Bharati Ahuja

Top Contributor Program By Google

The Top Contributor Program is a group of Google product enthusiasts who earned the distinction of Top Contributor or Rising Star by sharing their knowledge in Google Help Forums and Help on Social.

Google says last year, Top Contributors helped more than 55 million people with 30 different Google products, answering questions and providing tips. The super users in the Top Contributor program come from 60+ different countries. Google asked a few Top Contributors to share a bit about themselves and they shared as follows:

Jo says: As a writer, editor, and all-around book enthusiast, I spend a lot of time using word-processing programs. I first discovered Google Docs when I saw a Chromebook ad on TV. I was intrigued by the idea of working in the cloud and not needing an external hard drive to backup my work.

Kojo says: I grew up in a small town in the central region of Ghana, the oldest of five children—which meant I learned how to work hard. Being the oldest meant I had to set a positive example for my siblings and cousins. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry with honors from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, where I’m now a teaching and research assistant.

If you enjoy helping others and want to get involved with the Top Contributor Program start participating in a Google Product Forum or on social media, and let Google know you’re interested. Once you’re helping people on a regular basis, you may be invited to become a Rising Star, the first level in the Top Contributor program.

What Top Contributors gain when they use their Google product knowledge to help others:

Google - 05/26/2016

Google Search Console Allows You To Group Or Combine Sites Together Via Property Sets

Google adds another feather to the Search Console cap.

Google introduces the concept of "property sets," which let you combine multiple properties (both apps and sites) into a single group to monitor the overall clicks and impressions in search within a single report.

To get started You Need To:

Create a property set
Add the properties you're interested in
The data will start being collected within a few days

URLs of the included properties in the property set will be included as a single presence in Search Analytics feature of the Search Console and you will be able to get collected/grouped data.

This feature will work for any kind of property in Search Console. You can use it to gain an overview of:

International websites
Mixed HTTP / HTTPS sites
Different departments or brands that run separate websites
Monitor the Search Analytics of all your apps together

This will be rolled out in the next few days.

If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas, you can go to the webmaster help forum, or read the help documentation for this new feature

Google / News / SEO - 05/24/2016

Google Announces “Rich Cards” For Recipes And Movies For Mobile SERPs (An Upgrade On Rich Snippets)

Yesterday, Google announced a new search result format “Rich Cards”which use schema.org structured mark up, just like the Rich Snippets format.

The focus is to provide a more rewarding experience to the mobile user.

Google has started showing Rich Cards only for 2 categories, i.e Recipes and Movies and the Rich Cards as of now will show only on mobile SERPs in English on Google.com .

Google has updated their developer site with more documentation and examples to help you learn this new format.

They have also revamped Structured Data Testing Tool of how the rich card might appear in Search (currently available for recipes and movies).

Plus they added a rich cards report in the Google Search Console. It has indexing rates and error reporting to help you implement them.

Currently this is t an experimental stage but Google seems to be having promising future plans in taking this ahead . Google will have a Search and the mobile content ecosystem session at Google I/O (where Rich Cards will be discussed and which will be live streamed!).

Google / News / SEO - 05/18/2016

What Is AMP? All About Accelerated Mobile Pages By Google

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open source initiative by Google launched in October 2015.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are lightweight pages designed to load quickly on mobile devices. AMP-compliant pages use a subset of HTML with a few extensions.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), is a very accessible framework for creating fast-loading mobile web pages.

The AMP project aims at improving the performance of the mobile web. Further, the intent is that the webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics should work alongside smart ads, and load instantaneously.

Google also wants the AMP code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device the mobile user is using.

The mobile users have increased phenomenally in number in the recent times. Hence, Users now consume content wherever they find it and the experience of reading on the mobile may not be always a good one. Every time the webpage loads slowly on the smartphones that website/blog may lose a reader. This adversely affects the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions also for Google (Adwords) as well as the user (Adsense).

The first group of technology partners planning to integrate AMP HTML pages are :

About The Technical Aspect of AMP:

AMP in action consists of three different parts:

AMP HTML
AMP JS
Google AMP cache

AMP HTML

AMP HTML is a subset of HTML for authoring content pages such as news articles which helps improve UX by reducing the page load time.

