Best practices for mobile-first indexing

Mobile-first indexing means Google will predominantly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page's content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user's query. Since the majority of users now access Google via a mobile device, the index will primarily use the mobile version of a page's content going forward. We aren't creating a separate mobile-first index. We continue to use only one index.

With mobile-first indexing, Googlebot primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent. We will continue to show the URL that is the most appropriate to users (whether it's a desktop or mobile URL) in Search results.

As we said, we transition sites slowly to ensure a good experience for site owners and users. We evaluate each site individually on its readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the best practices and transition the site when the site is ready.

What's changing

If you have this type of site...
Desktop only Your site is desktop only and doesn't have a mobile-friendly version.	No change. The mobile version is the same as the desktop version.
Responsive web design Your site adjusts for screen size.	No change. The mobile version is the same as the desktop version.
Canonical AMP All your web pages are created in AMP HTML.	No change. The mobile version is the same as the desktop version.
Separate URLs Each desktop URL has an equivalent different URL thatserves mobile-optimized content. This site type is also known as an m-dot site.	Google prefers the mobile URL for indexing. To prepare for mobile-first indexing, follow our best practices.
Dynamic serving Your site serves different content based on the user's device. Users only see one URL.	Google prefers the mobile optimized content for indexing. To prepare for mobile-first indexing, follow our best practices.
AMP and non-AMP Your site has both AMP and non-AMP versions of a page. Users see two different URLs.	Google prefers the mobile version of the non-AMP URL for indexing. If your non-AMP mobile version uses dynamic serving or separate URLs, follow our best practices.

Best practices for dynamic serving and separate URLs

If your site has separate desktop and mobile content, which means you have a dynamic serving or separate URLs (or m-dot) site, make sure you follow the best practices below to prepare for mobile-first indexing:

• Your mobile site should contain the same content as your desktop site. If your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, you should consider updating your mobile site so that its primary content is equivalent with your desktop site. This includes text, images (with alt-attributes), and videos – in the usual crawlable and indexable formats.
• Structured data should be present on both versions of your site. Make sure URLs in the structured data on the mobile versions are updated to the mobile URLs. If you use Data Highlighter to provide structured data, regularly check the Data Highlighter dashboard for extraction errors.
• Metadata should be present on both versions of the site. Make sure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent across both versions of your site.

Additional best practices for separate URLs

If your site has separate URLs (also known as m-dot), there are additional best practices you should follow.

• Verify both versions of your site in Search Console to make sure you have access to data and messages for both versions. Your site may experience a data shift when Google switches to mobile-first indexing for your site.
• Check hreflang links on separate URLs. When you use rel=hreflang link elements forinternationalization, link between mobile and desktop URLs separately. Your mobile URLs' hreflang should point to mobile URLs, and similarly desktop URL hreflang should point to desktop URLs.
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  Example of hreflang for separate URLs
• Ensure your servers have enough capacity to a handle potential increase in crawl rate on the mobile version of your site.
• Verify that your robots.txt directives work as you intended for both versions of your site. The robots.txt file lets site owners specify which parts of a website may be crawled or not. In most cases, sites should use the same directives for both mobile and desktop versions of their sites.
• Make sure you have the correct rel=canonical and rel=alternate link elements between your mobile and desktop versions.

Resource URL: https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-first-indexing

Will Change in WordPress Themes Affect Your SEO Results?

The answer to the question “does changing WordPress Themes Affect Your SEO Results” remains dynamic and is dependent entirely on the situations that it passes through. Changing WordPress website themes can affect the SEO results of your WordPress website as well as WordPress blog, whether it changes  SEO positively or negatively depends on the process. 

Most WordPress professionals are experts at doing magic with PHP and CSS, but when it comes to SEO, they probably fail

When handling a WordPress website, you need check whether the SEO of your website is handled by a plugin or a particular WordPress theme. There are various kinds of WordPress themes and plugins for SEO. It depends entirely on the SEO plugin if it helps or hinders your SEO. 

While changing your WordPress theme, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind for your website.  One important thing,is that you can not just expect it to provide great SEO results to your WordPress website, but you need to do some investigation of your new chosen theme.

As an example, WordPress Thesis theme has certain SEO features to handle the ranking of your website for search engine results. Also, with Thesis theme, you do not need to use SEO plugins as changing the theme on a frequent basis can again have some negative impacts on your WordPress website. The theme framework is preferable as it takes care of all minor changes and the little things about the SEO of your website.

While changing the WordPress theme, your website may come up with various issues. Read on to find out those changes in custom settings!

How Changing WordPress Themes Affect Your SEO Results

• Loss of Custom Theme Settings

When you switch your theme and you are unaware of the performance of your the new theme, you may end up losing all your custom theme settings. Your new theme may or may not contain the features from your old theme. The reason behind this may be the different ways of coding used in the themes, so you get different functionality and design. 

