What is a Progressive Web App?

It’s an all-in-one solution for web developers to create a single version website/app that can be delivered across all devices and works like an app but without the hassle of distribution through an app store.

A progressive web app, or PWA, combines the best of a website and the best of a native application. It’s a type of hybrid app. If a user comes to your PWA-run site, then they’ll get the mobile version of your site, but faster.

With a traditional hybrid app, like the Amazon app, the user’s interactions with it are built into the phone as an app, but the data collected is from the web. Here’s where a PWA is different. A PWA launches a browser to do the same thing. With the introduction of service workers (the scripts running in the background of your browser) and other technological advancements, browsers are more sophisticated than ever. They can do things on your phone that previously could only be done through a native app. This means you don’t have to publish the app in the app store. The barrier to entry of downloading an app is no longer an issue for your users.

As a developer, you no longer have to program different apps for different devices, nor deal with special screen sizes. You can invest your time and resources into designing a PWA. If you have to make a mobile website, you might as well just use a PWA. It’s well worth it.

Talking PWAs with Cindy Krum

My longtime friend Cindy Krum, the CEO and founder of MobileMoxie, is a PWA guru. I wanted to get her take on how far in the future the mass adoption of PWAs looks to be. Here’s what she had to say:

Lots of big companies are already testing PWA code and integrations on their sites. Lyft, Mic, Washington Post, Flipboard, The Weather Channel and more have already launched beta PWA sites for testing. Google has already published some PWA development guidelines for SEO, but I think the update may depend on how aggressively Google and other influential companies promote PWAs.

Google has also been hinting at cross-over between AMP and PWAs, using AMP to make PWA’s work in Safari, so there may be some new iteration of AMP that makes AMP enabled content available in PWA format. The PWA news viewer already behaves a lot like a PWA. My guess is that in the next year, we will see some of the more agile and cutting edge companies take their PWAs out of beta, and making them their main sites, with or without the influence of AMP.

It will be interesting to watch more widespread adoption of PWAs unfold. As with anything new, of course, it can sometimes be hard to get clients to adopt bleeding edge technology. Here’s how Cindy is getting her clients on board.

Cindy: The main recommendation is to try it out. You can add a service worker and an app manifest to any existing website. It is not enough to get the full benefits of a PWA, but it is enough to learn how easy or difficult the integration will be for your company. In our case, we developed an app manifest in five minutes, and a service worker in 90 minutes.

Making web-apps indexable tends to be the harder part of the equation, but that is true with or without the PWA elements. Web apps are hard to index because developers don’t always include URLs for state-changes in the web app.

For the immediate future, PWAs are something to be aware of, and if you’re able to, start working into your testing and planning cycles. There are no guarantees it’ll be the go-forward structure and remain supported by Google forever, but you don’t want to be left behind. There are practical upsides to PWAs that are worth considering regardless of how long it takes this to be a mainstream approach.

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Here we’re going to talk about the absence of links.

How a mention without a link is good for SEO.

What is linkless attribution?

Linkless attribution is the mention of your business or brand without a hyperlink. An instance of linkless attribution is sometimes called a linkless mention.

Links have proven an easy target for spammers. Search engines have made efforts to break the dependence on links as a ranking signal.

The diverse set of clues the engines use to determine a site’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, trust) and relevance include a lot more than links:

• Links
• Domain/page age
• Freshness
• Relevancy
• Social signals
• Traffic volume
• Usefulness
• History
• Internal linking
• Mentions

Examples of linkless mentions include:

• A brand or business named in a news story without a link
• A brand or business mentioned in a review
• Consumers in forums or blog comments
• Podcast and video transcripts

Mentions of your business or brand, even mentions without links, can send signals to search engines. If the mention is positive, good for you. If it is negative, pay attention in case you have an issue to clean up.

And let’s be clear here. I’m not talking about spam mentions. None of that shady stuff. Comment spam is not transferring credibility to your business. Search engines likely use the same quality assessment filters on linkless mentions as they do hyperlinks.

Why Linkless Mentions Are New-Era SEO #Goals: It’s about the Customer Touchpoint

Since the search engines’ crackdown on manipulative link spam, SEOs have adjusted strategy.

