Google

New Study: Five years after EU antitrust fine, over half of UK Google Shopping ads still come from Google

Five years after the EU commission fined Google 2.4 billion euros ($2.65 billion) and ordered it to open up its Google Shopping service in Europe to external competition, a new study suggests around 53% of ads on the platform in the UK, still originate from Google itself - up from around 49% in 2019. The research from Searchmetrics indicates that after Brexit, Google is no longer trying to increase competition on its shopping platform in the UK.

New Study: Majority of Websites Currently Fail to Meet User Experience Requirements in Google’s Forthcoming Core Web Vitals Update

San Mateo April 20, 2021 – New research suggests most websites that rank in Google’s top 20 search results do not currently pass the minimum requirements for a good page experience set out in the search engine’s new Core Web Vitals update which officially rolls out from mid-June [1]. 96% of sites tested in US desktop searches and more than 90% of those in mobile searches fail to meet Google’s three Core Web Vitals thresholds for good website performance and usability and risk their rankings being negatively impacted from June. Currently only the top 2 or 3 ranking websites in search results achieve the required “good” score in most of the Core Web Vitals metrics according to the analysis by Searchmetrics.

SEO for Business: What Google Analytics Can Tell You

If you’re an individual or business looking to amplify your presence in the digital space, chances are you’ve looked into search engine optimization (SEO) as one of the first steps to drive more traffic to your business’ website. It's important to produce content for the keywords which are related to your industry. For example, SimplyRest which is primarily a mattress guide website also continuously  produces quality sleep related content.

Leveraging Googlebots Detection of JavaScript Redirects for Ranking

In the last I/O developer conference held in May 2019, there was an official announcement from Google that Googlebot web crawler is up-to-date with the latest Chromium version. This featured update also made Googlebot capable of crawling the modern websites to access those features too modern browsers demands like the use of JavaScript.

WordPress.com Premium Plan now offering Google Analytics

After years of maintaining and hosting my own WordPress and Drupal sites myself, last year I decided to give WordPress.com a trial run for one of my websites. I opted to subscribe to WP's Premium plan over their Business plan. The initial quantity of content for my website was low and I could not justify the higher cost of the Business plan for this site.

New Study Reveals Positive Impact of Page Speed on Google Rankings

San Mateo, May 16, 2019 - Websites that rank higher on Google tend to load faster and provide a smoother user experience on mobile according to a new Searchmetrics study conducted using Google’s open-source website auditing tool, Google Lighthouse[1]. And higher ranking sites in general are more likely to use modern web technologies such as next-generation image formats and the newer, faster HTTP/2 web protocol.  

Wikipedia and YouTube Dominate Search Results Globally, a New Study Finds

San Mateo, February 28, 2019 - Wikipedia retains its crown as the most visible website in Google search results globally based on its performance in organic search in ten countries, including the United States, UK, Germany and France. Second comes YouTube, which also saw the biggest absolute improvement in search performance over the whole of 2018 in all the countries analyzed.

New Searchmetrics study: Google now wants brands to get niche-specific

San Mateo, October 17, 2018 - Brands’ organic search strategies on Google should now be tightly tailored to the niche they operate in, according to the latest research by Searchmetrics. That’s because Google’s use of technologies such as AI and machine-learning are helping it pin-point, more clearly than ever, the specific factors that satisfy search queries in different niches and contexts. 

Rehabilitating Google AMP: My failed attempt

Back in February I wrote an article saying how I believed Google AMP has been imposed on the web by Google as a ‘standard’ for developing fast webpages, and my dismay about that. Google apparently developed this as an internal project without any open collaboration, and avoiding the W3C standardization processes. Google made implementation of Google AMP a requirement to show at the top of the search results for common news searches.

To many of us open web folk, Google’s AMP violated the widely held principle of search engines not putting bias into search results, and/or the principle of web standards (take your pick – it would not be bias if it was a standardized approach that the wider web community had agreed upon).