TRAFFIC
“Great content improves time on site and promotes social
sharing. The good news, of course, is that the search
engine will be looking at this by vertical and even by page,
so don’t worry if you are in a niche where social sharing
never happens.”
iGaming
There are also a couple of other data points
worthy of mention that appear to be dialing
up as far as ranking factors are concerned.
Turning to Roadmap data once again,
one area certainly worthy of further
monitoring appears to be HTTP and
HTTPS sites. While across the majority
of verticals the signal appears relatively
insignificant, in gaming we can see quite
the opposite. In Figure 4, you can see what
is a strong trend towards pushing HTTPS
sites above those that are not since the
latest update.
Aside from the linking metrics, NonHTML Page Load Speed and Entire Page
Size are 2nd and 5th in terms of highest
trend changes. 8th and 11th are also speed
factors: Non Html Page Size and Page
Load Speed (see Figure 5).
Although these elements were
correlating strongly in December to March,
it looks to us as though Google has applied
an increased weighting to these signals.
Is Google rewarding smaller,
lightweight, quicker sites within the gaming
industry? The trend of our data across
all the verticals we track would certainly
suggest this (see Figure 6).
What does this all mean?
So, does this change anything? That really
depends on your current strategy. Clearly,
investment in quality content becomes
even more important as sites are now
being presented with both carrot and stick
incentives to produce it.
On the one hand, Panda is seeking out
and negatively impacting poor quality
output, while this latest iteration to the core
algorithm looks to be rewarding the best of
content with better visibility.
Great content improves time on site and
promotes social sharing. The good news,
of course, is that the search engine will be
looking at this by vertical and even by page,
so don’t worry if you are in a niche where
social sharing never happens. As always,
measurement will be relative, but being the
best among your peer group will put you in
the best possible position.
The best way to position your site for
these changes is an audience-focused
content strategy, and a free downloadable
toolkit is available to help you develop such
a plan5.
While it’s early days for the Quality
Update, what is clear is that the reward for
creating quality content just got greater.
I’ll be sure to update on this topic as
more data becomes available.
Figure 6: Mean values for entire page size
SIMON PENSON is
founder and MD of Zazzle
Media, a data-driven
and content-led digital
marketing agency based
in the UK. They work with a
number of iGaming brands, helping
them to create and implement contentled strategies to build audiences of
value through both search and social.
You can follow Simon on Twitter
@simonpenson or email him at
[email protected].
5
24
iGB Affiliate