Links have always been the means to an end. When Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin published “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine,” they cited links as providing “a lot of information for making relevance judgments and quality filtering.” Calculating link popularity via PageRank, they argued, “corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance.”

That’s a long way to say: The end goal of the search engine is to accurately judge the pages people think are important.

Linking to a business is just one thing people do when we think a business is important. Primarily we talk about the business. Enter mentions.

Gary Illyes’s top piece of simple SEO advice is to get people talking about your business:

“You want to make sure that people know about your website. You want to talk to people about your website. (…) The more people start talking about your business, the more visitors you get and potentially more customers. And they’ll also be more targeted.”

He’s talking about the value of people mentioning you in reviews and in social media.

Here’s another quotable. David Amerland sums it up when he says that people’s comments “help create validation independent of your own website.” Yes and yes.

In similar realms, linkless mentions share a border with the land of nofollow links; neither counts for link juice, and they have similar benefits. A mention is just more subtle than a nofollow link.

Here’s a snip from The Blogger’s Guide to Nofollow Links:

It’s no secret: Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most important forms of marketing there is.

And the majority of word-of-mouth marketing on the internet is done through nofollow links.

I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to fear the nofollow link or the linkless mention.

The True Value of PR for SEO & Customer Reach

Years ago, using press releases to drive links and boost rankings became a popular SEO work item. Its merit is debated even today. Businesses were built around providing press releases for link building and SEO boost, and the practice still has a dedicated following today.

Search engines devalued links in press releases, but the value of PR is still huge.

Done correctly, a well-designed and executed PR program can yield the exact results you think you seek.

But what if, after all your care and diligence, that article doesn’t drop a link? What if the publisher only links to paying sites (a common practice with the popular big names these days)? What if they just mentioned your name once or twice in the article? No URL, no domain and no link … Was it all for naught?

Relax. There’s still plenty of value in a linkless mention.

All that effort you put into crafting the plan, executing it, reaching out to the right people, answering the questions and so on … it all still helps you.

The next step for anyone reading about you in an article, when there is no link, is to search for you. If they are interested, they’ll search.

Now brand search comes into play for you. How well you rank for your products plays a role at this stage. All those past efforts to improve rank now come into play to secure that new visitor.

Then your UX plays a role to converting them into a customer.

Then your email program steps in to help keep them coming back for more over time.

All of that because you got the mention in an article.

But the benefits don’t end there. If the brand is searched enough, it can become an addition to the predictive search drop-down, potentially furthering engagement.

If the product is new or unique, the same action can happen. These can work to cement your position in rankings if searchers are finding you and clicking through to you.

When you take off the link blinders, you remember to pay attention to marking up your content or products, allowing the engines to start using your content in knowledge panels, including rating data and so on.

The truth is that with repeated, non-linked mentions across multiple trustworthy sources, your business can see benefits.

You might not see direct traffic from sources mentioning you, but the longer term benefits can easily outweigh the short-term traffic bumps.

Linkless mentions are a long-term investment that spreads your name far and wide. The engines can see this happening, and they’ll wonder why your brand or product is becoming more important. Then they start testing you in results to see if you please searchers.

That’s the ultimate goal. Pleasing the consumer. The engine wins and so does the business.

Want to explore how our experts can help with your SEO goals? Request a conversation or call us today.

The post Why You Don’t Need that Link to Get the SEO Benefit from an Online Name Drop: The Power of Linkless Mentions appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

The quick version: This time, the search engine targeted sites linking out because the links looked like an attempt to boost the destination site’s rankings in search results. Google took action by devaluing all of the linking site’s links as untrustworthy.

Granted, we saw this coming as an SEO services company that’s successfully mitigated countless penalties for clients. But here’s why this outbound link penalty shouldn’t have surprised anyone paying attention.

Warning Signs That Penalties Loomed

Just a few weeks before the penalties came down, Google noted that those receiving compensation for things such as product reviews needed to take steps to call out any links from their site to the product site, page, or supplier.

