No mobile website? Google sinks your business

[Captain Awesome]

Yup. Pay attention to your bounce rates - they measure how long people stay on your website. The longer the better. As soon as the bounce rate (measures percentage of people leaving within one minute) goes up, Google starts punishing the website because it thinks it's not benefiting visitors.

Anything under 50% is healthy.

[36Drew]

Sometimes it takes awhile for the bots to pick it up. When I started the last site it took 3 months to get listed.

It takes ~5 days from zero to hero if you create a Google Webmaster account, validate your website, and submit your sitemap.

Bing and Yahoo both have similar workflows available.

[36Drew]

I started a website about a month ago, and Google results did not return the site at all (or at least not on the first page). It has mobile optimization, so yesterday I did a Google search and 'poof' there it was in the top 5 results!

Does that mean that any the sites not optimized for mobile were turfed from the results putting my site higher in the list?

Yes. Support SSL and you'll improve your rank even further.

[36Drew]

What Jenny said.

Algorithm favors web site that has been around longer, has more links pointed to it, and has more people spending time on it. If only your mom visits your website, Google keeps it mind and sinks it. As opposed to a website that has 500 unique visitors and has people spending considerable amount of time on it.

There's a whole science behind SEO. I know people who optimize web sites for a living and push them to the first page of Google - but even they can't keep up with changes of the algorithm.

There's a lot that will factor into SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

First - there is the concept of an authenticated and unauthenticated experience (Note - I did not say anonymous). If you are signed in to your Google account, your search history is tracked and aggregated. Your search results, within Google, are not the same results I see. Don't believe me? Fire up chrome. Sign into google and run a search. Open an incognito window and run the same search. The SERP will be different. Even the ads. The disparity will grow to more often you perform authenticated searches. Re: Anonymous. If you authenticate and then log out, or authenticate after searching - your results are no longer anonymous. While you have an active browser session, Google is aware of your account.

Google (and the others) don't have a single "Algorithm" regardless of what any SEO "expert" will tell you. There are a multitude of factors that increase your ranking - an aggregation of algorithms. The most commonly named one is PageRank. Forcing HTTPS over HTTP will also improve your SERP results. Being mobile-friendly (which is related to but not the same as a "mobile" site) is another. In fact, having a specific "mobile site" (m.site.com) will not improve your ranking - it will hurt it. Google wants your site design to be responsive.

Content, however, is the big driver. You want content that is unique, is relevant and matches that which people are searching for. Google does not measure the number of users that are actively looking at your website. They measure the number of click-throughs from SERPs and inbound links from other relevant sites. They also care about the quality of those inbound links. Having a link to your website from a spammy web farm will hurt your ranking. Being mentioned in a news article on Castenet will (probably) improve your ranking.

TLDR; Be relevant. Have good neighbors. Promote security. Be inclusive of mobile devices. Google will love you.

[36Drew]

Yup. Pay attention to your bounce rates - they measure how long people stay on your website. The longer the better. As soon as the bounce rate (measures percentage of people leaving within one minute) goes up, Google starts punishing the website because it thinks it's not benefiting visitors.

Anything under 50% is healthy.

Google doesn't rank by "bounce rate". They will report on it, as a means of optimization, by means of their webmaster tools. However, said bounce rate has no bearing on the ranking of your site/page in Google's index.

Also - "Bounce Rate" isn't measured in minutes. Bounces are single-page users. They hit a landing page and do not progress beyond it.

[36Drew]

I'd be interested to know what tools the average user or even smalltimer (Including Castanet) actually leverages for tracking usage, monitoring, performance, social, and the like. Sounds like a good Devops-y/webby discussion.

[JLives]

It takes ~5 days from zero to hero if you create a Google Webmaster account, validate your website, and submit your sitemap.

Bing and Yahoo both have similar workflows available.

That's the same thing the person who wrote the website said. It didn't happen. Mind you it was set up several years ago so maybe things have changed in the meantime.

It doesn't really matter though. I managed to get our site listed very high in our relevant search terms for free so I don't put much stock in the techie stuff. Content is the important part in my experience.

[36Drew]

That's the same thing the person who wrote the website said. It didn't happen. Mind you it was set up several years ago so maybe things have changed in the meantime.

I'll gather that you were given poor guidance, then. Our DI team can consistently get our new properties crawled in short order.

It doesn't really matter though. I managed to get our site listed very high in our relevant search terms for free so I don't put much stock in the techie stuff. Content is the important part in my experience.

I think there might be a difference in understanding - "indexed" is not the same as "listed in the top 10". Your webmaster tools account will give you insight into whether GoogleBot has crawled and indexed your site or not. It will also report content issues to you. This isn't "techie" stuff - it's content creator stuff. If you don't have access to your own GWT stats, you should remedy that. Even for a small personal site. It's useful information to have.

[JLives]

I don't really care about any of that stuff. I checked it out on several different computers and devices as I do know Google results can vary. I'm no longer at that company but they still turn up 4th in the entire province for our relevant terms and 1st in Kelowna/Okanagan due to the content I wrote for the site. Being easy to find and contact by your customers is what really matters to a small business.

[Always Sunny]

Most people in North America use google and a large percent outside of NA do so as well.

I guess I'm not part of the most.
Duck duck Go. and Bing

A little ironic that I had to Google "Duck Duck Go" to figure out what it was ;)

[36Drew]

I don't really care about any of that stuff. I checked it out on several different computers and devices as I do know Google results can vary. I'm no longer at that company but they still turn up 4th in the entire province for our relevant terms and 1st in Kelowna/Okanagan due to the content I wrote for the site. Being easy to find and contact by your customers is what really matters to a small business.

Fair enough.

At EA, we prefer to have insight into details such as how people are using our sites, what types of devices our users are using, various funnels, social sharing and message reception.

Dumb things - like somebody creates a Sim in the game. Saves it to the gallery. It gets shared out. Like this. Where? Who's consuming that content? How popular is it? Maybe if it's really popular, we should hilight it in the top picks.

Or when deciding if we continue to support a web browser - we can simply delve into webmaster tools to determine how popular IE10 is and decide if we want to continue to support it (The answer are "Not very" and "No", btw).

How about how much traffic a given article might be getting. How about "How many users have a particular article open in their web broswer right now" (ie., a live-media news release). Chartbeat. It also tracks social mentions and shares.

Being at the top of the google search results is no indication as to how people are finding you, discussing you, or consuming you. It just means that you appear for a given combination of words. Even a small company should care about those things. It's like having a two-way conversation with your users without having to actually disturb them.

[Captain Awesome]

We're missing Rekabis in this discussion to make it a nerdy *bleep* "I know a lot about computer stuff" topic.

[36Drew]

We're missing Rekabis in this discussion to make it a nerdy *bleep* "I know a lot about computer stuff" topic.

So somebody with real domain knowledge shows up, speaks to a topic that you're obviously interested in (otherwise you wouldn't be here), and you turn that into "This is a nerdy *bleep* I know a lot about computer stuff" discussion?

Seriously?

[Symbonite]

some people dont even know they are using google and using some hijacked webpage like Ask.com or searchprotect that looks like google but isnt.

hey while your at it...click here for a free ipad!