Read What Google Says About Seo in 2016

SEO is an ever-changing industry as
search engines (Google in particular)
evolve to some extent every single day.
Google makes algorithm changes on a
daily basis, and every now and then it
makes major changes that cause massive
shake-ups in search results as well as SEO
strategies.
What do you expect to change the
most about optimizing for Google in
2016? Share your thoughts in the
comments .


Mobile has been a major focal point of
Google for much longer, but in 2015 it
was as big a focus as ever. Early in the
year, Google announced two significant
ranking factors – app indexing and
mobile-friendliness – both aimed at
improving the mobile experience for users
and getting them the content they want/
need in the best way possible.
This will (unsurprisingly) continue to be a
major focus on Google’s heading into
2016.
In a recent webmaster hangout on Google
+, Google webmaster trends analyst John
Mueller spoke a little about what to
expect for SEO in the coming year (via
Barry Schwartz).


The relevant portion of the video begins
at about 26 minutes in, but you’re
probably only going to get more by
watching the entire video.
Mueller answers a question about general
SEO tips for 2016 (as transcribed by
Schwartz):
Oh man… I don’t have any magical SEO
tips for next year. I can’t tell you about
that high ranking meta tag that we’ve
been working on [sarcasm].

But in general, I think, next year you’ll
probably hear a lot about from us about
AMP, mobile friendly, we’ve been doing
over the years. It is still a very big topic
and we still see a lot of sites not doing
that properly. Those are probably the
bigger changes, but other things will
definitely happen as well. More
information about JavaScript in sites so
that we can really figure out how to
handle these better in search and make a
better recommendation on what you
should do or shouldn’t do.

But past that, of course, high quality
content is something I’d focus on. I see
lots and lots of SEO blogs talk about user
experience, which I think is a great thing
to focus on as well. Because that
essentially kind of focuses on what we are
trying to look at as well. We want to rank
content that is useful for them and if
your content is really useful for them,
then we want to rank it.


We’ve covered mobile-friendliness a great
deal throughout the year, so if this is
something you’re still struggling with as
Mueller implies, I’d encourage you to read
back through the content found here.
AMP of course refers to Accelerated
Mobile Pages, which is a new open source
project and basically Google’s answer to
Facebook’s Instant Articles, which is being
supported by a number of other internet
players including Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn,
Pinterest, WordPress.com, ChartBeat,
Parse.ly, and Adobe Analytics.

You can read more about this here, but
Google recently said it will begin sending
search traffic to AMP pages beginning in
late February. So that’s one major change
you can expect in 2016 (and early 2016
at that).

Another big SEO change coming in early
2016 is Google’s next Penguin update
which is supposed to update in real time
moving forward.

Regarding the javascript stuff Mueller
mentioned, Google recently changed some
recommendations related to that, which
you can read more about here.
What would you like to see Google
change or do for webmasters and SEOs
in 2016? 

Share your thoughts in the
comments .

SHARE THIS