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Stephan Kopp

The most relevant SEO News for March 2019

New technologies, devices, and content formats are challenging search engine experts around the world at an ever-increasing rate—but now help is coming from an unexpected source. What little helper can we expect to see in future strategic development and day-to-day business? Find out more in our March edition of SEO News.

Fraggles are back

The fraggles are loose, and they’re slowly taking over the Google world of tomorrow. Just to clear up any confusion right from the start: we’re not talking about the radish-loving, 65-cm tall (source: Wikipedia), cave-dwelling humanoids from the 80s TV show of the same name.

Like their namesakes, the fraggles our search engine optimisers have been working with for some time now are small and dynamic. Here, though, the word refers to content fragments identified by Google that can be scattered, either isolated or in innumerable combinations, throughout the ever-growing landscape of platforms, devices, and technologies.

Cindy Krum, a Denver, Colorado-based mobile marketing expert, was the first to use fraggles in this context. She says fraggles is intended as a portmanteau of “fragment” and “handle”, and describes them as Google’s response to dramatic changes in user behaviour and to the technological structural framework of websites, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), personalised web services, and data feeds.

What these digital assets have in common is that most of their content is assigned to a single URL. One driving force behind this trend is the process of adapting to the needs of the mobile age; another is the development of server-based technologies like Javascript or Ajax, which are capable of generating individualised content dynamically.

Google, Bing, etc. adjusting their indexing

As a result, Krum says, the fixed allocation of content to URLs is being supplanted; search machines are increasingly indexing mere fragments of content from individual websites, feeds, or apps. Rather than indexing entire websites page by page, she explains, Google, Bing and friends now face the challenge of fishing the most relevant content fragments from the massive ocean of conventional HTML, dynamic Javascript, and endless streams of XML. Krum believes that Google’s Mobile First Index, which has been online for over a year, is simply a huge dragnet for fraggles of all types.

Indeed, looking at how the major providers’ search results have developed over the past two years, the fragment theory makes sense. Both Google and Microsoft are continuously experimenting with new content presentation modes and formats, especially on mobile devices: everything from integrated map and rating displays on local search results, to comprehensive reports on people, places, and brands through Knowledge Graphs, to concrete answers to FAQs through Features Snippet.

Search engines: the universal assistants of the future

Moreover, search engines are adapting their results more and more precisely to users’ search intentions and usage contexts. This development is sure to continue through the dawning age of voice assistants. Virtually calling a computer-generated Google Assistant while at the hairdresser’s is just the first of many coming high points in terms of search engines differentiating themselves as ever-present, universal information and assistance systems.

Relevance and consumability are inextricably linked in systems like these. Whether on the phone, watching television, or driving, modern users have neither the desire nor the ability to look through a page of search hits for the answer they need—much less scroll through a website. The real advantage of the fraggle concept lies in the immediacy and flexibility of small fragments of information, delivered to countless combinations of usage situations and device preferences.

Fraggles highlight Google’s growing emphasis on the customer journey

Fraggles also fit seamlessly into Google’s new strategic alignment of search results to user journeys. To celebrate the 20-year anniversary of its search engine, Google announced its intention to stop viewing search activities as a series of individual queries, but rather to use context and history information to try and pinpoint the user’s exact intentions and position within the customer journey. This, combined with artificial intelligence, means that search results are now meant to be seen not as a results-based service, but as a conversation. Fragments can be incorporated into this scenario as well, whether as product information, concrete purchase offers, or special queries during the post-purchase phase.

What does this all mean for SEOs? First and foremost, it means they will need to continue developing their own approaches to voice and visual search queries. Markups for structured data and voice responses (Google Speakable) need to be part of their standard repertoire, as do keyword analyses organised by intentions along the customer journey.

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Stephan Kopp

The most relevant SEO News for October 2017

The issue of security doesn’t just motivate people when they’re casting their vote; it also motivates them on the internet. This is where the search engine giant Google is now exerting its market power. Also in SEO news – trends and new developments in the B2B sector and the Chinese market, the end of a long relationship, as well as a fresh look at a fundamental question: do I really need backlinks to be successful in SEO?

1) Google withdraws confidence in Symantec

Google has announced that it plans to withdraw confidence in Symantec’s security certificates and is going to remove them from its Chrome browser step-by-step. With a market share of around 40 per cent, Symantec is the largest issuer of security certificates, e.g. for verifying secure SSL connections. Google is criticising Symantec for alleged quality deficiencies and will gradually withdraw confidence in Symantec’s products from March 2018. Users of the popular Chrome browser will no longer be able to directly access websites with the affected certificates. Webmasters are now being asked to implement an alternative for Symantec certificates as fast as possible.

2) Great SEO potential in B2B

The US search engine has, for the first time, called on around 4,500 German politicians to fill in the contents of the information box to the right of the search results with their own ideas on the election program. The politicians are given a maximum of 500 characters to present their manifestos and appeal to their voters. Additionally, each politician can make three main points, each with a maximum of 140 characters. According to a statement from the company, the offer is optional and is primarily aimed at candidates who are not yet well known at an election level.