In a Webmaster Blog post, Google spelled out exactly how to disclose such a relationship, when to use a nofollow tag, and so on — items that are already clearly explained in the guidelines. That was a clear warning sign that a crackdown was coming.

At a more basic level, disclosure is also covered by federal law. In the U.S., Federal Trade Commission guidelines require businesses and individuals to identify when they have been compensated for a review, whether that’s through payment or just free products, for example.

All in all, this outbound link penalty shouldn’t have caught anyone unawares.

Overreacting Can Hurt Your Website

Here’s what is surprising: the reaction of some websites to simply nofollow ALL links across their website. (For those not up on SEO lingo, “nofollowing” a link means applying a “nofollow” attribute to the link tag.)

Such a drastic move is an attempt to avoid any problem with Google in the quickest way possible.

Unfortunate reality check: By “nofollowing” all outbound links, webmasters simply create other issues for themselves.

In fact, when he saw this happening last week, Google’s John Mueller posted this urgent advice in a Webmaster Help Forum: “There’s absolutely no need to nofollow every link on your site!” (source: The SEM Post).

The Appropriate Reaction to a Penalty

First, check your messages in Google Search Console to find out if your site received a manual action for outbound linking. If you were penalized, then the best solution is to call out things naturally. For example, wherever you’ve linked to a product you’re reviewing, you should:

• Explain in the article the relationship with the company supplying the item to be reviewed.
• State the circumstances (full disclosure).
• Add rel=”nofollow” to links to the product supplier within the article itself. Many plugins exist for the popular CMS’s to enable on-the-fly editing of nofollow on links at the article/publishing level.

Search engines see the internet as a connected entity. If you suddenly nofollow all of your outbound links, then it makes your site appear reclusive. It also hurts the sites you’re linking to that are natural links, relevant to your subject matter, and qualified to receive your vote of confidence.

There is simply no logic behind cutting off all link equity flowing out of your site, and we highly recommend avoiding this action.

Instead, you need to take legitimate actions to clean up the problem. There are no shortcuts here.

It will pay dividends for any website to be clear about why they are linking to other pages across the web.

Taking time to review your outbound links is good business. Over time, things change, so a page you linked to several years ago may be entirely different in its focus today.

Domains are bought, sold, and then expire, only to then later be purchased, parked, and plastered with ads.

While these normal activities and link-location changes have always been factored into the search engine algorithms, it’s never too late to ensure you’re linking to — and thus sending your patrons to — quality web pages at relevant, related websites.

After you review your outbound links and nofollow the ones that are unnatural, you can submit a reconsideration request to get back into Google’s good graces.

A Sign of Penguin?

A final point to keep in mind. In the past, we’ve seen minor moves like this ahead of more major updates by Google.

Remember that Penguin we’re all waiting to be updated? We’re not willing to say definitively that this outbound link penalty action is the precursor to a Penguin refresh (as many have predicted already).

However, the fact remains that when the teams are working on one portion of the algorithm, the rest is often close at hand. There can be economies of timing when making algo updates, from the search engine’s perspective. So don’t be surprised if the refresh we’ve been waiting for is near.

The post Google’s Outbound Link Penalties: How to React without Overreacting appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

The truth is, inside an engine is a busy place. I spent nearly six years representing a search engine to the SEO industry and I can tell you that, contrary to many search engine optimization conspiracy theories, neither Bing nor Google have designs on harming businesses. Both do have profit motives, however, just like you do.

Updates happen because … pause for drum roll … something undesirable is happening!

What Motivates Search Engines?

Research suggests that WordPress powers about 25 percent of the World Wide Web’s sites. More websites use WordPress, but of those using it, they are not “higher traffic” sites. OK, that makes sense — WordPress powers blogs mostly, we can loosely infer.

Let’s say, for example, someone made a WordPress plugin that managed ads across one quarter of the Internet. And that WordPress plugin placed the ads above the content on a page. Obviously, on an individual level, this is a recipe for increased revenue. But taken across the entirety of the user base, if even a fraction of WordPress sites adopt the plugin, it results in a disturbing trend.

If the engine is judged by users on the quality of the experience the user sees after clicking through on a result, then this places the engine in a difficult position. Do you police for quality or do you “throw it over the fence” and declare it not your problem?

