Google Mobile Penalty Study Day 6 – Mobile sites up 5%

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So we’re almost a full week into the hype of the Google Mobile Penalty Roll-Out and…. maybe, just maybe, we are seeing some logical results.   Aggregating data across the 59 sites in the study – we’re now seeing natural search traffic from devices for mobile optimized sites up by 5% while non mobile sites are showing an aggregate decline of 3%.  Kind of what you’d expect from the algo update, albeit at a much smaller scale.

Or maybe not…

Individual data across the sites in the study remains highly variable with significant swings both up and down.  The graph below shows a wide range of performance across the largest of both optimized (blue) and unoptimized (red) sites.

Mobile Day 6

Conclusions?  The only conclusion I can draw is that either a)we still have a very long way to go until the algo really rolls out completely OR b)the impact of this algo change was grossly overestimated by SEO geeks (including myself.)

 

 

 

Google Mobile Penalty Study Day 3: In Which we ask, “What Rollout?”

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Across the board, SEOs are asking “what rollout?”  Its gotten so odd the Google’s clarified, that yes, there has been a roll-out and in fact it is complete in some data centers… which now begs the question:  was this overhyped?  SEO Clarity’s study on over 50,000 queries shows a 5% change yesterday – so far this looks like a snoozer.

Looking at our much more limited dataset of 59 law firm websites: all 12 of the non mobile optimized sites have seen mobile search traffic above the 8 week benchmark.  Aggregating data across those sites shows mobile search traffic 21% higher.  That’s right – traffic has increased for every one of these non-compliers post algo update.  This is starting to look like the mobile penalty was conjured up by Mountain View to feed business to starving web developers.

The graph below shows the sites from our study that had a minimum volume of traffic – blue are mobile optimized, red are not.  Things that make you go hmmmmm.

Day 3

Sit tight, lets see what the weekend has in store…

Google Mobile Penalty Study: Day 2 – Mobile Search Traffic up 15%, but…

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So, we are now 2 days into Google’s roll-0ut of their mobile penalty.  We’ve added 5 new sites to the study – and if you’d like help in benchmarking your own site’s performance, give us a call and we’ll show you how.  So now – across the 59 sites we’re monitoring – across those with a mobile friendly platform we’re seeing traffic up 15%.  (Note this isn’t an average number, its an aggregate number of mobile search traffic across all of the sites.)

But…

The 12 non mobile friendly sites have seen traffic up 32%.  Explanation please?  We sometimes see these upward spikes at the early stage of an algo change OR (more likely) a few outliers are having an inordinate impact on a small data set – stay tuned.  OR (and i’m believing this last explanation to be true) the algo is either rolling out very slowly or the impact of the change is going to be much less than telegraphed.

In the graph below – blue bars are mobile friendly, red are not – and this represents a sample of the more trafficked sites in the study.
Mobile Day 2

Mobile Penalty Study: Traffic up 9% on Day 1

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Yesterday marked the beginning of Google’s mobile algorithm change – and while it is scheduled to take a full week to completly roll out, we’re monitoring the results carefully at Mockingbird headquarters.

Mobile Penalty Study Methodology

We looked at data across 54 different law firm sites – 42 mobile optimized and 12 that weren’t – compared average daily mobile search traffic from the previous 8 weeks to the traffic on April 21st.  In aggregate the volume of traffic to the non mobile sites was up by 1% compared to the mobile friendly sites’ 9% lift.

The Graph

In the graph below – the blue bars are mobile friendly sites and the red bars are non mobile friendly sites.  I’ve graphed the top half (as measured in traffic) of sites in our study, because the data sets below were so low that small changes had a large impact in the % change numbers.
Mobile Day 1

 

Limitations of the Data

  • The roll-out is far from complete and we’re expecting more dramatic changes over the week.
  • Law firm traffic tends to dip over the weekends and we compared a weekday against an average that included weekends – so there may be an artificially high change that won’t get worked out until we have a full week’s worth of data.
  • A more accurate comparison will be a week’s worth of traffic once the roll-out has, well, rolled out.
  • Many law firm sites have a low volume of traffic – specifically mobile natural search traffic – so small differences can have a large impact on % changes.  This is why I aggregated all of the data to come up with the 9% number (instead of the average percentage change.)

The conclusion?  Stay tuned… this is just the beginning of what we expect to be a very bumpy ride.

