This past week we learned that it has become paramount to log in to that Google My Business account of yours, we now know of a way to get your web pages indexed faster, and the big G knows about an annoying type of spam we have been dealing with for the past several months.
Full details to follow about each of these headlines in this week’s SEO news roundup.
Latest SEO News – Week Ending 6/6/2015
Google My Business: Log In or Get Kicked Out
If you’re specifically trying to attract local search traffic with your website, then a verified Google My Business account (aka Google+ Business page) is a no-brainer. It used to be as simple as creating the account, getting it verified via inserting a piece of code on your website, and that was that. What used to be a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing will now require more maintenance than you’re used to.
According to Jade Wang from the Google My Business Maps team, you will now have to log in to that account at least once in a while in order to keep it active.
“In some cases, we may contact Google My Business users via email to confirm that they are still actively managing a business page. If a user is unresponsive to our attempts to contact him or her and has not logged into Google My Business for a significant length of time, then we may unverify pages in the account.”
It wasn’t specifically noted how frequently you’ll need to log in to your account in order to keep it verified. Since you’ll also need to look for, and respond to, messages from Google itself then perhaps making it a monthly routine would be a good idea.
How to Speed Index Your Site in Google
Do you plan to launch a new site and want to get it indexed as fast as possible? Now we know how to do that.
According to Google’s John Mueller, the way to fastest way to get your websiote indexed is to use the Fetch as Google tool and submit to indexing. The Fetch as Google Tool can be found withing Google Search Console (a.k.a. Google Webmaster Tools).
The one downside to this is that you can only index pages one page at a time via Fetch as Google. So it may only be worth your time to index your homepage and a few other key pages that you want to drive traffic to. For all other pages, submitting a sitemap file is still among the fastest ways to get all of your pages indexed.
Referrer Spam. Referrer Spam Everywhere.
Spammers gonna spam, and now they’ve found a new way to do it. If you have looked at your referring pages in Google Analytics over the past few months you may have noticed an abundance of referrals coming from sites you have never heard of before. The goal of these spammers is to make you aware of their website and raise your interest enough for you to visit it.
A dead giveaway that what you’re seeing is referral spam, and not genuine traffic, is that traffic coming from these sites will likely have either 100% bounce rate or 0% bounce rate. That’s the kind of thing Google is not too thrilled to see, not to mention it detracts your attention away from the real referral traffic you’re getting.
Google’s John Mueller says the Google Analytics team is aware of this growing problem and are looking into a solution. Mueller also mentions there are certain things you can do in Analytics to eliminate specific sources of referral spam, but the goal is to create a more broad, long-term solution.
Wrapping it Up
It’s more important than ever to log in to your Google My Business account if you want to keep it active, using Fetch as Google is the fastest way to get your pages indexed, and Google is working on a solution to pesky referral spam.
If you’re concerned about any of this past week’s developments, please leave a comment and we’ll be sure to respond.
Pam Aungst
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