Google, the search giant, has recently declared a new ranking algorithm that can judge web pages based on how users judge their experience when interacting with a web page.

The search giant has created a new set of metrics called Core Web Values that measures Google user experience with web pages. If the metrics find that users have a poor experience, Google may not rank those pages as highly as it does now.

The algorithm update is called the Google Page Experience, which is likely to go live in 2021.

What is Page Experience?

Google has briefly stated the metrics that dictate the page experience criteria. The essence is to understand how a user will perceive his experience with a particular web page. The consideration factors are: does the page load quickly? Is it mobile friendly? If intrusive ads are present? Whether it runs on HTTPS? And whether content jumps around during page loading?

You can also regard the page experience as composed of some of the existing Google ranking factors, such as the mobile-friendly update, Page Speed Update, the HTTPS ranking boost, and the intrusive interstitials and safe browsing penalties.

These are refinements around usability and speed. And Google calls these refinements as Core Web Vitals.

Know More about Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals comprise user-centered metrics that assign scores on different aspects of web pages, like load time, interactivity, and content stability during load time.

Although good user experience comprises of many aspects, yet Google has chosen three essential elements that every website must have:

Loading Experience: With the metric “Largest Contentful Paint” (LCP), Google measures the user’s perceived load speed. LCP indicates the specific point at which the entire main content of the page is loaded.

Interactivity: The metric “First Input Delay” (FID) measures users’ flexibility in interacting with the page. FID measures the degree of responsiveness of the page. It is one of the most calculable measures of how the user feels while performing actions on the page and navigating.

Visual Stability: “Cumulative Layout Shift” (CLS) is a metric that Google uses to measure the page layout’s Stability. And that means by what amount the layout changes unexpectedly for the user.

When to Prepare for the Update?

The good thing is that you need not hurry as there is ample time. Google said that the update would go live sometime in 2021. And Google also said that it would give a six-month notice before making the update live.

You might wonder why the search giant is giving you so much time. It is not only because Google usually gives some time to prepare for its updates but also due to the unstable business environment due to the COVID19 pandemic.

So, in the meantime, you can go through the new Core Web Vitals report, which Google has released.

Takeaways from the Expected Google Update Information

 – Content is Still King

Great content will continue to rule for Google’s website rating. The search giant has said that web pages with great content will rank high in Google search even if the page experience lacks.

In the context of a website’s ranking in Google, the search giant said it would rank pages with great and relevant content higher even if some aspects of page experience are below par.

 – Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Although you no longer need AMP for inclusion in the Top Stories section in the mobile Google search results, you can include it in the Google mobile search results if you have AMP pages.

You need to know that your AMP pages will compete with other pages for the Top Stories section in Google. And the majority of AMP pages result in good page experience. However, there is no guarantee that all AMP pages will entail good page experience, but it will prove effective.

 – Importance of Page Experience Relative to Other Ranking Factors

If you consider what Google says, then quality and relevant content remain the mainstay of the future SEO trends.

Google said that it prioritizes pages with the best overall content even if some aspects of page experience are below par. As such, you can regard high quality, and relevant content is more important than page experience.

But what does it mean to you? It means the page experience metrics will play a decisive role in ranking your pages. Say, your page and that of your competitor have similar content quality, but your page has better page experience metrics, then your page will appear high in Google search results.

How to Optimize for Page Experience?

It is no secret that Google will be putting the new page experience ranking factor into action in 2021, so it will not be wrong to say that there is plenty of time ahead of you.

Yet, it is also not a bad idea to start the preparation to be fully equipped to handle the update as soon as it is launched.

The workflow for page experience optimization, according to Google:

• Find out the groups of pages that call for attention by opening up the Core Web Vitals reports in Google search console. It will help if you firstly focus on the URLs in the “poor” category first, then the “needs improvement” category
• Share the report with your engineering team or continue with more diagnostics
• Once you finish identifying the pages that call for the most attention, diagnose the specific issues by running those pages through Page Speed Insights to contribute to low Core Web Vitals metrics that you need to address.
• Use a Lighthouse audit to run the pages or utilize the Web Vitals Chrome extension for more impactful guidance on what you still need to fix.

Google also dictates the page experience best practices, which are as follows:

• Confining the size of each to less than 500KB (page + all resources)
• Maintain the total number of resources per page to less than 50 (ideal for mobile)
• Implement AMP as that can fix any page loading issues on both mobile and desktop

Conclusion

It is needless to say that if you fail to make your website appear higher in search engine results, then you might eventually be out of business. As such, it makes sense for you to keep updated with the latest SEO trends and prepare for the implementation of Google’s latest algorithms.

