Mobilegeddon is a name for Google's search engine algorithm update of April 21, 2015. [1] The term was coined by Chuck Price in a post written for Search Engine Watch on March 9, 2015. The term was then adopted by webmasters and web-developers.
The main effect of this update was to give priority to websites that display well on smartphones and other mobile devices. The change did not affect searches made from a desktop computer or a laptop. [2]
Google announced its intention to make the change in February 2015. [3] In addition to their announcement, Google published an article, "Mobile Friendly Sites," on their Google Developers page to help webmasters with the transition. [4] Google claims the transition to mobile-friendly sites was to improve user experience, stating "the desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device." [4]
The protologism is a blend word of "mobile" and "Armageddon" because the change "could cause massive disruption to page rankings." [5] But, writing for Forbes , Robert Hof says that concerns about the change were "overblown" in part because "Google is providing a test to see if sites look good on smartphones". [6]
Search engine results pages on smartphones now show URLs in "breadcrumb" format, as opposed to the previous explicit format. [7]
Based on their data set, software company Searchmetrics found that the average loss of rankings for the non-mobile friendly sites measured was 0.21 positions on average. [8] Content marketing company BrightEdge has tracked over 20,000 URLs since the update, and is reporting a 21% decrease in non-mobile-friendly URLs on the first 3 pages of search results. [9] According to Peter J. Meyers, it was "nothing to write home about." [10]
Google Search is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the Web by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. It is the most popular search engine worldwide.
Meta elements are tags used in HTML and XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a Web page. They are part of a web page's head section. Multiple Meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.
Spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating related and/or unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Googlebot is the web crawler software used by Google that collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google Search engine. This name is actually used to refer to two different types of web crawlers: a desktop crawler and a mobile crawler.
The anchor text, link label, or link text is the visible, clickable text in an HTML hyperlink. The term "anchor" was used in older versions of the HTML specification for what is currently referred to as the "a element", or <a>. The HTML specification does not have a specific term for anchor text, but refers to it as "text that the a element wraps around". In XML terms, the anchor text is the content of the element, provided that the content is text.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. SEM may incorporate search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings and increase the Call to action (CTA) on the website.
Internet Explorer Mobile was a mobile version of Internet Explorer developed by Microsoft, based on versions of the MSHTML (Trident) layout engine. IE Mobile comes loaded by default with Windows Phone and Windows CE. Later versions of Internet Explorer Mobile are based on the desktop version of Internet Explorer. Older versions however, called Pocket Internet Explorer, are not based on the same layout engine.
Sitemaps is a protocol in XML format meant for a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for web crawling. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs of the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more efficiently and to find URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site's content. The Sitemaps protocol is a URL inclusion protocol and complements robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.
Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about "what" the site visitor is searching for but also "where" information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude. Examples of local searches include "Hong Kong hotels", "Manhattan restaurants", and "Dublin car rental". Local searches exhibit explicit or implicit local intent. A search that includes a location modifier, such as "Bellevue, WA" or "14th arrondissement", is an explicit local search. A search that references a product or service that is typically consumed locally, such as "restaurant" or "nail salon", is an implicit local search.
Google Search Console is a web service by Google which allows webmasters to check indexing status, search queries, crawling errors and optimize visibility of their websites.
In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website. Briefly, link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results. Link building is also a proven marketing tactic for increasing brand awareness.
Yandex Search is a search engine owned by the company Yandex, based in Russia. In January 2015, Yandex Search generated 51.2% of all of the search traffic in Russia according to LiveInternet.
Google Panda is a major change to Google's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", in particular "content farms", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.
Responsive web design (RWD) or responsive design is an approach to web design that aims to make web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes from minimum to maximum display size to ensure usability and satisfaction.
Google Penguin is a codename for a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared Grey Hat SEM techniques involved in increasing artificially the ranking of a webpage by manipulating the number of links pointing to the page. Such tactics are commonly described as link schemes. According to Google's John Mueller, as of 2013, Google announced all updates to the Penguin filter to the public.
Google Search, offered by Google, is the most widely used search engine on the World Wide Web as of 2023, with over eight billion searches a day. This page covers key events in the history of Google's search service.
Google Web Light, introduced in 2015, was a service offered by Google for faster browsing within its Android mobile browser Chrome. It detected slow Internet connections, such as 2G, and switched to Google proxy servers with built-in data compression. It could speed up loading times for text-based websites. These pages also had the advantage of being less taxing on the hardware of entry-level devices with less processing power.
Google Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for measuring the quality of web pages. It can be run against any web page, public or, requiring authentication. Google Lighthouse audits performance, accessibility, and search engine optimization factors of web pages, this is the major difference from Google PageSpeed, the Google Lighthouse provides more detail information. It also includes the ability to test progressive web applications for compliance with standards and best practices. Google Lighthouse is developed by Google and aims to help web developers, the tool can be run by using Chrome browser extension or by using terminal (command) for batch auditing a list of URLs. Google's recommendation is for using the online version of Page Speed Insights as of 15th May 2015.
