Here are some key points brought up during the keynote at SMX by Google’s Gary Illyes: Authorship Google has completely stopped usage and display of authorship data. Although it has been a long time since the announcement, it has taken till now for it to be completely removed from the index. RankBrain He also said that you cannot optimize for RankBrain. He confirmed that it is a ranking factor, but one that does not have a score or a numerical figure associated with it. This ties in with the assumption that it is mostly used to optimize queries. Panda The panda update is continuous and slow. It can take months for the score assigned to each site by Panda to make it into the actual index and affect search results. Penguin Google is working on another penguin update but at this point there is no definite timeline on when its release can be expected. Mobile index He also talked about the mobile index that Google is still working on. It is meant to be a separate index only for mobile queries. At present both mobile and desktop searches are served by the same index. HTTPS One of the most interesting statistics to come out of this was that HTTPS within the Google index has now hit 34%. This is a huge jump from the single digits in the last few years. He recommends moving to HTTPS as quickly as...
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The accelerated mobile pages (AMP for short) standard by Google appears to be gaining traction with publishers. The standard, is meant to make pages smaller and reduce loading times. It achieves this in two ways. Firstly by narrowing down the technologies used and secondly by serving the pages from Google’s own servers. Here is a bit more detail from Wired: “To use AMP, you create an alternate version of your site that conforms to the specifications published by the AMP project. These standards are a lot like traditional HTML, but pared down to what Google considers to be the bare minimum. Typically you’ll give your AMP-optimized site a separate address, for example: yoursite.com/yourpage/amp. If you use WordPress, there’s actually a plugin will automatically create these alternate versions and help Google find them. But you could, theoretically, just replace your whole site with AMP optimized pages and it would still work in most modern web browsers, though it might be a bit drab.” Now it appears that more and more publishers are adopting the standard to serve on mobile devices. At Google IO 2016, Richard Gingras announced Google has indexed AMP pages on over 125 million documents from more than 640,000 domains across the web. In addition they also announced that updates to the Google Search app on both iOS and Android will now show AMP pages in the results. Recipes and other verticals will also start showing AMP pages by default wherever they...
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