November has passed and we’re already back to December. The year flies by fast and working in Digital Marketing time seems to pass twice as fast. Let’s go through some November SEO updates below.
Links importance to ranking might decline
This has been an ongoing conversation recently. John Mueller has suggested links won’t be an essential ranking factor like they have been up until now. Obviously, links are how Google crawls and finds pages so they will always be important. We’ll have to monitor this situation and see how it develops.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines changes to “Search Essentials”
Google simplified their Webmaster Guidelines to Search Essentials. The documentation now leans heavily into EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) distancing itself from Pagerank. If you’re interested, reading the Search Essentials is a great way to get started in SEO.
Data Studio becomes Looker Studio
When Google gets bored they like to change the names of their properties. Now Google Data Studio is called Looker Studio. This an interesting development considering the URL still mentions data studio. We’ll see if this sticks, our team isn’t sure about the new name yet.
Writing for Search Volume lists isn’t a suggested strategy
John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, discussed content with a Twitter user. The user in question pondered how to cover keywords with high search volume without cannibalizing. Mueller suggested that targeting content just for search volume won’t harvest great results.
Content should be natural and should fit your brand well, avoiding any “superficial” type of content that’s just for search engine results is the best way to advance. It’s great to see Mueller confirm best practices. He’s on Twitter as @JohnMu assisting people working on SEO content for search.
Fandango updates
Wreath making
To kick off the season, James and Dan joined Carla’s wreath-making workshop tradition. With a glass of bucks fizz in one hand and boughs of spruce, eucalyptus, and gypsophila in the other the team created their wreaths.
There were a few different approaches to the wreaths. Carla went big, James went very Christmassy and Dan went very stylised to appease his mother. This was a lovely way to spend an afternoon focusing on a new challenge for James and Dan.
Christmas bauble
Around the Christmas tree in Chichester town centre are baubles for local businesses supporting the Rotary Charity. Our lovely extended colleagues at Buzzword designed a striking yule pattern with a QR code directing people to our homepage.
We’ll have one more blog to sign off this year, so come back in a month as we go through the years biggest changes.