3) 2017: What’s new at the Chinese search engine Baidu

Baidu, the Chinese search market leader with around 77 per cent share, is copying the strategies of its American competition to a large extent. With their version of mobile-optimised websites, MIP (Mobile Instant Pages), the Chinese are backing the same horse as Google with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). The preferred presentation of secure HTTPS websites and the relatively new Progressive Web Apps (PWA) technology also underline the fact that Baidu wants to see itself as a technology leader. In addition to an algorithm update called “Hurricane”, which cracks down on illegally-used, protected content, Baidu has also introduced a new crawler that is better able to understand the layout and UX of the page examined. Here’s some practical SEO tips for the Chinese market – a website should not be larger than 128KB and, if possible, URLs should be shorter than 76 characters. You should therefore avoid using Chinese characters in the URL. In contrast to Google or Bing, you can de-index 404 pages using an XML file, and new domain endings, such as .TOP or .WIN are categorised as spam by Baidu.

4) Apple’s Siri now loves Google (not Bing any more)

People that search on their iPhone using Siri in the future will no longer be shown search results from Microsoft Bing when Apple’s voice assistant can’t provide a spoken answer. The group based in Cupertino in California explained its decision to change the iPhone search provider due to wanting to standardise search technologies between its iPhone (Siri) and Mac (Spotlight) platforms and in internal searches on iOS. Apple states that the displayed results will include website links and video. Since the market launch of the iPhone 4s in 2011, the Siri voice assistant has used Microsoft’s Bing search engine as standard.

5) Bing: Links are still an important ranking factor

In the beginning there was the link. The era of PageRanks started in 1997 with Google. PageRanks weights websites according to the number of links and the quality of its linking structure. For many years this meant that a good backlink was the gold standard in the SEO sector. Unfortunately, the optimisation industry is exploiting the potential for manipulation in this technology, meaning that search engines started to downgrade links as a ranking factor in 2012. They were replaced with metrics that are less open to manipulation, such as social signals, clickstream data or engagement data. This doesn’t mean that the age of backlinks is anywhere near over though. Microsoft has now confirmed that its Bing search engine is still not at the point where backlinks can be forgone as a ranking factor. Microsoft states that outbound links that add value from authoritative pages are essential.

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Stephan Kopp

The SEO News for August 2017

Search engines do not take a vacation. Therefore, we present just in time for the summer vacation the most important SEO News of the month July – with new competition for Amazon Alexa, positive news for Bing and, of course, exciting Google updates.

1. Google Mobile Search enables direct contact with potential customers

After the first tests in November of last year, Google in the USA has now officially launched the function enabling users to contact companies directly from the search results on mobile terminals. After a local search (e.g. for a restaurant, hairdresser, etc.) you will be able to notify the store of your choice directly by Messaging App. For providers, the new function is activated quickly via the Google MyBusiness-Account. The communication is processed either through the Google-Messaging-App “Allo” onto Android devices or directly in the native Messaging-App onto iOS.

2. Videos on Google and YouTube: New study explains the differences in the ranking

Do I want to focus on Google or YouTube in the case of optimising my moving image content? A new study from the USA provides support with this decision. Using a comprehensive ranking analysis, this could show that the algorithms of both search engines differ significantly due to different user intentions and monetisation models. As a result, the content of the video is decisive: While informative content on traditional Google search, such as operating instructions, seminars, or reviews gain high visibility, on YouTube you can achieve high rankings with entertainment content and serial formats. Interesting reading for any SEO.

3. Bing expands market shares in Desktop Searches

For a successful search engine optimisation, it is important not to depend only on the market leader Google. To reach your target group, you need to closely observe the broad spectrum of general and specialised search systems. This, of course, includes Microsoft’s search engine Bing, which, by his own account, serves older and financially stronger target groups than its competitor Google. According to the latest figures from Comscore’s market researchers, Bing was able to expand its European market share in desktop searches to nine percent in the first two quarters of 2017, in Germany to twelve percent and in the United States even to 33 percent. Bing was driven by a stronger integration of the search engine into the current operating system Windows 10 and its Voice Search “Cortana”, Depending on the audience and target market, it is thus worthwhile keeping an eye on the company from Redmond.

4. Bing expands results display for brand searches

And once again Bing: In the past, it has been shown that even Google is not afraid to copy new features from Microsoft’s search engine. For example, in the case of the image search, Bing was able to profile itself with new display formats on the search results pages. Recently, in the United States, Bing offers during the search for brand names, in addition to the well-known site links, also direct entry points for “Popular Content” in the form of screen shots and images. Whether or not this feature provides added value for the user is questionable, it serves quite definitely an attention increase and thus a potentially higher click rate.

5. Competition for Google and Amazon: Samsung and Facebook are planning their smart speakers

Up to now, the market for the smart speaker has been controlled mainly by Amazon and Google, where the trade giant currently plays a dominant role with Echo and Alexa. Now Samsung and Facebook are also preparing to enter this market. Currently, Samsung is focusing on the development of language assistant Bixby and once more positions itself as a competitor to Google. Apparently, Facebook will launch a corresponding offer on the market in the first quarter of 2018.These developments underline the trend that SEO will increase significantly in complexity given the rapid (further) development of language searches and the more diverse region of terminal equipment.

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