XML Sitemaps Or RSS Both For Optimal Crawling

In new "best practices" guide, Google says it's not an either/or question.

When it comes to telling search engines about the content on a website, webmasters might be wondering if they should submit sitemaps or just setup RSS or Atom feeds.

Google’s answer? Use both.

In a new blog post sharing advice on XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds, Google says it’s not an either/or question.

For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS/Atom feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index. Note that submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.

The post goes on to list a handful of best practices covering areas including URLs, last modification time, how often XML sitemaps should be updated and more

New Google Feature Would Offer

Users would have option to speak with a doctor when searching illness-related symptoms.

According to a report from Engadget.com, Google is trying out a new way to help users diagnose whatever ailments they may be suffering, or, at least, searching.

When searching for illness-related symptoms, users would see a “Talk with a doctor now” link within the Google search card.

Engadget said the link would provide a video chat, offered via Google’s Helpouts feature.

As noted in the image above, any costs associated with the video chat would be covered by Google during this new feature’s “limited trial,” although, users may incur a cost should the doctor video chats move out of beta.

Pigeon Rolled Back

Local search marketers have been concerned about the impact of Google's Pigeon update on small businesses -- has the search giant taken notice?

Pigeon – that hastily rolled out Google algo change that impacted both local and natural results – had those of us working in or for small, localized businesses (like law firms) in an utter panic.  Early consensus among the local search geeks was that Pigeon:

• Heavily favored the massive directories — in fact there was a lot of discussion how Pigeon may have been an overreaction to Yelp’s persistent anti-competitive whining
• Drastically reduced the frequency of local packs
• Reopened up local results to previously diagnosed local spam tactics

Many of us, myself included, were not surprisingly vocally critical of the mess that Pigeon left all over the SERPs. Local search Rock Star, David Mihm, delayed his annual Local Search Factors study to give us a chance to evaluate just what Pigeon had dropped.

Frankly, from my perspective, it didn’t make sense that small businesses were being marginalized in favor of mega-directories. Yet, despite all of the talk from Google about the little guys, this is exactly what was happening.

What Really Happened

I recently sat down with Gyi Tsakalakis from AttorneySync to compare notes and to evaluate the impact of Pigeon on a small subset of the heavily local, small business market: law firms.

We reviewed natural search traffic from 57 different law firm sites and compared average weekly traffic for 6 weeks (post Pigeon and pre Panda 4.1) to a benchmark of average weekly traffic for 8 weeks pre Pigeon.

In the analysis, we frankly ignored the two weeks of data immediately following Pigeon under the (correct) assumption that the results were so zany, unpredictable, and fleeting during that time period.

With a few exceptions, the results are spectacularly uninteresting (which in and of itself is an interesting pattern). As shown in the graph above, more than half of the sites experienced a net growth in traffic – not what I would have expected given the initial expert histrionics around Pigeon.

More importantly, about two out of every three sites saw a traffic change of less than 20% – about par for the course for these smaller sites.

We reviewed the sites at the extreme ends to try to identify any patterns. I expected to see a concentration of NAP fakers (law firms are notorious for trying to look bigger by claiming fake locations) getting hit the hardest. Not so.

One of the firms which experienced the biggest traffic growth is, in fact, an artless and flagrant geo-spammer. Turns out, there was no common thread (that we could ID) among the biggest winners and loser groups.

Interestingly, when I reran the numbers, looking at traffic for the four weeks immediately following Pigeon launch, two out of three of the law firm sites saw a drop in traffic.

Reading the tea leaves, it looks to me that after a very unwelcome arrival, Pigeon is slowly being rolled back. Anecdotally (at least in legal), we’re seeing 3-packs coming back and 7-packs replacing the 3 packs. Here’s a current example Gyi sent me this weekend (with the subject line “Pigeon Poop Begone”):

Now, much of this is just conjecture. It is also quite likely that law firms run into more spammy NAP issues that your average small business, so the results may not be representative overall. Suffice it to say, I think it would be a shame for small businesses to take the brunt of an algo change, and the limited data here suggest that Google has turned around to reflect this.