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As per the recent statement furnished by Google’s Gary Illyes at SMX Advanced, the search engine giant is planning to unveil new Panda update in upcoming weeks. As per his statement, the digital marketers could expect the latest update to be launched in next three to four weeks. However, hold on your level of patience if you are thinking that this update will be an algorithmic one because Illyes has said that this will be only a data refresh.

It is good news for those websites that have suffered a significant drop in their rankings due to the previous Panda update as this data refresh is expected to help those sites recover from their lost rankings in the near future. But if you think that this refresh will help all suffered websites to recover, then it is not true. Some of the websites will definitely recover, however some of the new sites may be hit by this new data refresh.

So, if you have recently stepped in the world of World Wide Web through your website, then pack your bags and get ready to face the consequences of this upcoming Google’s Panda update that might either bring loads of goodies for your site or you might be left with a crashed ranking.

Illyes has further explained that the upcoming data refresh will be done as per the Google’s best interest and they will keep this refresh updated on frequent basis. However, presently this data refresh will require manual update and it will not be updated by itself like its previous algorithmic updates.

For the time being, just hold on your breath for now and keep a watch on our news section to get updated with more information about this impending Panda update, which is expected to land on floors within few weeks.

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Moreover, websites such as WikiHow, eHow, Answers.com, are other major informational sites that have faced major drop in their traffic in the past couple of weeks. Previously, when Hubpages’ traffic was affected by this update, Google refused to give any detail related with this update, but now Glen Gabe, an expert search engine analyst and digital marketing professional has coined the term “Phantom” for this update as it is the second major algorithm update of Google in the past two years.

With his proper understanding and effective data analyzing techniques, Gabe becomes determined that this update has no relation with Penguin or Panda update as this update was a ruthless approach by Google affecting the complete domains for a few occurrences of content. Although Google has not commented on this update officially, but recently at SMX Sydney last week, a spokesperson from Google Webmaster Trends team, Gary IIynes confessed about the latest change in the core algorithm update.

With the notorious combination of Google’s Knowledge Graph that lessens traffic from websites for “how to” searched and Google’s Phantom update impacting the websites, it will definitely become more challenging for the content publishers to write and publish their content. Do you have an information website and you have also noticed some changes in your website’s traffic from this month? If so, you can analyze the types of content that are affected by this latest update and review the content to minimize the impact on the overall traffic of your website.

The post Phantom Update Rolls Out Targeting “How To Style Content” appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Google has finally unleashed its New Search Analytics Reports as an integral feature of Google Analytics. Launched with the motive of offering proper comparison between mobile and desktop traffic, the New Search Analytics Reports allows the users to make most from their traffic analysis data.

This report will finally replace the Search Queries report from the Google Analytics because it is fitted with additional benefits such as offering more filtering and data options. Google was already working on this report since a long time by performing an alpha test to webmasters in January this year and after getting approval from webmasters in the month of February, Google has finally rolled it out in the first week of May.

Apart from offering awesome data filtering options, this new report is blessed with range of awesome features, out which I have listed the two most liked ones, Mobilegeddon and Search Type Filter.

• Mobilegeddon: Using this feature, you can check how many visitors have reached your website searching for a particular keyword and you can easily compare between the desktop and mobile traffic.
• Search Type Filter: This feature allows you to check for clicks from Video Search that can’t be calculated by other ways.

According to Google, this new report will help you to divide your website’s search data and filter in varied ways to analyze it more accurately. Moreover, if you have a website serving different locations globally, you can check out the countries where your products or services are searched most popularly. The major difference between the new Search Analytics report and Search Queries report is the calculation of data, which will be explained more clearly in this new report.

So, test this new report to find out of its features will be frequently used by you for analyzing the traffic information of your website. So, start exploring this new report of Google Analytics right away. If you have any queries, please share with us below.

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According to the post of Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.org, WordPress 4.2 version, also known as “Powell” as a tribute to popular jazz pianist Bud Powell has finally come up a long way to enter into the competitive era of website development. Available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard, this latest version of WordPress is bundled with amazing features that helps the users to communicate and share easily across the globe.

If you are not sure whether to upgrade to this latest version or not, here I am going to list down some incredible features that you will get with it.

Share Easily with “Press This”

Yes you have read it right! This update has introduced some enhancements to the “Press This” browser bookmarklet that makes it simple and quicker for you to share the content to your WordPress site via other sources.

