Late last month Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, responded to a tweet confirming that the next update to Google's search algorithm should come out late this year. With only a little over a month left in 2015, the update should be coming out very soon. One significant feature of the algorithm is that it should be real time, meaning that changes to your site should be processed by the algorithm as soon as they happen. Obviously this will have some important implications. Search Engine Land has published some tips on preparing for this update. 1. Anchor Text Distribution "All of your links shouldn’t include exact-match anchor text. Vary your external links by brand, URL, long-tail keywords and non-descriptive keywords." 2. Sudden Spikes & Too Many Referring Pages "When you’re analyzing your backlinks at the highest level, you want to look for anything out of the ordinary, and that will usually show itself as sudden spikes in your line graphs." 3. Optimize Your Internal Links "Don't ignore the signals you’re giving Google with your internal links. These might not have a big impact on your rankings, but they do heavily influence how search engines crawl your site. Keep these things in mind to keep a clean internal link profile:
- Vary your anchor text with non-descriptive text, not just exact-match keywords.
- Link related pages together. Ask, “Would someone looking at Page A also be interested in Page B?”
- Try to maintain as much of a hierarchy as possible.
- Match your consumer-facing links to your canonicals and what’s in your XML sitemap."
You can check out the full article for more details at Search Engine Land. Contact Louisville Web Group if you want some SEO work done to help boost your page's rankings!