You will find the difference in the order your website gets loaded. For instance, one of them will load the sidebars first and then post the body. Whereas, the other will load the body first and then will go for the sidebars.

While changing the theme of your website, if you have not checked the functioning of the theme, you may suffer such changes on your website which, in turn will result you with changes in the loading time of your website.

Why does this matter? If the loading time is increased, you will ultimately end up getting negative impacts on your SEO results. Make sure to check the performance before switching to your new theme! 

• Changes in the Heading tags

When changing the WordPress theme, you must find out the heading tags for the post titles used in the theme you are selecting. The tags for which your post titles are used or hyperlinked will affect the overall SEO of your WordPress website. When changing the theme of your WordPress website, you should have studied this aspect of theme. 

• Having a Backup is Always A Great Option

Whenever planning to change the theme, making a backup is a must for any WordPress Development Company. Make sure to you must take the backup of your website’s theme and database before migrating it to the SEO plugin. There are a lot of SEO plugins out there that contains inbuilt SEO settings to which you can store your backup and continue your process of changing the WordPress theme without any changes in your SEO settings.

When you have saved the backup of your theme, you can make use of the last theme if the working of the new theme does not go right. There are times when after changing the theme, you find that you do not like to work with the new theme. At this time, you can make use of the backup that has been saved from the last theme. This shouldn’t affect your SEO results, but you may notice some fluctuations in the SEO ranking of your website. After the initial fluctuations, it will return to your original SEO results. Hence, having a backup of the recent theme is a great option to have a perfect website working with the WordPress platform.

• SEO Friendly Theme Should be Preferred

WordPress platform contains a huge variety of beautiful themes, but when it comes to SEO friendly WordPress theme, very few of them seem to show positive results. Some of them come with fantastic design features, but lack in clean and SEO friendly coding. Hence, for making a perfectly SEO-friendly website, you should select the theme which has certain in-built features to enhance the SEO ranking of your website.

Once done with changing, make sure you have previewed the newest WordPress theme before it goes live on your website. With these, you can look for the bugs or errors in the latest version. There are certain tools available for detecting the error or the bugs happening to the updated website theme.

Change in theme affects your SEO results, but whether to bring those changes in a positive or a negative way is totally dependent on the selection of the WordPress theme. If chosen smartly, it will have drastic positive effects on your SEO, and if not, it can also ruin the recent ranking of your WordPress Website. All of it depends on the selection of your WordPress theme.

The functioning of the theme you select is the only thing that makes the difference in the working of your website and in the SEO results of the website. So, have a concrete checklist before rushing to look for the next WordPress theme for your website and follow it to get an exact and appropriate theme based on your requirements and budget.

Remember that selecting your WordPress theme smartly will lead you to better SEO rankings!

Resource URL: https://sceptermarketing.com/wordpress-themes-affect-your-seo-results/

Google begins rolling out mobile-first indexing to more sites

Sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing will be migrating over now, and Google will send notifications via Search Console.

Google has announced that it has begun the process of rolling out the mobile-first indexing to more sites. This rollout is only for sites that “follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing,” Google said.
This is the first time Google has confirmed it is moving a large number of sites to this mobile-first indexing process. Google did tell us last October that a limited number of sites had been moved over. But this Google announcement makes it sound like the process of mobile-first indexing on a larger scale has already begun.
Google did say it will notify webmasters/site owners that their sites are migrated to the mobile-first indexing process via messages in the Google Search Console. Here is a screen shot of a notification:


Google also said “site owners will see significantly increased crawl rate from the Smartphone Googlebot. Additionally, Google will show the mobile version of pages in Search results and Google cached pages.”

What is mobile-first indexing?

Google says it is about how Google crawls your site. Google will only have one index, but how Google crawls and creates the index will be based on a mobile-first experience going forward. Google wrote:

To recap, our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our — primarily mobile — users find what they’re looking for.

Google has a detailed developer document on mobile-first indexing. Also make sure to check out our FAQs on mobile-first indexing.

Resource URL: https://searchengineland.com/google-begins-rolling-out-mobile-first-indexing-to-more-sites-295095

20 Common English Mistakes Made by Indian People

Depending on whether you are a native speaker or not, the English language can either be hard or simple to learn. Most non-native speakers consider it hard to learn especially in situation where they get introduced to the same at a very late stage in life. In as much as the native English speakers are assumed to have an easier time with the English language, not everyone can claim to have mastery on the same. As a matter of fact, most of them speak the language without a proper consideration on the grammar and words work.
Depending on what are your preferences, you can choose to either learn the British or the American English versions which are the most popular. Other versions include: the Canadian version, the Australian and the New Zealand version to name but a few. All these versions are slightly different from one another in terms of their grammar rules and in some case the spelling of words. To a typical non-native, all these can be overwhelming and confusing at the same time. This makes it hard for anyone who is willing to learn the language. In fact, some people attribute their countless mistakes to having such disparities in the versions.
In this piece, we’ll pay much of our attention to the Indian people as we try to explore some of the common mistakes they make in relation to the English language.