Added Language Support

This is another benefit of this new update that offers you support for new characters such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean along with mathematical and musical symbols and heiroglyps.

Enjoy New Emojis

If you don’t use any characters, you can still enjoy with the new range of Emojis that comes bundled with this latest version. SO, make your content even more attractive and creative with the exclusive collection of emojis.

More Embeds

You can paste links from Kickstarter and Tumblr.com to view them wonderfully appear in your editor. It means with every release of WordPress, your editing and publishing experience will become more joyful.

Goodbye to Boring Screen Load With More Streamlined Plugin Updates

The more streamlined and easy plugin updates brings the time to bid farewell to the boring screen load. You simply have to click on the “Update Now” button to visualize the magical changes.

Preview Fresh Themes

A feature that has been overdue since a long time has finally makes its way through the launch of the new WordPress 4.2 update. Now, you can preview fresh themes before making it live to the public. It means you can view the look of your new theme to check if it looks good with your content and can also make suitable changes, if required.

So, with so many features packed with this new version, you can give a try to update your current version or download this new version from your WordPress dashboard.

The post WordPress 4.2 “Powell” Hits the Floor with Bundle of New Features! appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Google has recently introduced a new Webmaster Tools feature called ‘Blocked Resource Report’. It aims at helping the webmasters to find and resolve issues where Googlebot cannot use blocked CSS, linked images, or JavaScript. Blocked resource prevents web pages from rendering correctly, and Google wants to ensure that you are only blocking what you really need/ want to be.

What is Blocked Resource Report?

The Blocked Resource Report provides the names of the hosts from which your website is using the blocked resources such as CSS, JavaScript, and linked images. By clicking on a row, you will get the list of blocked resources and pages that embed them. It helps you figure out and take care of these issues so that Google can better crawl and index the content present in your website.

Some resources will be hosted on your website, while others will be hosted on others. If you click on a host, you will get a count of web pages on your web site affected by each blocked resource. Furthermore; if you click on any blocked resource, you will get a list of web pages that load that resource. By clicking on any web page in table hosting a blocked resource, you will get directions for unblocking that particular resource.

Here is a design of the report:

For evaluating and reducing your list of blocked resources, you can follow below mentioned steps:

• First open the ‘Blocked Resources Report’ in order to find a list of hosts of blocked resources on your website. Now, start with hosts which you own, as you can directly update the robots.txt files, if required.
• After this click a host on this report so as to see a blocked resources list from that particular host. Now go through that list and start with those which may affect the layout in a meaningful way. There is no need to bother with less important resources (tracking pixels or counters).
• For each resource which affects layout, click to see page list that uses it. After this click on any page of list and follow the instructions of pop-up for viewing the difference and for updating the blocking robots.txt file. Now, fetch and render after each change in order to confirm that the resource is appearing.
• Continue updating resources for a host until you have enabled the access of Googlebot to all important blocked resources.
• Now move on to the hosts that you do not own. If the resources have a strong visual impact, you can contact the webmaster of these sites and ask them to unblock the resource to Googlebot. In addition to this, you can consider removing dependency of your page on that resource.

What is the new update in Fetch & Render Tool?

The fetch and render tool is especially designed to show how Google sees your web page. The update of Fetch and Render will show how the blocked resources matter. When you request a URL to be fetched and rendered, it will show screenshots rendered both as a typical user and as Googlebot, so that you get a better grasp on the problems.

This new feature is definitely beneficial for webmasters, as it make easier for them to spot and then unblock resources used by their website.

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The recent study conducted on Digital Marketing strategies of the companies by 2015 has revealed that companies are expected to enhance their digital marketing budget in 2015. This might be surprising but true since, marketers have learnt that investment for driving business advantage and revenue growth is important for better customer experience. And not only the companies will make their digital marketing budget healthy, but they will also focus on their overall business growth in the coming 12-18 months.

The study is based on “The Future of Digital Marketing” that is conducted through an online survey on 262 companies’ executives including both B2B and B2C. When the stats of these companies is evaluated, it is revealed that 40% of these companies will enhanced their digital marketing budget by 5% and 10%, while 32% claims to increase between 10% to 15%, and 9% companies plans to enhanced in between 0% to 5%.

While companies have decided to enhance their digital marketing budget for the year 2015, how this enhancement will impact the overall productivity of their organization.

How Increasing Budget Will Benefit Companies?

