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Problems with Google PageSpeed Insights

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Google PageSpeed Insights has become a tad problematic of late.

Firstly, Google PageSpeed is just a list of code changes that might improve your website’s speed. In most cases trying to do everything they list would simple break a WordPress website – it’s usually a matter of having to try lots or permutations of speed settings to see which scores best. So for example with a lot of themes if you minify javascript and defer scripts it it’ll break things, so we have to choose between those.

It’s also true that when Google actually uses speed as a metric for your SEO ranking, they’re looking at the actual load time for the site as opposed to how it measures on the PageSpeed metric.

To give you an idea of why the % scores aren’t a great measure, let’s consider browser caching. We can’t change whether other domains have it or not. So if you reference any other scripts in your site, for example Facebook, we can’t affect that. And you’ll still fail for the ‘browser caching’ section – even though it might already be applied to all your own scripts.

It’s a great irony of PageSpeed that having Google Analytics installed on a site always costs it a few % points, for the same reason. You’d think Google could do better with their own systems.

Google also changed the way they display results recently and it’s made their reports far less useful for the majority of sites out there. They recommend you ‘Serve images in next-gen formats’, even though there’s a lack of cross-browser compatibility for them. (Yes, you can set things up with a fall back so if a visitor’s browser doesn’t support JPG 2000 it will show another image instead – but as yet this isn’t something you’ll find commonly in WordPress themes. In fact I’m not sure it’s in any.)

So suddenly this testing tool is giving biased advice – guess which browser has full compatibility with next generation image formats? Google Chrome.

Like most Google reporting, PageSpeed does give a good idea of possible things to investigate but it’s not worth getting so hung up on you stop focusing on your content creation.

Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56

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Over the past week I’ve seen more than my fair share of emails from Google regarding “Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56″.

It’s a big change, but not exactly a surprising one.

Google has been pushing to make the web more secure for a long time. Seeing HTTPS and green padlocks all over the web has been a key direction for them – they’ve even given secure sites a ranking boost as part of their algorithms. This new change is really an extension of their general SEO ethos.

So anyone running the latest version of Google’s Chrome Browser (version 56) will see a warning when browsing any web page that asks for sensitive information. The examples they’ve given are passwords or credit card details but undoubtedly there’s other situations a user would be presented with a warning too.

I’ve been recommending web owners migrate to HTTPS for a few years, but now it’s become really important especially if you have any page users can log in through (including I expect WordPress Dashboard login pages like wp-login.php) or e-commerce.

These things may well be frustrating when they first crop up, requiring immediate changes to your website. But bear in mind Google has been open about their general desires for the web (that it be easy to find useful information, that it be secure, mobile friendly and fast) for a long time. So as long as you apply those same concepts to your own site as soon as you can then changes like this will actually put you ahead of the curve.

In case you know this impacts you but haven’t yet had the email from Google about it (or don’t use Google Search Console in which case you’d never get one) here is the text of their message:

Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56 for http://www.domain.com/

To: owner of http://www.domain.com/

Beginning in January 2017, Chrome (version 56 and later) will mark pages that collect passwords or credit card details as “Not Secure” unless the pages are served over HTTPS.

The following URLs include input fields for passwords or credit card details that will trigger the new Chrome warning. Review these examples to see where these warnings will appear, and so you can take action to help protect users’ data. The list is not exhaustive.

{examples are given here}

The new warning is the first stage of a long-term plan to mark all pages served over the non-encrypted HTTP protocol as “Not Secure”.

 

Google Apps is now called G Suite

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Google Apps (used for business email, file sharing, calendaring etc.) is now rebranded as G Suite.

Which sounds like a bad mid-90s R&B group. (Try as I might, I can’t forget “Rappin’ 4-Tay”.)*

In their official blog post, Google said this is more in keeping more with their mission to provide a series of tools businesses use to further their own purposes. Basically rather than a series of individual applications coming together they see it as a stock set of tools within one Google system.

Fair enough.

Google Apps proved to be an invaluable tools for companies, schools and universities, and I do hope G Suite continues to build on and improve those systems.