Get vs. Gets

A very common mistake made by the Indians which sees them adding the word ”s” to words unnecessarily.
Example: Unless you gets your act right
This is wrong. Unless the words ”you” is replaced by ”he” and ”your” replaced by ”his”. Better yet you cab drop the letter ”s” from ”gets”.

Their vs. There

More often than not, these words are misused. ”Their” refers to people whereas ”there” is used to refer to places.
Example: I have been there.
They came with their goods.

Misuse of a comma

The main purpose of a comma in a sentence should be to indicate a pause in a long sentence or split a list of items mentioned. When a sentence is split, it accounts to the misuse of a comma.
Example: It takes him all day, to drive home.
This is referred to as sentence splitting and is in fact wrong. The comma basically confuses the sentence and creates what is commonly referred to as sentence fragments.

Blunder vs. Mistake

These two words basically mean the same thing and can never be used in a sentence at the same time.
Example: You have made a blunder mistake
This is wrong because the sentence actually means, ”You have made a mistake mistake.”  It can either be ”You have made a mistake” or ”You have made a blunder”.

More vs. Better

At no point should they be used together in a sentence.
Example: This could never have turned out to be more better.
The word better in itself implies superiority hence the use of the word ”more” in the sentence is seen as being unnecessary.

Does vs. Do

”Does” is used in singular form while ”Do” indicates the plural nature of the subject.
Example: Why does he bother you a lot?
Why do they bother you a lot?

Which vs. That

One of the most popular mistakes that cuts across all nationalities. ”That” should be used as a restrictive pronoun while ”Which” should be used as a relative pronoun to imply the available options. In a nutshell, ”Which” defines and ”That” limits.
Example: I never watch movies that are not HD.  This means that you limit yourself to HD movies.
I only watch HD movies which are available on DVD. It means that you can watch HD movies available on DVD and do not have to download them.

Who vs. Whom

As a subjective pronoun, ”Who” is used in situations where a pronoun acts as the subject of a particular sentence. On the other hand, ”Whom” is used as an objective pronoun and used whenever a pronoun acts as an object in a sentence.
Example: Who is she?
To whom was the assignment given?

Putting a comma before the word ”that”

This is a very common grammar mistake made by Indians. There is a school of thought of the opinion that, ”that” should never have a comma before it while other provide for some discretion in certain scenarios.
Example: I did not think, that they were wrong.
This is wrong.

Un-capitalized words at the beginning of a quotation mark

Every time you start a quotation mark, it must be followed by a capital letter.
Example: He said, ”Get up and head to school.”

Forgetting to put a question mark

This mostly happens in sentences that do not begin with ”Why”, ”What”, ”How”, ”Who”, and ”When”.
Example: Are they not going to come back.
That is wrong. The sentence needs to end with a question mark.

Place vs. Plaice

This is a very common spelling mistake.  ”Place” refers to a certain location or position while ”Plaice” is some type of fish.
Example: He took the first place.
Who needs a plaice?

Accept vs. Except

When spoken, these words sound almost the same and can be confusing to non-natives. ”Accept” means to agree to take something that’s being offered while ”Except” means with the exclusion of something.
Example: Kindly accept this as a token of appreciation.
The book is new except the cover.

Its and it’s

”Its” is used to show possession while ”it’s” is the short version of ”it is”.
Example: It’s broken.
The vehicle broke its windscreen.

Envy vs. Jealousy

”Envy” is used to imply the pursuit to someone else’s success whereas ”Jealousy” has a much more negative meaning implying a fear of competition.
Example: I envy you with all your success.
His jealous nature contributed to his poor judgement.

May vs. Might

”May” is normally used to imply a possibility while ”Might” refers to uncertainty.
Example: Two shots may get you drunk.
It might rain today.

Fewer vs. Less

”Fewer” is mostly used on items that can be counted while ”Less” is used for hypothetical quantities.
Example: Today, the market has fewer people.
Last year the company was less successful.

Since vs. Because

”Since” refers to time while ”Because” is used to refer to causality.
Example: Since I started drinking, I’ve lost around 10 cell phones.
Because I’m highly intoxicated, I’ll not drive.

Bring vs. Take

The use of these two words basically depends on whether the object is moving towards or away from you.
Example: Take this to your mother.
Bring it to me.

Averse vs. Adverse

”Adverse” is used to refer to unfavourable while ”Averse” refers to the state of being reluctant.
Example: The adverse effects of tobacco.

A good number of people are averse to sleep at work.

Resource URL: http://englishharmony.com/20-common-indian-english-mistakes/