While increasing budget might put some pressure on the business from investment front, but it would definitely do good for enhancing their productivity because they finally will have the budget to hire great professionals from all across the world. When they will have significant number of good talents in their work pool, they will obviously get benefitted with their vast experiences and skills. However, the study has also revealed about the top hiring barriers that are hindering the businesses in hiring the real talents from the IT market and those barriers includes searching for the highly skilled talents (as reported by 65% companies), impressing the top talents (as reported by 21% of companies), cost involved in hiring quality staff (as reported by 30% of companies), culture fitness (as reported by 26% of companies), and maintaining the top talents ( as reported by 16% of companies).

This decision was taken in regard of the overall turnover of a company because companies often face this as a major issue of their business growth. According to the study, the average tenure of professionals in companies is in between 12 months to 18 months while the average tenure of CMO in companies is around 45 months. Owing to the growing demand, the professionals continue on switching their jobs for better pay and career growth. Now, when the companies have planned to extend their budget required for hiring and maintaining their talent pool, it becomes obvious that their talent pool will not face major turnover as increased budget will obviously motivate urge between them to stay in their current job and focus on their job responsibilities, which is necessary for the growth of both the employees and the organizations.

The study has further revealed the top skill sets that will be hired by the companies in 2015 and it includes social/digital (54%), content creation (44%), analytics/big data (33%), and mobile digital strategy (30%).

While the digital marketing professional are going to get more job opportunities in 2015, traditional marketing skills will be given low preferences since, only 24% marketers will be hired by companies for ingenious services and 22% marketers will be hired for brand/product knowledge.

The study also divulges that mobile will stood at top position acting as the key driving factor for better user engagement (as responded by 24% marketers), and it will see more enhancements in three to five years accounting for 70% of total user engagement over a website. Future also sees video as the important driver of customer engagement in future accounting from 13% at current to 61% in future, while social media will see an increase of 49% in the future when compared with the 38% at current.

Another major shift that is predicted in 2015 is more towards flexible workforce that includes shift from the permanent workforce type to contractual and freelance workforce type. At present, nearly 42% companies constitute permanent workforce, which is expected to drop to 23% in the upcoming 12 to 18 months. Meanwhile, the companies that consist of both contractual and permanent workforce type accounts for 1%, which is also expected to see an enhancement up to 30% in the 12 to 18 months.

Eventually, the increasing digital marketing budget will be profitable for both the branding purpose and for enhancing the customers’ experience as it will pave new way of strategizing the marketing policies to meet the customer demands. Also, the connected economy is all set to modify a company’s relationship with its target markets and customers and this economy will definitely create more opportunities for the businesses as well as the customers to gain benefits because this will offer relevancy to the customer’s demands as it will be governed by the actual consumption behavior.

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Recently the Google Webmaster team on Google+ asked their followers which mobile configuration strategy they use. 81% out of the 774 votes (at the time of this writing) responded with responsive web design. 4% said dynamic serving, 7% said separate mobile URLs, and only 8% said their site is not mobile friendly.

In a research post of Guy Podjarny, web performance researcher and evangelist at Akamai’s Web Experience business unit, some figures are presented. The chart shown below demonstrates the percentage of responsive websites amongst the top 100; 1,000 and 10,000 sites. The figure showed that just 18.7% of a list of 10,000 top-tier websites is responsive. When top 100 sites are analyzed, only 11.8% use responsive web design.

This study suggests the move to responsive websites is happening slowly on the top 100 websites as compared to the top 1,000 or top 10,000 websites, perhaps because big companies are more likely to have multiple stakeholders and more complex websites.

Although adoption in practice is not nearly as high as the unscientific survey of Google would suggest, responsive websites are growing quite quickly to the point where they are now catching up with the separate URLs as the dominant mobile website configuration method.

One question might be popping in your mind is why responsive websites are gaining popularity. There are various reasons that explain why incorporating the responsive website design is necessary. Some of these reasons are listed below:

• Better search engine optimization- the search engine giant, Google has clearly indicated that it prefers responsive web designs to the mobile templates. Further, using single URL with the responsive design makes it easy for the search engines to crawl and index the website.
• Reduced bounce rate due to better user experience- A responsive web design offers users various features when accessed on the mobile device that results in reduced bounce rate.
• A single SEO campaign for companies’ website- If any businesses don’t opt for the responsive web designs, they have two websites to manage. However, with the responsive website, the business needs to focus solely on the main site functioning.
• Easier long term maintenance- A responsive site much easier to maintain than the mobile versions of the main sites because the smart devices are updated at instant speed.

