As far as digital marketing is concerned, 2016 can righteously be called the year of changes. So far this year, Google has introduced loads of updates that improve both the user experience of the search engines and the authority of the websites. But these changes were not that much easy to deal with. Marketers had to modify their methods after each update in order to hold positions of their respective websites. Here’s a brief discussion on the updates of Google occurred in 2016 and how they altered the digital world.
The update enables users to have control over the rich information visible by the side of the search results.
The Impact
There are several instances that the information of a company gets changed but as the owner is not able to update the change on the knowledge graph, the users don’t get the right information. Now, the chances of miscommunication are minimized as the users will get only the official information.
The accelerated mobiles pages have been introduced by Google with the intention to track contents fast on mobile devices. It’s meant for improving the web surfing experience on mobile phones. It uses a lighter version of HTML that adds a faster loading time. Tests have shown that AMP HTML pages load 15 to 85% quicker than non-AMP pages.
The Impact
Accelerated Mobile Pages certainly have a lot of impact on digital marketing. The faster loading contents on your website are quite impressive, ending with less frustrated users and more page views that will enhance a website’s position in the SERPs. Besides, it helps to build a bond between the buyer and the seller.
Rich Cards are the new version of Rich Snippets with the carousel effect to give a better mobile experience. For now, the update is meant for movies and recipes but Google has plans to expand its reach in near future. It also comes with the tracking and performance metrics within Google Search Console.
The Impact
With Rich Cards, you get a Rich Results filter in Search Analytics to let you know how your Rich Cards and Rich Snippets are working. You are also able to dig deeper and have a look at the impressions and clicks. The launch of the update doesn’t mean that you have to remove the existing rich snippets markup. You can also keep it if you wish.
Possum is one of the biggest updates in local search results. The main purpose of the update was to diversify the local results and restrict web spamming as well. It brings an improved Google filter to ensure that the local search results are separate from the organic results. In one word, Possum brings positive results for local businesses by delivering more accurate results.
The Impact
In earlier days, a perfectly optimized local business can even appear in the regions other than the exact location where the users are searching from. But after Possum, it wouldn’t be that much easy as according to the update, the farther the distance, the lower the rank. Thus, there’s a lot of chance to appear on top of the local search even when your business is not much optimized, as the businesses in other locations will not be in the competition.
Like previous versions, Penguin 4.0 update is meant for penalizing the websites that use various black-hat techniques to influence the search engines. But the method of penalizing has been changed. It’s no more a separate filter. It’s been included in Google’s core algorithm and upgraded to a real-time data that recrawls and reindexes a penalized web page as soon as it is changed as per the guidelines. It has also become very specific. It deranks the particular offending pages, not the entire website. Moreover, it can leave an impact on domains, folders, pages and even keywords and keyword groups.
The Impact
Your site getting penalized by penguin 4.0 doesn’t mean that it will be completely removed from the search engine result pages. It may also cause a rank drop if there’s a question about low-authority backlinks, leading you to check the positions of your keywords regularly and remove the spammy links. The update also demands backlink audits for each subdomain and subdivision. A useful way to get rid of the update is to add your website to Google Search Console that can help you disavow files if required.
The content keywords report, one of the oldest features of Google Search Console has been removed recently. In earlier days, it was the only way to see the findings of Googlebot after crawling.
The Impact
The primary aim of removing the feature from Google Search Console is to prevent taking steps out of confusion. The feature was mainly used to view the phrases and keywords that the robots have found from a website. But now there are the options like Search Analytics and Fetch that can easily give the same information. Therefore, removing the feature will certainly minimize the probability of confusions.
Another recent update from Google is the drop of crawling the web as a feature phone and removal of crawl error reports from Google Search Console. As there’s a limited number of websites providing contents that are compatible to feature phones, Google decided to come up with the change. If your website supports feature phones, you need to use handheld link annotations to have a dynamic serve of feature phone content.
This is how the code looks like:
The Impact
As Google is no longer crawling the web as feature phone, there are no more crawl error reports. It means that there’ll be minimum confusion for the users. Most importantly, there’s no need of a special form of markup or transcoder, generally used for feature phones.
Today, we have a vigorous digital world that’s gradually stepping towards the betterment of search methods. If you are in the digital field, this is the time to prepare yourself for the better opportunities in near future.
Therefore, no more waiting for the new year to bring resolutions for you. Start from today. Someday you might get the top position.