Update on Google’s Upcoming Mobile Penalty

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By now, you should be well aware that April 21st is the date The Google has telegraphed for the roll-out of their upcoming Mobile penalty for non-mobile friendly sites.  (If you need to catch up, start here.) Representatives from The Google recently disclosed the following information about the upcoming changes:

  1. The change will roll out over a week – commencing April 21st.  This is a pretty typical approach for major algo updates.  (This, of course, means you should wait a week to assessing the impact.)
  2. The change is binary – you are either mobile friendly or not…  just like you can’t be a little pregnant, you can’t be a little mobile friendly.

Reminder:  if you aren’t sure if your site is mobile friendly, hurry on over to The Google’s Mobile Friendly Test Tool and feel free to panic if you don’t like what you see.  (Or at least scream at your website vendor if you’ve been paying them for anything other than hosting for the past few months).

Upcoming Google Algorithm Update – Say Goodbye to Doorway Pages

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Google announced yesterday that they will soon be releasing a ranking adjustment to address the prevalence of doorway pages and warns “sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.”

Brace yourself – big things are coming. Due to the pervasiveness of spam within legal, we’re predicting this may be a bigger shakeup than Pigeon (which really only hit spectacularly flagrant local spammers) or even the upcoming mobile change.

Wait, what’s a doorway page?

In the words of Google, “doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination.”

Don’t confuse doorway pages with landing pages. Landing pages provide useful, relevant information to the user whose purpose is to get users to do a certain action. Doorway pages contain irrelevant information whose only purpose is to get users to the site.

If you’re not sure if your site is full of doorway pages, Google created this handy dandy list of questions you can ask yourself (or your SEO):

  • Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
  • Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?
  • Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
  • Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
  • Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?

What does this mean for the legal industry?

Our guess? Big things. Although the most typical culprits of doorways are large brands and franchises, the legal industry is not only notorious for spammy SEO tactics, but also for trying to act like large brands and franchises.  Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide summed it up nicely when he said: “This update may be no big deal, but when I see Google use the phrase “broad impact”, I tend to get a bit paranoid.”

Our guesstimates of what might be coming:

  • Legal is rife with low quality spammy directories with nothing but doorway pages – highly possible that this adjustment negatively impacts law firm sites that rely heavily on doorways for links. (And there are tons of these sites.)
  • Lots of law firms have successfully implemented doorway pages across multiple domains. They are going to get hit – expect a reshuffling of website traffic at a rate legal hasn’t seen in a very long time.
  • Possible changes in the structure of the two remaining large legal directories directories, Avvo and FindLaw.

This may also be the long awaited fulfillment of Google’s move away from the directories and towards the small businesses that populate those directories. Of course, this has been our prognostication ~2 years and we’ve been wrong so far, but, fingers crossed.  (Think we’re crazy? We’re not alone in this sentiment — in his coverage of the doorway update, Shotland goes so far as to suggest shorting Yelp.)

Hasn’t Google been rather busy lately?

Yep. If you’re wondering if there’s something in the water at Google lately, you’re not alone. They’re penalizing doorway pages, implementing mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal in mobile search, putting everything in the knowledge graph, releasing all sorts of new tools, and more.

However, doorways aren’t a new thing, so it’s about time Google addressed the issue. Matt Cutts, infamous head of Web Spam at Google currently on leave, wrote about crappy doorway pages back in 2005. As in, the 2005 that was 10 years ago. (Note: its a good read if you’d like to see the primary spokesperson of a billion dollar company perfect the implementation of the word “asshat.”) Plus, all of Google’s actions have been consistent with their mission to provide more helpful, user-friendly search results.

Regardless of the impact of the update, we’ll keep you posted on the fallout. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got high hopes this one will be nicknamed Platypus.

Google Will Now Use Mobile-Friendliness as a Ranking Factor

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Over the last few months Google has alluded to the importance of a mobile friendly (responsive) design. Now we know why. In Google’s own words, “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.” Google will also “begin to use information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed.” That’s right — Google will once again shake up the Internet world with an algorithmic ranking update, and this time they’re giving us a warning.

What does mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal mean?

Google considers a multitude of different signals to determine the quality of your website. For instance, they look at your backlinks (or other sites on the web that link to yours). They use your content as a signal – is it fresh, unique, and high quality? They consider the technological soundness of your site – how easily can their bot and users can find and navigate your site? The list could go on, but the important thing to remember is that in addition to the factors mentioned above, Google will now be using mobile-friendly factors to help rank your site in mobile search results.

