Wow, what a week! There has been a lot going on, and I wanted to catch you up with the latest in search, domains names, and social media. If you haven’t signed up yet for my weekly update newsletter, you might want to do so, as I send it weekly with added tips and tricks from time to time.
Secure Websites and Search Engine Rankings
Probably the biggest news of the week and the biggest news that will effect your website’s search engine rankings, is the fact that Google officially announced that https is a search engine ranking factor. What does this mean? If your website is https (uses a secure certificate) for all its content, then you could see better search engine rankings. Google wants us to have secure sites now, even if you don’t sell stuff online. I just finished moving my website to https for all its content, and will be doing so with other websites. I recommend considering a move to https. Notice that all of my links to my articles are now https URLs and not http like they were in the past? More on my post here:
https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/moving-to-https-for-better-search-engine-rankings/
SEO Firm Caught Impersonating Google
An SEO firm was caught doing telemarketing, and they called the wrong business. Linda Buquet recorded the conversation, and the guy from the SEO firm literally told her on the phone that her Google listing would be deleted if she didn’t pay $299. And he said he was from Google.
Google Authorship Stats Removed
Google has quietly remove the Google Authorship stats that a lot of us were using. It had info about page views, etc. for your articles. Is this a move to quietly get rid of Authorship? Maybe. They’ve already removed photos from the search results.
https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/google-authorship-stats-has-been-removed/
Microsoft Sway
There’s some new product called Sway coming from Microsoft, and we don’t know what it is yet. We do know, though, that it will be on Sway.com, a domain name they recently purchased. There’s also a CDN (content delivery network) associated with it, as they bought CDN domain names, as well.
https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/microsoft-to-launch-microsoft-sway/
That’s it for this week, keep in mind that I really recommend moving to an https site for all of your content, as it will not only potentially help search engine rankings, it will help with your site’s security overall.