But I do have one niggling concern in the back of my mind. Google Apps used to be free for small firms, then overnight all new accounts were subject to a subscription fee. Existing free accounts continued to run with charge – but any change to Apps brings a fear they might start to charge for those grandfathered accounts.

And with a change this big, well – Google Apps keep free accounts, but will G Suite?

Read the original Google blog post
*Although I thought of making this joke myself, I wasn’t the first, so credit goes here

Google mobile search

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One of things I’ve talked about a lot in the past couple of years has been Google’s move toward “mobile friendliness”. Last year they made a small change that meant sites that are mobile friendly would appear higher in search results when someone was looking from a mobile device.

Well they’ve really increased this as a search signal – sites that are NOT mobile friendly will now have a very hard time competing with those that are.

They’ve also updated their mobile friendliness test to make it more restrictive—it’s worth retesting your sites to make sure they still pass. Of course the best test is always the information displayed within Google Search Console which reports on the entire site, not just one page at a time.

The extra good news for those of you with mobile responsive sites is that any of your competitors who do not have mobile friendly sites will now suffer in their rankings.

One related point, there is a growing body of data that suggests this change also affects (in a smaller capacity) sites from normal desktops – that Google is prioritising sites that are mobile friendly on searches from ALL devices.

They haven’t confirmed that yet, so it’s not certain, but I am keeping an eye on it.

If you don’t have a responsive site for mobile devices yet and you don’t want to get caught out, please contact me and I can help make you a new, fully mobile complaint one.

Google descriptions

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I’m often asked about how to change the description Google shows in their search results. (This post applies in part to many search engines, but Google in particular.)

The answer is slightly more complicated than any of us might like. The old response (going back a decade or more) was to just change your meta description tag. Those used to be picked up verbatim.

But these days Google isn’t beholden to anything we provide (with the exception perhaps of your own domain name). They can pick and choose what they think will be most useful to their users. They don’t have to use the description we provide–they can choose to ignore it and create their own.

If we want to give our descriptions the best possible chance of being picked up, they need to conform to the following:
  • be between 150-159 characters*
  • be in sentence structure
  • not include too many commas or ands – basically avoid things that make it look like it could be a list of keywords
  • ideally, it would be a whole sentence or two taken directly from the text of the page
  • in fact, really ideally it would be the first sentence or two from the page

and on top of all that of course it needs to fit our own needs of being informative and enticing people to visit the site.

Enjoy.

* = Normally 130-160 (or some other variant within that range, but usually ending with 160) is touted as acceptable. Recent data suggests in fact 160 may be too long, many pages with 160 characters exactly are finding their descriptions are being truncated before the last word with a ellipses (…) added, making it look unfinished. So 159 seems the current practical maximum.

Buying backlinks 2016

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It’s been a while since I wrote a post about backlinks. But it’s always worth re-iterating this.

In short, my stance on these has only become stronger, because Google has become even more clever.

The shortest answer to the backlink question is that having backlinks is very beneficial.

But the longer answer is actually more important. Google has become incredibly adept at working out which backlinks are natural (i.e., someone liked your site and linked to it) as opposed to bought, meaning you paid for them.

Natural backlinks help your SEO, generally speaking. As for manipulated ones, once Google realises what you’ve done (which can take a few months) they will usually hurt your rank, often quite drastically.

There are a lot of people selling what they called “safe” links, or “Google friendly links”. In truth Google is very clear that any attempt to buy or create links is contrary to their ethos and something they will try to find and penalise you for.

And they are very good at it.

The reason people still sell them is a quirk of Google’s algorithm. When Google first see new links come in for a site they will almost always improve that sites ranking. It’s not until they’ve seen the patterns emerge and they realise they were faked links that they penalise you.

So when someone first buys links they usually do see an improvement, and feel happy with the service that made them. Months later when their site takes a hit—it’s too late.

So, are backlinks good? Absolutely. Should you try to have them created on your behalf? Absolutely not.

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Peter Mahoney, WordPress SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert blog