This means that if you want to show up well in Google’s mobile search results, and we know you do, it’s critical that you update your site to be mobile-friendly.

The particulars of the update

At Mockingbird we try our best to keep technical jargon to a minimum (which is admittedly difficult), but it’s important to explain how this update will impact search results. Here are the specifics:

  • Algorithm runs in real-time – we suspect this means that if your site is updated to be mobile-responsive, you could see an immediate bump in the search results.
  • Page by page basis – if your home page is mobile friendly and the rest of your pages are not then only your home page will benefit.
  • Site will be labeled as mobile-friendly – if Google views your site as mobile-friendly, they will mark it as such in the search results that they produce to users. In theory this will increase your click-through rate. This is already happening – you can see an example from this screenshot I took this morning:

Mobile Friendly Google Results

Why does Google care about mobile-friendly (responsive) design?

Quite simply, Google cares about user experience (and you should too). Let me pontificate on the importance of this point. You should care how your customers (and, even more importantly, potential customers) interact with your site. If the user has to pinch, zoom, and drag your site all over their phone or tablet, they will not be satisfied with their experience. It may not be something you actively think about (I do because I’m an Internet nerd), but we’re all familiar on some level with the annoyance of a non-responsive site.

According to a Local Search Association study released today (March 11th, 2015), “60% of US adults now typically choose smartphones or tablets over PCs to find information before buying products and services offline.” Creating a great mobile experience for the user can no longer be a second thought, but instead an integral part of design and development.

What will this update mean for legal?

There are two important considerations when thinking about the impact on the legal industry:

  1. Lawyers often fall behind the times on Internet and SEO best practices (possibly why we see such obvious spam in the industry).
  2. Legal is extremely competitive compared to most other markets (also possibly why spam is so prevalent in this industry).

You can view this update as an opportunity to surpass your abhorred competitors, or you can view it as another Google-induced headache. Either way, it’s coming on April 21st and you can’t move out of the way.

What can and should you do?

If you’re not sure whether your site is mobile-friendly, don’t worry; Google makes it extremely simple to test whether or not your site passes their test. You can check out your site in real time via Google’s “Mobile-Friendly Test”. You can see our actual result below.

Mockingbird Google Mobile Test

If you passed, congratulations! You need not fear April 21st.

If you were greeted with a handful of red error messages, it’s time to seriously consider updating your site to be responsive to any device. Don’t get left behind in the extremely competitive legal landscape. If you need help avoiding the pain Google’s unmerciful hand, give us a call: 206-209-2125.

LinkedIn Publishing Won’t Eat Up Your SEO Traffic (and you won’t get Google penalized either)

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Three weeks ago, Kevin O’Keefe posted a question on Facebook – the corresponding answers, of which there were 21, dug deep into SEO theories concerning duplicate content, canonicalization, rewritten summaries, excerpts, site authority and Google Panda penalties.

First, Kevin’s Question:

Anyone else looking at re-posting blog posts from your blog on LinkedIn’s publishing platform?

I could see lawyers and other professionals wanting to re-post a blog post from their blog to “LinkedIn Publishing” and — and vice versa. I see some people even advising to auto-post content from your blog to LinkedIn — though I am not certain how that is even possible, unless they are just referencing sharing versus publishing.

LinkedIn publishing content appears to be indexed by Google. That would seem to create problems with duplicate content for the lawyer’s blog, the risk being that LinkedIn’s version would outrank the blog post on a search for the matter covered in the piece.

According to some commenters, the duplicate problem was  so severe that it would likely invoke a Google penalty on a lawyer’s website. I wondered if this was true (spoiler alert – it wasn’t – but more on that later.)

First, some background on LinkedIn publishing and the dreaded duplicate penalties:

LinkedIn Publishing Background

LinkedIn’s describes their publishing platform as The Definitive Professional Publishing Platform (their words not mine) by showcasing content from influencers in the LinkedIn network. During 2014, LinkinedIn opened up publishing from a select few thought leaders  to more and more of its network.

Duplicate Content Background

As LinkedIn publishing rolled out, many SEOs raised concerns around duplicate content – simply put, would putting my blog content verbatim onto LinkedIn cause one of the following:

  1. LinkedIn, with its very strong authority, is stealing SEO traffic from my blog by utilizing my own content.
  2. The Google might see my content copied onto LinkedIn, believe the original version (known as canonical) was the LinkedIn version, further deduce my site is full of nothing but syndicated content and whack my website traffic with a duplicate content Penalty (aka Panda).