Though most tags in an AMP HTML page are regular HTML tags, some HTML tags are replaced with AMP-specific tags. (as listed on https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-html-format.md#html-tags)

Tag	Status in AMP HTML
script	Prohibited unless the type is application/ld+json. (Other non-executable values may be added as needed.) Exception is the mandatory script tag to load the AMP runtime and the script tags to load extended components.
base	Prohibited
img	Replaced with amp-img.
video	Replaced with amp-video.
audio	Replaced with amp-audio.
iframe	Replaced with amp-iframe.
frame	Prohibited.
frameset	Prohibited.
object	Prohibited.
param	Prohibited.
applet	Prohibited.
embed	Prohibited.
form	Prohibited. Support coming in the future.
input elements	Prohibited. Includes input, textarea, select, option. Notably, the buttonelement is allowed.
button	Allowed.
style	Required style tags fo adjusting opacity. One additional style tag is allowed in head tag for the purpose of custom styling. This style tag must have the attribute amp-custom.
link	rel values registered on microformats.org are allowed. stylesheet and other values likepreconnect, prerender and prefetch that have side effects in the browser are disallowed. There is a special case for fetching stylesheets from whitelisted font providers.
meta	The http-equiv attribute is banned. Otherwise allowed.
a	The href attribute value must not begin with javascript:. If set, the targetattribute value must be _blank. Otherwise allowed.
svg	Most SVG elements are allowed.

HTML tags can be used unchanged in AMP HTML. Certain tags have equivalent custom tags (such as <img> and <amp-img>) and other tags are outright prohibited:

AMP JS

To avoid the delay in page rendering AMP manages resource handling and asynchronous loading but third-party JavaScript is kept out of the critical path.

Detailed info on : https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/technical_overview.html#allow-only-asynchronous-scripts

Google AMP Cache

The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents. It fetches AMP HTML pages, caches them, and improves page performance automatically.

The AMP HTML Code:

AMP Code Validation:

You can test the HTML AMP page as per the instructions on:

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/validate.html

AMP And Search Presence:

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) went live in mobile search results in February 2016. Due to certain limitations and being still at the initial stage currently AMP is more relevant for Content Sites and not for ecommerce sites.

Page load time and speed are ranking factors and user experience has always been the pivotal factor. AMP pages hopefully, should get rewarded by Google on search results like the mobile-friendly pages.

AMP reports are added to Google Search Console and Google also displays AMP as top stories in carousel for mobile SERPs.

AMP In Mobile SERPs

AMP Report In Search Console

The SEO Nuance:

If you have both AMP and non-AMP versions of your pages, include the following links:

On any non-AMP page, reference the AMP version of the page to let Google and other platforms know about it:
- <link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/amp-version.html" />
On the AMP page, add the following text to reference its non-AMP canonical version:
- <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/regular-html-version.html" />
For standalone AMP pages (those that don't have a non-AMP version) the AMP page should specify itself as the canonical version:
- <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/amp-document.html" />

Some Pros and Cons of the AMP Project:

Pros:

AMP is open source.
Page load time and speed being a ranking factor, it may have a SEO advantage.
AMP articles appear in the carousel spot in mobile SERPs.
Increase in readership due to UX.
There is a WordPress plugin for AMP. https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/
You can implement analytics to measure activity on AMP document. (https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/extended/amp-analytics.html)
Google had added the AMP Report in Search Console too.

Cons:

You cannot have forms for AMP Content.
AMP cannot be enabled for non-publisher sites and ecommerce sites.
Third-party JavaScript cannot be used.
Only WordPress plugin available but other CMS plugins are yet to go live hence implanting AMP can be complicated if you are not a developer and do not use WordPress.

The Future Goal :

The main goal of the AMP project in the coming future is to build more features and functionality focused on:

Content
Distribution
Advertising

Google says:

Webpages built with AMP load on an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than equivalent non-AMP pages. In many cases, they’ll load instantly. It’s how reading on the mobile web should be—fast, responsive and fun.

AMP Project - A Win-Win Project by Google, for Google And Users

With the mobile web expanding exponentially, the mobile ad blocking also showing an increasing trend. Users do not want to have degraded data experience due to page-load speed issues or low quality ads.

The AMP initiative by Google is surely a win-win one as it not only has a focus on improving the user experience but also helps in safe guarding Google’s interest of displaying ads. seamlessly.

I think its major impact will be felt when AMP will be extended to ecommerce sites as well because the 2015 total retail sales reveal that eCommerce sales continue to grow at a rapid pace, growing 14.6 percent year over year in 2015 to a grand total of $341.7 billion.

forecast-mobile-ecommerce

A BI Intelligence report states that by 2020, mobile commerce will make up 45 percent of total e-commerce, equaling $284 billion in sales. That’s more than three times what’s expected for 2016: BI Intelligence predicts mobile commerce will hit 20.6 percent of overall e-commerce, or $79 billion.

Following are the retailers (from 1 to 10), total digital unique monthly visitors (in millions) in January 2015, and the percentage of total visitors that only shop the retailers on smartphones and/or tablets, according to comScore:

The impact of mobile is huge. Ask these 2 questions to yourself.

Is your site mobile-friendly?
Have you enabled AMP for your publisher site?

If your answer to the above two questions is "NO" then we would love to help you.

Related Posts:

Google / SEO - 05/15/2016

What Is Gboard By Google?

Gboard is a new app for your iPhone that lets you search and send information, GIFs, emojis and more, right from your keyboard.