The Responsive Web Design adoption is growing rapidly. If you want to take your company to the way of success, you should also keep encouraging the use of RWD, but at the same time you have to double your efforts in building knowledge and tooling for making responsive websites fast.

The post Mobile Configuration Strategies for Responsive Web Design in 2015 appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

As confirmed by the Reuters reports, Facebook has chosen to end its long time bonding with Microsoft Bing by quietly dumping the search results from Bing in its recent search update this week. With this new update, now you won’t be able see the Microsoft Bing results on the Facebook’s on-site Graph product.

As per to the statement given by Facebook to the VentureBeat, the social media giant is currently not displaying the search results of web in the Facebook Search because it is concentrated towards assisting the Facebook’s users in finding the posts and images shared with them on its platform. However, this statement further also includes that that the social media giant will continue its long time bond with Microsoft in other areas.

While Facebook has been constantly involved in helping its users finding people and information of their interest, but since 2008, it has also started serving with web search results to its users in collaboration with Microsoft Live search until 2010, when it has integrated Microsoft Bing for giving the search result services.

In 2013 only, Facebook has highlighted Microsoft Bing as part of its Graph search,this step was taken to supplement Facebook’s search results with that information that might not be considered as part of user profiles like music result, weather, etc. With the end on this collaboration with its latest search update this week, Facebook seems to be gearing up for taking its next move by focusing on its own search tool because recently Facebook has updated its search tool to help the users find particular posts rather than searching for pages or users first.

While Microsoft might not be happy with the steps taken by Facebook on dumping its search engine, Bing, but the move is quite interesting and astonishing as well because it saves people from seeing lots of search results from the wider web than just seeing the results of Facebook particularly. It also means that from now onwards, Facebook users are unarguably going to have a better experience.

It’s too early to predict anything in advance, so it is better to wait and see if Facebook is getting geared to introduce some more advanced search features in its own tool. Hence, for the time being stay tuned with our latest and imminent updates about this ne search update of Facebook.

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Despite Google’s unofficial promise (made after rolling out “Florida” update back in November 2003) to not mess up with the ranking algorithm during the holiday season; the world’s biggest search engine is on a continuous spree to push fresh algorithmic updates – Penguin 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 & 3.4 one after another. As reported by searchengineland on 10^th Dec, 2014, a Google Spokesperson said in an open statement that Penguin is shifting to more continuous updates with the idea to keep optimizing its algorithm as they go now. More details of all these 4 Penguin updates are shared below.

Penguin 3.1

Considering it as a part of Penguin 3.0, Google released Penguin 3.0 update on November 27, 2014. Though Google has already confirmed this update, no cases of penalty have been reported so far.

Penguin 3.2, Penguin 3.3 and Penguin 3.4

All these updates are not yet confirmed by Google. While Penguin 3.2 rolled out on December 2, 2014, Penguin 3.3 was released on December 5, 2014 and Penguin 3.4 on December 6, 2014.

Amongst all these four continuous updates, Google has confirmed only Penguin 3.1 so far. However Google’s decision to not even spare the Holiday season has left many people wondering & many online businesses worried as their sole earnings are at the mercy of Google. From “Thanksgiving” onward, Google is on a continuous spree to violate its “no updates during the holiday season” rule despite claiming to avoid updates during holidays on multiple occasions (in 2011 and 2013). Attached below are the screenshots of two such tweets made by Matt Cutts and Google.

Two months back when Google unveiled Penguin 3.0 update after a complete one year gap in order to slam websites violating Google webmaster guidelines, many clients from US & UK who’ve been hit by the penalty consulted SEO experts to recover their online presence. While Google confirmed that Penguin 3.0 affected nearly 1% of the search queries worldwide, we’re yet to see the impact of Penguin 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 on search engine rankings.

A Piece of Advice to all SEO Folks & Website Owners

Though it’s too late for you to avoid penalty from this Penguin update, we still recommend SEO folks to run a health check-up on their clients websites for “bad links” and avoid any black hat SEO techniques to lift search engine rankings unethically. For all the website owners especially those who don’t believe in updating their sites according to latest Google algorithmic updates, it’s time you opt for ethical SEO consulting services from a digital agency where professionals strictly follow Google webmaster guidelines and keep track of all the changes made by Google.

We hope that websites who’ve still retained massive penalty from previous Penguin updates soon clean up their spam problems and lift their rankings on Google’s search result pages. Stay tuned on our news section for getting information on more Google updates. if you have any questions regarding the Penguin hit.

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