Concerns about duplicate content are exacerbated by the use (or misuse?) of canonical tags by LinkedIn. Canonical tags were specifically created to identify the original (or canonical) version of content – specifically syndicated content. LinkedIn self-servingly automatically generates those canonical tags on content in their publisher platform.  You can see the rel=”canonical” tag  highlighted below in the code for the article I published on LinkedIn, despite the fact I had just cut and pasted the content verbatim.

canonical tag Kevin’s Question

So we come back full circle to Kevin’s Question.

What does The Google do when I copy my blog posts to LinkedIn Publisher?

Let’s see what actually happens in the real world. I tested the theory that LinkedIn is stealing  SEO traffic by copying two of my recent blog posts verbatim to LinkedIn immediately after I published them.  Waited 24 hours to ensure the search engines had time to see both my blog and LinkedIn.  Then did a Google query for a phrase specific to that article and see what happens:

Findlaw canonical

What the what?  Oh LinkedIn . . . . ?  Where are you LinkedIn . . . . ?   Nothing. No mention of LinkedIn at all.  (Sidebar – the FindLaw ad is a little funny; I couldn’t help myself.) And apologies for getting a little geeky but you’ll note there’s nothing showing as suppressed results – which means that The Google hasn’t even indexed the LinkedIn page. I got the exact same results for both posts. I then rechecked the results 2 weeks later.  Same exact thing – no LinkedIn.  But perhaps, this is unique to Conrad’s specific situation.  So I ran 3 more legal blog postings from different firms.  Same results (or lack thereof).  Here’s an example of the results for content on a Chine Law Blog that appear verbatim on LinkedIn.  Note the two results at the bottom are syndicated and originally showed up as supplemental results.  But again.  No LinkedIn.  Not even in supplemental results.

china canonical

Interestingly, when I ran the test for two of Kevin’s posts he syndicated on LinkedIn, I did see LinkedIn, albeit below the original, canonical content (his blog), lumped in with all the other domains on which his content is syndicated.  (Note here that this isn’t a verbatim copy, as Kevin has changed the heading and therefore the H1 of the article.)

Untitled 5

Now, I haven’t done a comprehensive study, but so far 5 out of 5 data points tell the same story:  publishing on LinkedIn won’t cause LinkedIn to steal your traffic nor will it incur the wrath of Mountain View based Pandas. This of course, makes a ton of sense to me – – – I can’t imagine that the brainpower at The Google hasn’t figured out how to handle this very common widespread issue. Its not like syndicated content is an entirely new concept. Note that LinkedIn does aggressively push content in front of your LinkedIn network – so republishing does have real value even if that value doesn’t originate from SEO (gasp – did Conrad really just say that?). If you are still paranoid – just duplicate the experiment above for your own stuff; but as far as I’m concerned – ignore the SEO ballyhoo.

The only thing publishing on LinkedIn will do is to get your established network to read your content – which doesn’t seem like a bad idea after all.

What to do When FindLaw Pulls the Plug on Your Website

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Want to see the world’s ugliest law firm website?

404 Coffman

That’s what Kendall Coffman’s FindLaw website looked like on Tuesday.  What follows demonstrates how Kendall was able to get his site (admittedly stripped down) back up and running with 21 hours.

1:27 PM Tuesday

I receive an email from Kendall.

I have been in a dispute with Findlaw for several months now, and Findlaw has decided to “take down” my website.  My site was www.sanmateobankruptcylawyer.com, and if you go there, you will see nothing except maybe error messages.

2:02 PM Phone Call

I give Kendall a call – what follows are my notes from the call:

Kendall is locked in to a long term contract with FindLaw after moving his website from a self made 1&1 website. He’s become increasingly concerned over the decline in performance of his FindLaw site – and has been in an ongoing dispute over the fees he’s being charged and the site’s underperformance. Now I think that part of Kendall’s problem is entirely exogenous to FindLaw – as the real estate market and economy have picked up, the demand for his specific practice area has declined. But, Kendall is concerned that his site was hit by Panda 2.4 in September 2011, but unfortunately FindLaw hasn’t installed Google analytics on his site – despite his bringing up the issue – so this is just conjecture at this point.  He’s also concerned the backlink package he purchased from FindLaw has resulted in low quality links which may be impacting the site negatively.  However, it seems that FindLaw has viewed his inquiries about his site’s lagging performance as an upsell opportunity.

“When I ask for help, Findlaw tries to sell me something to cause my bill to go up.”