With Gboard, you can search right from your keyboard. Anything you’d search on Google, you can search with Gboard. Results appear as cards with the key information front and center, such as the phone number, ratings and hours. With one tap, you can send it to your friend and you keep the conversation going.

See how it works in the video below:

It is available at App Store in English in the U.S., with more languages to come.Gboard

Gboard

Google / News - 05/13/2016

Google Search Console And Google Analytics Get More Deeply Integrated

Google announced yesterday that they have introduced the ability to display Search Console metrics alongside Google Analytics metrics in the same reports, side by side – which gives a full view of how your site shows up and performs in organic search results.

Google analytics and Search Console are the 2 Google properties which no search marketer can ignore. We have been able to link Search Console and Google Analytics since many years but this update will give a fuller picture of the website’s performs for organic search.

You may not see this immediately, as this update will be rolled out over in the coming weeks. There will be a new section 'Search Console' under Acquisition which will display the integrated data.

To view the combined data of Search Console and Google Analytics it is important that both the properties are linked. The instructions about how to link Search Console and Google Analytics can be read on: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1308621

A detailed view of the data is as below:

This data can be helpful for:

Find landing pages that are attracting many users through Google organic search (e.g., high impressions and high click through rate) but where users are not engaging with the website. In this case, you should consider improving your landing pages.
Find landing pages that have high site engagement but are not successfully attracting users from Google organic search (e.g., have low click through rate). In this case, you might benefit fromimproving titles and descriptions shown in search.
Learn which queries are ranking well for each organic landing page.
Segment organic performance by device category (desktop, tablet, mobile) in the new Devices report.

This will surely help SEOs to do quality analysis and move on from doing only the quantity analysis. This data of acquisitions, behaviour and conversions can also help us determine and plan targeted content .

Detailed post on, "How to determine the topics for the next editorial calendar after the search query analysis" can be read on http://www.webpro.in/how-types-of-search-queries-can-help-you-determine-the-content-for-the-company-blog-or-website/

Google / News - 05/13/2016

Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, John Mueller Confirms Rolling Out Of An Update To Mobile Search Results

Today, John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) confirmed and tweeted:

FYI The mobile changes mentioned here are now fully rolled out. https://t.co/fTB3ia6LJ2

— John Mueller (@JohnMu) May 12, 2016

Last year, Google started using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal on mobile searches. In March 2016 Google announced that beginning in May, Google will start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help the users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.

There are many resources shared by Google online to check and test the mobile-friendliness of a website are as follows:

If you want to find out if a page is mobile friendly then take the Mobile-Friendly Test
If you want to make a site mobile-friendly with a 3^rd party software then see Customize your website software for mobile users
If you want to dive into technical details then Review the Getting Started section on Web Fundamentals, our resource for web developers
you can use your Webmaster Tools account to get a full list of mobile usability issues across your site using the Mobile Usability Report.
Read the Mobile SEO guide for an overview of
https://www.viagrasansordonnancefr.com/acheter-sildenafil-100mg-lowest-price/

the implementation process

Some Other Google Resources answering the following questions:

Google / News - 05/12/2016

July 13th 2016 Onwards Google Will Ban Payday Loans Ads.

Google announced yesterday that starting July 13^th 2016, they will be putting a ban on payday loan ads. and ads related to some other related products.

Google says:

We will no longer allow ads for loans where repayment is due within 60 days of the date of issue. In the U.S., we are also banning ads for loans with an APR of 36% or higher. When reviewing our policies, research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that.

According to Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, "This new policy addresses many of the longstanding concerns shared by the entire civil rights community about predatory payday lending. These companies have long used slick advertising and aggressive marketing to trap consumers into outrageously high interest loans - often those least able to afford it."

The purpose of the ban is to protect the users from the deceptive financial products. Google clearly mentions that the ban will not affect companies offering loans such as:

Mortgages
Car Loans
Student Loans
Commercial loans
Revolving Lines of Credit (e.g. Credit Cards).

Some Other Related Posts By Google:

Google / News - 05/12/2016

The SEO Industry In 2016 Shows A Promising Growth, Quantitatively And Qualitatively

The latest article on http://searchengineland.com/seo-industry-worth-65-billion-will-ever-stop-growing-248559 surely paints a positive picture and an assured growth path for the SEO Industry and I surely cannot agree more about its optimistic future.

Call it by any name inbound marketing or by any other name organic search presence is here to stay as long as there are quality search engines on the world wide web. The main reason being that organic search presence results are considered to be more trust worthy than the paid results by the user.

As the image below indicates that most of the targeted traffic usually comes from the search engines.

The 4 factors mentioned against the growth of the SEO industry in the above mentioned article are also a blessing or a boon in disguise.

