thread you should spend some time in.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Decided On Content Removal For Right To Be Forgotten

The Wall Street Journal reported on how Google decides on what to remove based on the EU's Right To Be Forgotten (RTBF) mandate.

It requires Google to remove content from their search results when the content is harmful and no longer relevant - it actually gets way more complex than that.

The WSJ documents that Google has meetings every Wednesday to make decisions on what to remove and what not to remove based on the RTBF requests and submissions. And the decision is pretty much in Google's hand.

The court gave little guidance on how requests should be decided, beyond saying that search results should be scrubbed if they include links to information that is inadequate, irrelevant, excessive or outdated. 

That largely left Google on its own to figure out where to draw the line. The case, which established what is informally known as the “right to be forgotten,” has prompted more than 250,000 requests covering more than 920,000 links, as of Tuesday. Google has agreed to remove 35% of the links submitted and declined to remove 50%, with 15% still under review.

It is a very manual process, requiring Googlers to discuss each on a case by case basis.

Here is a chart from the WSJ on the removals:

I wonder how one gets to work on Google's RTBF decision making team?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Another Mass Reduction In Google Rich Snippets?

Over the past couple weeks, I have been seeing more and more webmasters complaining about their rich snippets disappearing from the Google search results page.

There is a thread at WebmasterWorld but dozens of complaints from individual webmasters in the Google Webmaster Help forums, I only linked to two but there are many.

In short, webmasters who had rich snippets displaying, mostly for reviews rich snippets, no longer see their stars.

For example, Home Depot shows rich snippets here:

But a year ago, it looked like this:

So Home Depot didn't have, Walmart did, now they don't. And before that, Walmart did not and Amazon did:

Back in October 2013, Google performed a 15% reduction in rich snippets and it would not surprise me if they did this every now and then. Maybe a few weeks ago they reran their rich snippet reduction algorithm (or rich snippet quality algorithm or whatever they call it) and it resulted in many sites losing their rich snippets again?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help.

Technical Hangout: Google, SEOs & Angular Experts Talk About SEO & JavaScript

For all you really technical SEOs out there, the 14th episode of Angular Air on Google+ was incredibly insightful.

We have Google's John Mueller answering some very technical questions about Google's ability to crawl and render JavaScript, AJAX and Angular. We also have expert SEOs and developers Adam Audette, Jody J. O'Donnell and Max Prin going through questions, answers and observations.

Here is the video:

This is an hour, it goes over most of what we know already, but for those who deal with crawling issues with JavaScript, facetted navigation, pagination, etc etc - it is worth listening to while you are working.

John Mueller from Google

Forum discussion at Google+.

More Details On What Google Defines As A Doorway Page

When Google updated their doorway page algorithm and guidelines it confused webmasters. The definition was not as clear, and honestly, most SEOs still are fuzzy on what a doorway page is.

This is so much so that most SEOs had no clue the new doorway page algorithm actually launched.

This morning I spotted a thread at Google Webmaster Help where one webmaster was being smart and wanted to 'out' the Hilton hotel for having landing pages for each hotel on the main hilton web site as well as a secondary URL in the format of hiltoncityname.com.

Top Contributor ETS responded to that, which Google's Eric Kuan from the search quality team marked as the best answer, as follows:

Those aren't doorways, no. There's nothing deceptive or manipulative that I can see. An example of doorways is when you have a website with 200 pages on it, all of which have the same basic text but with place names switched out on each page ("Find a taxi in London"/"Find a taxi in New York City"). The pages are designed to rank separately, catch keyword searches, but funnel all the traffic to one destination.

Whether this way of doing things is a good idea is another matter - since you effectively have two different indexed pages/sites (both are indexed) competing with one another. It would generally make more sense to have one of the URLs 301 redirecting to the other - and making one strong site instead of two.

So maybe use this as your doorway page definition even though it isn't described too well in the help docs.

Forum discussion Google Webmaster Help.

Google: Panda & Penguin Are In Real Time But Still Require Manual Data Updates

We've been covering all the confusion around Penguin and Panda about it being real time or manual. I explained based on covering John Mueller's explanation of what is real time and what is not over here.

But Google's Mariya Moeva explained it very concisely in a Google+ post, this is not new, because I covered it before, but the way Mariya explained it is short and concise:

Essentially, both (Panda and Penguin) are built-in in the realtime infrastructure, but the data has to be updated separately. I think this two-part process is what's leading to the confusion.

I don't speak Russian, but the reason this was prompted is because at the 46:42 minute part of the video, someone asked about this:

Q: Google's John Mueller is basically saying parts are real time and parts are not but with Penguin (and also currently with Panda), for you to recover, Google does need to run something manually and you need to wait for a refresh

A: Yes, absolutely, it is happening all the time

So I asked Mariya to explain and she responded:

I don't think we said anything extra revolutionary or surprising though (:. Essentially, both are built-in in the realtime infrastructure, but the data has to be updated separately. I think this two-part process is what's leading to the confusion. 

Again, this has led to a lot of confusion, I covered all of that over here but it is important enough to cover again.

Without the updated data, even though these algorithms are built into the real time infrastructure, you won't see any changes to your rankings around those specific algorithms.

Forum discussion at Google+.