We go over the services Kendall is receiving.

His monthly bill is $1,519.44 and includes FindLaw Premium Profile ($59.40), FindLaw Firmsite 333 C Website Package ($628.95), Findlaw FS Web Advantage Starter Plus ($348.36). At one point he was sold on blogging and added FindLaw Post Plus Firmsite and FindLaw Blog Service Starter FS ($433.60 for 2 blogs a month).

So after ongoing billing and performance conversations, without any warning, FindLaw pulled the plug on Kendall’s website. (Note that it is particularly dangerous from an SEO perspective to do this as search engines are particularly loath to send traffic to an empty, broken, dead, error page.)

2:31 PM Pull the Fire Alarm

Occasionally at the agency, we “pull the fire alarm” – essentially everyone drops everything and jumps on a project where time is of the essence.  We’ve done this in the past, when a client’s host went AWOL, we’ve done it in response to news events in the mass torts space and yesterday we pulled the fire alarm for Kendall.  The goal was very simple: get a placeholder site up as quickly as possible.  Instructions to the team:

FindLaw has pulled Kendall’s current website and it is currently returning an error. The site, unfortunately is registered to 1&1. Our immediate goal is to get a barebones website back up and running.  We’re going to launch a very simple, scaled down version TOMORROW.  On our plate: build out a  5-6 page WordPress website from existing template; hosted on WPEngine.  Redirect old pages (there are 93) to homepage.  We think Kendall does NOT own any of the content, so he is going to have to rewrite it within our shell – we’ll need to provide him with the WordPress Guide.  Kendall is sending us information on his 1&1 logins.  We do NOT think there is an existing GA account – so should probably set that up as well.

3:46 Infrastructure

Kendall sends us log-ins to 1&1 – to which his domain is registered.  Fortunately 1&1 makes it easy for us to access these records.  (Note: good thing Kendal had an initial site through 1&1 – while he doesn’t technically own his domain – a big no no – 1&1 has made it easy enough for him to control what goes on that domain. His worst case would be if his vendor actually registered the domain and owned it – which has been known to happen.)

5:25 PM Creative Done

Mockingbird Design and Development used a preferred WordPress Theme and applied an existing basic design template. Utilizing the Wayback machine they were able to view Kendall’s FindLaw site (prior to the plug being pulled) and reviewed the general layout, imagery, content map, color schemes, logo and vital content like address, phone numbers etc.

Instructions emailed to Kendall along with the site and log-ins.

I would also suggest not to edit anything if you are not sure what that edit will do. With that said, I have set up some basic menus and pages for you to see how WordPress works. Attached is a basic WordPress Editing guide. This should help you create and edit pages.
Good luck!

Below are the old and new sites.   I might be a little biased but I think the new one looks just a little better.

Kendall’s New Site:

Kendall's New WordPress Site Kendall’s New WordPress Site 

Kendall’s FindLaw Site

Kendall's FindLaw site Kendall’s FindLaw site

11:36 PM Content Loaded

Kendall has written and uploaded content into the site and sends a few requests:
  1. Replace the FindLaw tracking phone numbers with his primary number.
  2. Add a Better Business Bureau badge
  3. Change the email address on the contact form on the site.
  4. Add ApexChat functionality.

9:31 AM Wednesday

Mockingbird Design & Development completes requested changes and modifies 1&1 registrar records to point to our WP Engine hosting solution.

10:11 Site Live

21 hours after Kendall discovered that FindLaw had pulled the plug on his website – he’s back up and running. You can now see it here: site. Its admittedly a stripped down version from a content perspective; but professional, functional (responsive) and much better looking than a 404. A few search queries and it looks like the downtime hasn’t decimated his search engine performance.  Over the next hour, we finish the process of redirecting the old URL’s.

Now, because the site is built on the ubiquitous and easy to use WordPress platform, Kendall can add much of the content himself without being beholden to a vendor’s proprietary platform. And if he wants further help on it, he can contract with one of the tens of thousands of professionals who work on WordPress throughout the US.

Ruminations

I started working directly with law firms precisely because I hated seeing small businesses going through these types of horrendous experiences. This may be naively idealistic and my MBA brethren would certainly scoff, but I’d rather foot a client’s hosting bill than deliberately hurt their business by leaving them naked and flapping in the online wind.  (Granted our hosting is only $29 monthly, but I digress.)

If you are concerned about your own FindLaw site, download the FindLaw Jailbreak Guide to carefully plan your escape.