What is the Google Helpful Content Update?
In our new series of Q&A sessions, we ask our very own Spike SEO specialists for their thoughts on some of the big topics in technical SEO today. We asked our Head of SEO – Tom Nelson and SEO Training Director – Steve Bailey to sit down and discuss: What is the Google Helpful Content […]
Why Google Analytics 4 might just be a good thing
What is Google Analytics 4? In a nutshell, GA4 is the next generation of Analytics, moving away from the session-based model in Universal Analytics to an events-based model (more on that later) and bringing sites and apps together within a single property. It marks a shift in both measurement and reporting unlike any seen before […]
Google’s Latest Update to Penalise Low-Quality Content
Google’s new ‘helpful content update’ will penalise sites that have created content purely for search engines rather than readers. Reminiscent of Google’s now decade-old Penguin update, the helpful content update will penalise poor-quality content. Any site that has crafted content purely for search engines will receive a sitewide signal that makes it difficult to rank. […]
What is new about Google’s Coverage (Page indexing) report?
Google have recently updated issue categorisation in Search Console for webmasters and SEOs. Google’s coverage report is a very helpful area of the Google Search Console reporting suite to provide insight into the broad but critical area of content quality. This handy report assists SEOs with looking at website architecture and has had some nice […]
Masters Of User Generated Content: An SEO study
What is user generated content? User generated content (UGC) is any type of image, text, video or audio uploaded by a web user to a website, forum, application, wiki or social media. In this article, I take a look at how user generated content (UGC) accelerates SEO performance for 4 household digital brands: Amazon, Trip […]
A guide to the impact that machine learning will have upon search
Why we liked this article Good to get some clarity on machine learning terms. Gain insight into Google’s machine learning algorithms. Provides a good understanding of the different types of machine learning algorithms and models.
Italy is the latest EU country to declare Google Analytics illegal
Why we liked this article More and more European countries are ruling that Google Analytics contravenes privacy legislation, under GDPR, and is technically illegal. The key issues surround the fact that Google transfers data to the U.S. and is obliged to hand it over upon request, which means the E.U. can no longer guarantee its […]
What Google News are looking to do with their new desktop design
Google announced some design enhancements this week to make Google News (desktop) a much more sticky, engaging user experience. There’s definitely more of a Yahoo News feel about it and there are 3 immediate areas of focus: personalisation, customised topics and local news. Google News: personalisation Similar to the Google News app & Google app, […]
The dialect of tech
The dialect of tech Say What? Survey finds that smart home devices struggle the most with Welsh accents! Welsh and Scottish claim to be the most misunderstood when it comes to voice recognition tech! Almost 42% of us change our voice to be recognised. Map shows how regional accents fare with voice recognition. Some might say […]
How TikTok’s SEO exploded after the 2022 Core Search Update
The social media landscape is constantly changing and this is reflected in what we search for and how we arrive to popular content. Between May 25th 2022 (Happy Core Search Update day to all SEOs) and early June 2022, TikTok has seen massive Google organic search growth. This shift in rankings for the social media […]
Ahrefs announces $60M investment in building creator-friendly search engine, ‘Yep’
Why we liked this article Ahrefs brings over 12 years of experience in crawling and storing data sets already. It has already deployed 1000 servers in its own data centre for this. Looking at a new model of internet advertising for Yep that will reward creators, such as Wikipedia.
Google announces its move to offer Career Certificate scholarships
Why we liked this article This is Google’s first move towards offering an SEO/Marketing certification, currently limited to US businesses. Whilst they maintain all course instructors are Google employees who are subject-matter experts the content has quickly come under fire from the SEO industry who have pointed out that the course content is misleading or […]