Add Mobile User Experience To Its Ranking Algorithm

Google sees what users see, and if that is a bad mobile experience, it may impact your rankings

At Search Marketing Expo East, Google engineer Gary Illyes talked a lot about user experience and how webmasters really need to focus on that. Over the past week or so, I asked Google about this and tried to understand why Google stressed this point so much at the event. Google told us in a statement:

“We’re making a big push to ensure the search results we deliver reflect this principle,”

Back in May, Google announced it is able to fully render your web pages both in desktop mode and Google mode. Webmasters are indeed noticing GoogleBot fully crawling and rendered the final page, the page the user sees, not just the code behind the page. So GoogleBot sees what users see when they visit your web page. Google has been making a strong point about this for months.

Google Ranking Algorithm May Use Mobile UX As A Signal

Why is Google pushing this so much to webmasters? Is it just about them being on a campaign to make the web a better place? Possibly, but how can Google do that where webmasters will actually do something about it? You got it! By adding it to the search ranking algorithm.

Google strongly implied to us that this will become a ranking factor. A Google spokesperson told us:

“Because at Google we are aiming to provide a great user experience on any device, we’re making a big push to ensure the search results we deliver reflect this principle. We want users to be able to enjoy the web wherever they are.”

GoogleBot Sees What Real Users See

Google can currently look at the user interface and not just see specific font sizes but see how a user would see the fonts on different mobile devices. Google is also able to see how a user will see how a page scrolls on a mobile interface; are the buttons large enough to click on; is the interface confusing to mobile users?

If the mobile version of a website has tiny fonts, once GoogleBot renders the page, it can see that because it actually renders the page as a user would. For example, if the HTML has a 14px font size, then once rendered with JavaScript and CSS, it might have modified those to 8px instead. This on a tiny view-port could lead to a bad user experience.

Another example might be how a mobile site requires zooming and panning for a user to see the site. GoogleBot will correlate it to view-port of the mobile device and see how it impacts the user.

As I described above, GoogleBot is actually rendering what the user sees fully.

Why Is Mobile UX Important?

A Google spokesperson sent us this statement:

“Mobile-friendly websites provide a much better user experience for the mobile users. According to our studies, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site that they had trouble accessing from their phone. That includes sites that use fonts which are illegible on mobile, or sites where users have to zoom in or pan around excessively. Mobile is a very important area; the mobile device penetration is over 50% in the USA and most users use their device for browsing websites.”

Is Mobile UX A Ranking Factor Now? No

Right now, Google does penalize sites that generate errors for mobile visitors. It began this in July 2013, so that sites which may redirect all mobile users to homepages will have less chance of appearing in Google’s mobile search results. Similar errors might also have an impact.

What Google is considering with the mobile user experience is a step beyond this. It would mean that if people are correctly delivered to the right pages, even pages meant for mobile visitors, Google would still assess how effective it deems the pages to be and reward or penalize accordingly.

Will it happen? With many things Google has hinted at in the past, such asHTTPS, page speed, ad-heavy pages, quality content and so on, these warnings have come months before, and Google has released new algorithms that incorporate them into the ranking algorithm.

How to prepare, if it’s coming? I’d recommend using the new Fetch as Google tool and test your sites on mobile, to ensure your buttons, links, scrolling and so forth are easier for users. Even if Google doesn’t end up releasing this into their ranking algorithm, your users and conversions will be happier.

PageRank Finally and Officially Dead

Google's John Mueller said Google probably won't update Toolbar PageRank in the future.
In October 2013, Google head of search spam Matt Cutts implied we would likely not see another Google Toolbar PageRank update before the year end. Well, by accident, Google updated Toolbar PageRank in December 2013. Since then, we have had no Toolbar PageRank updates.

Google’s John Mueller said in a Google Webmaster Hangout video that there will probably not be another Toolbar PageRank update ever. John said: