Grab a coffee, take a seat, maybe listen to some music and relax by reading ourblog. We want to share our passions and know how with you and the whole world!
At Crescent Digital, we are regularly called in to perform website audits following a drop in visitors. Over the past 18 months, we have seen more sites moving towards using HTTPS encryption following Google’s announcement of using HTTPS as a ranking signal (1).
However, when adopting HTTPS incorrectly, you will likely see your search traffic suffer.
Clients are absolutely correct to adopt https for their websites as although the ranking increase may be relatively minor, the reassurance to clients that your website is safe and secure will help increase engagement.
Why Mixing Your HTTP & HTTPS is a Bad Thing To Do
Google & other search engines see www, non-www, http & https versions of websites as separate sites each with its own trust & authority.
According to Google (2), technically all of the following urls and domains are different:
http://www.yourdomain.com
http://yourdomain.com
https://www.yourdomain.com
https://yourdomain.com
Your website’s domain will have earned trust & authority which will directly affect where it appears within the organic search results. However, your new https prefixed domain will likely have none, meaning a big drop in search engine trust, authority, rankings and ultimately traffic following the change. In addition, the search engines will not know which version of your site to show in the results when users are searching because they will be seen as duplicates.
What To Do
Having established that Google sees www, non-www, http & https versions of websites as separate domains, diluting any search authority, it is critical to configure your site correctly and there are several critical factors configurations to consider:
Set-up permanent redirects to redirect any visitors and search engine spiders towards your one preferred domain.
Set-up permanent redirects to redirect any old pages (particularly those with a large volume of links & social shares) to the corresponding pages on the new domain / site. This will likely be achieved using the htaccess file if using Apache web server.
Configure Google Search Console in order to set your preferred domain.
What Not To Do
Please do not use the URL Removal Tool to remove old web pages or domains as you can end up removing your whole domain for 6 months. With redirections configured correctly, the search engines will understand and within time start to show the appropriate results.
It’s sad but true, we are moving into the Autumn and soon many people’s thoughts will be on keeping warm and cosy. Its an important time too for business leads & transactions as we find it’s the time of year when staff have returned from their vacations and sitting down to discuss plans.
The next few months are particularly important for retail sales of furniture and homeware and plans for positioning to take advantage of this should be at an advanced stage. If you need assistance or advice on planning your digital marketing campaigns for seasonal sales, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Exhibition Season
For some sectors, Autumn marks a busy exhibition season, both domestically and Internationally and Crescent Digital are formally UKTI approved International digital marketing specialists, so we’re available to discuss how to help realise your ambitions.
What’s Hot?
At Crescent Digital, we love data and we’re always looking for trends to help our clients. One of the biggest spending Google AdWords clients this time last year were retailing Christmas jumpers with AdWords spend exceeding £500,000 in the run-up to Christmas. One trend showing strong growth throughout 2016 is the fashion for military and retro clothing, such as bomber jackets:
Many successful clients started by retailing through eBay & Amazon and several of our clients sell multi-channel through eBay & Amazon in addition to their own web site.
Incidentally, our data shows the hottest selling item category (past 30 days) on eBay to be … Moth Balls.
We didn’t believe it either, but a quick glance at some products shows that there is potential for good revenue within these niches – 201 items sold @ £506 = £101,706 revenue for one product:
Google Penalising Mobile Pages With Pop-Ups
From January 2017, if your website contains pop-ups that cover some of the content; or the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content, your mobile search results may not rank as highly in Google.
As for us, we are here for the duration looking forward to helping you grow your businesses, answering your queries and generally getting the job done.
We’ve been asked by a couple of clients about services where you can find details about who has visited their site. There are paid services providing this and what they are doing is mapping the address / name of the gateway which the visitor uses to connect to the Internet with a company name.
However, in Google Analytics, you will find details of gateway name of who’s visited – the larger corps generally have static IPs with named gateways. This is suited to clients with larger corporate customers and not B2C, as home users tend to lease IP addresses from their ISP.
The report is under -> Audience -> Technology -> Network
This report details how many times they’ve been visited, how many pages have been viewed and whether they have made contact. I add this to a daily report, emailed to the client every morning, and they can prepare to expect a lead or follow up (if they had already made contact). It also allows them to view visits from corporate competitors’ networks.
Google has been testing different search results pages and have this week rolled this out the changes which may make a significant impact.
What has changed:
4 paid AdWords ads at the top of the page (previously 1-3) – there is now more opportunity to show ad extensions in the 3 and 4th positions such as site-links and snippets
The Ads down the right hand side of the page have disappeared completely
Organic search results have been pushed down the results page further
The winners are the advertisers who have ads in positions 1-4. The losers are advertisers in positions 5+ as these will now be shown on the bottom of the page or even page 2. The other losers are organic SEO results as organic results now make up a minority (36.4%) of the search results.
We always recommend using several streams of traffic for your website rather than being over dependent on AdWords or organic Google results. For AdWords advertisers, according to recent data, position #3 has seen the biggest increase this week with a 15% increase in click-throughs and with our clients AdWords, we are positioning ads at position #3 and would suggest as a good tactic to follow if managing your own.
Costs haven’t inflated for positions 1-4 yet, however there’s likely to be a lot of jostling for position when advertisers realise what’s happened so we’d recommend keeping a close eye on positions of ads and traffic.
My thoughts are that contrary to some reports, its not time to panic as we’ve seen several changes before. We’re a little disappointed that this wasn’t communicated to Google Partners and that Google has become even more ‘pay to play’ with prominent results dominated by those with the largest budgets. However, if you’re starting to get fed-up with Google, there’s a lot of chatter about a search engine that doesn’t track you.
If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Thanks for the explaination. I did everything accordingly, and now waiting for the 24h to pass for it to show up in my Analytics. However, the small one-sentence confirmation is not appearing anymore, when someone fills in the contact form on our website. Could you please give some input on how to fix this?
Unfortunately not I’m afraid. It does vary with the type of activity and LinkedIn frequently change their policies, but at present, LinkedIn’s maximum is 30 days.
Regards
Steve
Hi there.thank you for your website
Is there any possibility to see all my updates in linkedin from the bigining?I had been linkedin member for about 3 years or so and .I had shared simething that I need it now and unfortunately I lose to have them any where else they were gone. I’d have been grateful if you can guide me
Many thanks
Verena
| #
Thanks for the explaination. I did everything accordingly, and now waiting for the 24h to pass for it to show up in my Analytics. However, the small one-sentence confirmation is not appearing anymore, when someone fills in the contact form on our website. Could you please give some input on how to fix this?
stevenba
| #
Unfortunately not I’m afraid. It does vary with the type of activity and LinkedIn frequently change their policies, but at present, LinkedIn’s maximum is 30 days.
Regards
Steve
N_jarolmasjed
| #
Hi there.thank you for your website
Is there any possibility to see all my updates in linkedin from the bigining?I had been linkedin member for about 3 years or so and .I had shared simething that I need it now and unfortunately I lose to have them any where else they were gone. I’d have been grateful if you can guide me
Many thanks