This Week on WA Feb 19, 2017

byNumerous

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7 years ago

Letter From the Numerous

It’s been an interesting week with it’s ups and downs. I won’t bore you with the details, but I have had a bit of a problem with my posts here on WA this week. There seems to be a bit of formatting issue when posting with whole blocks of text disappearing when I publish the post. I’m not sure if anyone else has experienced this, but it has happened in two different browsers on two different computers which makes me think it’s a WA glitch. My guess is they’re working on the updates and not all the bugs are worked out yet.

On to the news. This week is all about mobile. I ran across a lot of mobile stuff this week so I decided to dedicate this whole post to it. Only one of these links is to a post here on WA, but the stuff is either stuff I’ve talked about here on WA before or things you’ll really just want to know about.

Mobile First Search

https://www.ninahale.com/blog/2017-google-mobile-f...

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/11/mobile-f...

Apparently Google was planning on moving to a mobile first search algorithm this quarter, but it’s been delayed. That’s good news if your site isn’t optimized for mobile yet, but it’s still coming so now is the time to get on it, because it will likely be going into effect in the next couple of months. Mobile first basically means that all search engine results will be affected by mobile criteria regardless of whether the search is done on mobile or desktop. So let’s look at some of those criteria.

No More Pop ups

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-...

This took effect back in January of this year, but it becomes relevant again when we start looking at Mobile First Search. What this means is that if your site has pop ups or anything that interferes with the user getting to the content it is going to start hurting your search engine rankings. If you’re currently doing this for a mailing list or something, I recommend looking at moving to either the sidebar, inline in your articles, and/or putting a notifications bar at the top of your page.

New SEO Plugin

https://roots.io/weve-migrated-from-yoast-seo/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/autodescription/

Roots.io definitely has their own way of using Wordpress, and not everyone agrees with it. However, they’re very much pushing the boundaries of Wordpress for developers, so it’s worth at least considering they’re take on things. Well I found this article from back in May saying they we’re going to stop using Yoast. A lot of people have a lot of issues with Yoast, so this wasn’t exactly earth shattering news, but I was really curious to know what they were switching to. I assumed it would be AIOSEO and I was just curious as to why.

I was really surprised that they were switching to a plugin that I’d never heard of before, The SEO Framework. So I figured I’d give it a look. One of the things that I really liked about Yoast was that it scored your posts, which is help for my clients that know nothing about SEO. Well the SEO Framework does that too, although not in as much detail. The other cool thing is that it’s highly extendable, so it’s possible for developers to create additional plugins that add functionality to it.

So you may be asking what all this has to do with mobile. I’ll cover that next.

Accelerated Mobile Project

Your Google Mobile Rankings Amped

AMP was created by Google to help speed up the internet for mobile. For more information watch Jay’s webinar above on it, because I don’t really have a lot of experience with using it however. However, The SEO Framework above actually has a module built specifically to work with the AMP plugin. Some people have mentioned that the default AMP plugin doesn’t work with their theme and that the plugin recommended by Jay has a lot of bloat. If you find that is the case then you might want to try The SEO framework to see if it works any better for you.

Have a Great Week

Hope everyone is having a great weekend and all the best in the upcoming week.

About This Week in WA

This Week in WA is a collection of the interesting things I came across in the last week not that were necessarily posted in the last week. Some of them were posted months ago. Some of them I’ve only briefly looked at, so inclusion isn’t necessarily an endorsement. And this isn’t necessarily every cool thing I’ve seen or was posted in the last week, so exclusion isn’t a non-endorsement.