As I am a die hard optimist, especially when it comes to the growth of the search industry, I list my views regarding these 4 factors as follows:

Jayson Demers writes:

Factors against unlimited growth
And now, some of the reasons why SEO may face an eventual halt or decline:

Competition and prohibitive costs. SEO spend rising means that more businesses are getting involved in SEO. That means more competition to deal with. For a while, this will be fine, but eventually the cost of entry will become prohibitive, and there will be a “tipping point” where the rise in spending tapers off.

My View:

The competition will surely increase and there can be an initial turbulence but, as SEO is an art and science that cannot be mastered in a day or for that matter by attending any training sessions alone, the experienced SEOs will surely be preferred. The experienced lot or the SEO companies who have seen the rise of this industry will surely demand their price contributing to the reputation of the SEO industry. There will be a stark demarcation of experienced SEOs who may charge a higher fee and the new entrants who may charge comparatively very low. But, sooner or later the website owners will see through this and the willingness to pay a higher amount will also increase. Search presence is a valuable digital asset for any company and the new entrants may not have the expertise of experienced SEOs and the price you pay by getting your site penalised by search engines is surely something no website owner will be willing to pay.

Jayson Demers writes:

The Knowledge Graph and visibility decline. Thanks to the Knowledge Graph (and similar future technological developments), users are being given more immediate forms of answers, reducing their reliance on individual site visitations to find what they’re looking for. This could eventually start compromising the ROI of SEO, pushing people out of the game.

My View:

Instead of pushing people out of the game, the Knowledge Graph and other forms in search results is making SEOs focus more on quality metrics like search queries, landing pages location, time on site, new sessions, pages per session, bounce rate, etc. rather than only rankings as an ROI. As knowledge graph is earned as a result of quality web presence and popularity, SEO will be considered as a true platform for earned media and this will carve a niche for SEO services where website owners will ultimately develop the mindset of earning the search presence patiently over a period of time rather that ask for quick results. And believe me we are heading towards it.

Jayson Demers writes:

Alternative search modes. Search is starting to evolve in some weird forms, including personal digital assistants, which marry online and device-specific search. These alternative modes of search are harder to predict and harder to “rank” for, since oftentimes they forgo a “ranking” process entirely.

My View :

As mentioned , it is still evolving and at a very initial stage. Moreover, this will take some time to emerge on the global scene.

Jayson Demers writes:

RankBrain and decreasing rank predictability. Machine learning is already huge, and it’s only getting bigger. Technologies like RankBrain are starting to upgrade search systems in real time, with processes only AI programs can incorporate. That’s going to make it harder and harder to accurately assess ranking factors and respond accordingly.

My View:

The semantic web will be the future if RankBrain gets implemented extensively. This will not only increase the quality of the search results but also reduce the focus on the keyword rich content. This will shift the focus to more meaningful and correlated content related to the topic. Moreover, SEOs will have to work on adding content using schemas which presents content in form of a dataset rather than only text using simple HTML tags.This adds value to the SEO work, making the SEO work more technical. When you add value to your work, you can demand the price too.The current manipulation of meta tags and other on-page factors resulting to spam will surely show a decline. Hence, this will be a plus point for genuine SEOs rather than the other way round.

RankBrain the machine-learning artificial intelligence system is a software which is integrated into the algorithm to mathematically connect words and phrases. As Semantics add extra information to help the search engine with the meaning of the information, websites using Schemas will be able to get more correlated to the contextual content.

I am sure SEOs who have seen the industry grow since 2000 will agree to what Gabby Williams has to say :

"We make it look easy on the court... because we practice until we cannot get it wrong anymore."

SEO - 05/10/2016

Some Web Spam Insights Google Gathered and How Google Fought Spam In 2015

Google yesterday published a post on how they fought spam on the webmaster blog. Google mentioned, we fight spam through a combination of algorithms and manual reviews to ensure that sites don’t rise in search results through deceptive or manipulative behavior, especially because those sites could harm or mislead users.

Some important web spam insights Google gathered in 2015:

Huge no. of websites being hacked. 180% increase compared to the previous year.
Increase in the no. of websites having thin or low quality content.

Actions taken by Google:

One of the algorithmic updates helped to remove the amount of hacked spam in search results.
Google sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters to notify them of manual actions they took on their site and to help them identify the issues.
There was a 33% increase in the number of sites that went through spam clean-up efforts towards a successful reconsideration process.
Users submitted more than 4,00,000 spam reports to Google. Google acted on 65% of them, and considered 80% of those acted upon to be spam.
Google conducted more than 200 online office hours and live events around the world in 17 languages.
Webmasters had tens of thousands of questions answered, including over 35,000 by users designated as Webmaster Top Contributors. webmaster help forum continued to be an excellent source of webmaster support.
Google believes, fighting web spam is one of the many ways they can maintain search quality at Google and Google thanked all those who submitted reports and contributed towards a cleaner web ecosystem!