New Google Changes Impact Website Rankings

BIG changes on Google that will Impact your Website Rankings

Google is making updates to its ranking algorithm and browser that could affect your website rankings and click through rate. Here are more details on these two changes.

Mobile First Indexing

Google has started to use the mobile version of the web as their primary search engine index.

This means Google will create and rank its search listings based on the mobile version of content, even for listings that are shown to desktop users. 

Google will rank your mobile and desktop sites based on signals they get from crawling your site from a mobile view. So, the page speed of your mobile site will now be a big determining factor for the rankings of both your mobile site and desktop site in Google. Google will also likely look at the technical aspects of your mobile site, such as your title, H1s, structured data and other tags as well as the content generated from your mobile site and use them as ranking factors rather than your desktop site.

Google recommends you go with a responsive approach — the content is the same on a page-by-page basis from your desktop to your mobile site.

The bottom line for this is that websites that are not responsive (mobile friendly) will greatly drop in rankings or not rank at all in the search results!

SSL Certificates

Google has been stating that they want a more secure web, and to that end, with release 68 of the Chrome Browser, they will identify sites without an SSL certificate as “Not Secure”.

An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate is a security feature that has been necessary on sites that collected personal data, such as credit card information, in the past.

Google is now flagging all websites that do not have an SSL certificate. Chrome (most popular browser by a lot) is starting to display "Not Secure" on websites that do not have an SSL certificate. Version 68 of the Chrome Browser is due out in July 2018 and is set to start displaying the “Not Secure” on all non https sites. This could serve as a deterrent for website visitors, even if you are not asking them for personal information. An SSL certificate is easy to acquire and requires an inexpensive yearly fee to implement.

Even if your website is currently not showing as "Not Secure", it may be due to the browser version you are using, or the roll-out of this feature in your browser. However, others who are using the latest version of the Chrome browsers, may be seeing this flag.

Ask yourself this: “Would you open a website that had a warning that it is NOT SECURE”? Most people will not!

Local MarketPlace can help you with both of these problems, as well as other online issues.

Contact me with any questions or comments you may have. Call Wayne at 985-796-1288. YourLMP.com