Your website could be rapidly disappearing from search engines as we speak. Before you start hyperventilating and scanning search result pages for your business, understand that any issues causing the demise of your web presence can be easily resolved. The most recent updates in SEO have unveiled themselves within the past few weeks and they sure are disrupting things. Read on to see how these updates could affect you.
AMP
Site pages using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) will be shown SEO favor. When searching for a particular topic on Google from a mobile device, pages created using AMP will appear ahead of others in the Top Stories section of the search results page. And if you click on a particular AMP-affiliated top story, it will load faster than you can say the word “AMP.”
AdWords
Your paid search ads could be displaying differently than before. Google AdWords is changing its paid search ad layout to include four ads on the top and will no longer include any ads on the right sidebar.
Contact Form 7
For WordPress folks, if you’ve been updating your plugins recently (and you should for site security), then you may have noticed some configuration errors pop up within the backend of your forms. CF7 now requires that the email address in the Mail tab of contact form settings to match the site domain as well as a few other message field changes.
Yoast SEO
The latest version of this plugin blocks site meta-description, thus making you look like an amateur unless you fix the error. Fortunately, Yoast will alert you to this with the update in your WordPress dashboard and prompt you on how to correct this error.
Social media bonus news:
Advertisers are reacting positively to the new Facebook reactions.
In case you thought you woke up to a world where everything you knew about online marketing was wrong, let us assuage your fears. Keep your site relevant and stay personally informed by reading up on the latest news in SEO and online marketing.