Bing Says Stop Stuffing Keywords or Else!

This month has seen some more significant changes in both Bing and Google. It wasn’t all that long ago when I remember having some monthly updates that basically said not much happened. We don’t seem to have those months anymore as the search engines, especially Google, keep changing things every month (sometimes weekly). No time to stop and rest or we’ll miss something.

In this month’s video, we’ll talk about Google and Bing’s latest algorithm updates as well as some big announcements Google made…one of which includes a certain aquatic fowl which is looming in the near future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3brQ54Wu3k

Full Transcript:

Hi, I’m Kurt Steinbrueck with OurChurch.com, and this is your monthly SEO update, keeping you informed about what’s going on in the search engines.

Bing

Keyword Stuffing Not Allowed
We’re going to go ahead and start with Bing because they had an update to their algorithm, which doesn’t really happen that often with Bing, but we had one this month. What it is, is that Bing is now going after people who are keyword stuffing in URLs or in the web address of their pages. Basically what people were doing is that they would stick a whole bunch of keywords in the URL, making these really long URLs, or they would repeat the keywords over and over and over, trying to increase that ranking just a little bit by putting those keywords in there.

And Bing’s saying, “Stop doing that. We don’t want you doing that; we want you to rank naturally based off of the normal things, like getting natural links and shares and just doing a good job with the optimization of the page and things like that.” So, Bing is not going to give any kind of a boost for repeatedly using keywords in your URLs.

Create Natural Keywords
And in addition to that, if they see you consistently doing that, then you might get penalized. Now, it’s not bad to have a longer URL, because that happens naturally, especially on blogs. It’s also not bad to have a keyword in the URL. Just don’t go overboard on these things. Don’t shove keywords into it. Make it natural, make it make sense, and think about your users when you’re creating these web pages. Is this something that the user could remember?

This is something that Google had dealt with a long time ago. For them, it hasn’t really done much for you to use keywords in your URLs for a long time. But now Bing is also getting onboard with that.

Google

Ranking Boost to HTTPs Sites
Moving over to Google, speaking of them – Google has two updates that we need to talk about. The first is that they’ve said that they are giving a rankings boost to sites with HTTPS. That is the secure, encrypted website format. So if you’re taking payments or if you’re taking personal information that needs to be kept secure, that’s what HTTPS is supposed to help with.

Which brings up the question: what if you’re not doing that? What purpose is there, really, for turning your site to HTTPS? And the answer to that is, I have no idea. It really doesn’t help you. In fact, all it does is really slow your site down and make you have to pay for a service and get it all set up, which can be a hassle.

So if you are a site that is taking personal information or taking payments, then you should already have HTTPS, hopefully; if not, go ahead and do that. If you aren’t, then don’t really worry about it, because the reality is that we have not seen any kind of a significant impact on the rankings from this HTTPS update.

Benefit of HTTPs
What it appears to be is what’s known as a tie breaker. So if two pages are competing for rankings, and they both are equal in just about every other respect as far as ranking factors go, then Google’s going to look at the HTTPS, and that one’s going to win out. If there’s any difference in the ranking factors, then those other ranking factors are going to play more significantly into the rankings.

Just wanted to let you know about it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to try to get my site to be HTTPS, because it really isn’t going to be worth the hassle, unless you really do need to keep things secure.

Authorship is DEAD
The other update is that Google has announced that Authorship is dead, essentially. That the Google Authorship program, which they started about 3 years ago as a way to be able to identify the people creating content on the web, is no more. Basically, they found that only about 30% of people after 3 years had signed on and tried to implement things. There were a lot of mistakes, even within that 30%. So when you only have 30%, that’s a pretty poor ranking factor, so they weren’t able to do that. They tried to do it themselves with their algorithms, and that didn’t work either. So for now, they’ve kind of given up.

I wouldn’t remove anything from your site. I don’t think that Authorship is going to come back, per se, not in its current form – but it’s good to stay connected between Google+ and your content, because people who have you in their circles, they could still see a little bit of a rankings boost there for your content if they’re logged in to Google and doing a search.

I still do think that Google may try to come back to Authorship eventually, if they can find a solution for it, because I think that the promise of being able to identify who was creating content and whether they’re trusted people was something that Google really wanted to be able to do. But for now, it just isn’t working out.

Penguin Update Coming Soon
The last thing I’ll mention is that Google did give us a heads-up. They said that in the near future, in a reasonable amount of time, they are planning to do another Penguin update. Now, we don’t know what a “reasonable amount of time” is, or how near this future is, but just be aware that that is something that’s probably coming in the near future. And we’ll let you know what it does, because that’s what we do here, right?

So remember, we live in this internet age, so it’s important to stay strong in the search engines so that you can achieve your mission online, and we’re here to help you do that. God bless.

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