But see, it is the engine’s problem.

Google faces ever-growing competition. Competition that’s gaining, albeit slowly, and in some ways seeking to change the game. Bing faces a similar problem on the other side of the coin — satisfying searchers enough to convert them.

In either case, the common ground is making searchers happy.

Reread that, as it’s a critical and often-forgotten point. The engines do not exist to satisfy a business. They exist to satisfy searchers. More subtly, they exist to develop revenue, to source data, and to feed that data into inter-related systems across the companies operating them.

When Do Search Engines Make Updates?

So when someone builds a popular plugin for WordPress, again, and it shows a trend that goes against the goal of happy searchers, the engines take an action. In this example, Google gave us the Page Layout Algorithm back in 2012. On Bing’s side of the graph, while the updates aren’t named or publicized, they happen. Indeed, they happen frequently. So frequently, in fact, that it simply doesn’t make sense to announce everything.

It’s important to note here that, in many cases, updates are not “to fix something that’s broken.”

Updates are a move from one state to a more advanced state.

Maybe that’s a matter of perspective, but if you’re still asking me today about links, I’d say your perspective is wrong. Things change over time, and with thousands of smart people seeking to improve a product daily, things tend to keep moving. At the scale those projects work at, it can take time to manifest, but I’ve seen first-hand the changes at Bing.

If you think of Google as being a highway, every now and then you encounter a speed bump. It can be jarring. Everything is smooth, then suddenly WHAM! you hit an update. Bing, on the other hand, takes a different approach. The road surface at Bing is slightly less smooth overall, but once you’re up to speed, you don’t notice the slight surface irregularities. It feels smoother. Doesn’t mean things aren’t going on, just that your perception is it’s smoother.

This can help explain why ranking is harder in Bing at times, and more stable in the long run. And on that note, let the corrective comments, refuting examples and hate email start! I’m certain there are more than a few examples to rebut what I just suggested. But again, scale. When looked at not just across the sample set that even the biggest agency works with, the actual scale the engine operates at is enormously larger. In that context — the context of the engines — the statement makes sense.

How Do Engines Feel about SEO?

Does this all mean that the engines dislike SEOs, their tactics and businesses doing this work?

Nope. They readily recognize the improvements made by the work. The flip side is that the engines have to protect against gaming. This is why engines always take an arms-length approach.

The job of representing a search engine to the industry is not an easy one. I know. I was that face for Bing for about six years. Matt, Gary, John, Maile, now Christi Olson at Bing have all had to balance carefully. As individuals, all are approachable, helpful and knowledgeable. But that doesn’t mean any of us can give away secrets, or share things the engine wants kept secret. This is obvious, yet countless times at conferences the impossible is asked for, then derision heaped on socially when answers are not forthcoming.

The reality in some cases is that due to the structure of the product, it’s completely conceivable the person you’re speaking to may not have access to the information, or that something changed since the last time they connected internally on the topic. Bing has a few thousand employees working on search. Google has, what, maybe 20,000 applied to search in some degree? I grew up in a city of 30,000 people, so asking me to know all the information and be current is like asking me to know the details on two-thirds of a city. Unrealistic. Even at Bing’s smaller scale, it’s an unrealistic expectation.

The bottom line here is there will always exist a push/pull reality. Engines want the improvements that optimization brings to a product, but they cannot be trusting to the point where results suffer. And in a space where searchers are growing ever savvier, ever clearer about expected results, it might seem like changes being made are punitive to businesses. But the reality is they are designed to appeal to searchers.

How Can Businesses Appeal to Search Engines?

Now, what might happen if your efforts were all geared towards improving the users’ experience, meeting their expectations and providing the highest quality result for their need? Do you think that might be something the engine would want to showcase?

So what should you expect from a search engine?

Exactly what they’ve given us for years. A lack of in-depth answers in some instances, rapid change and advancement, a searcher-first mentality, and a drive for revenue. We all know these are the ground rules. So why is it so hard for businesses to adapt?

There’s a better approach for businesses to take when it comes to SEO and rankings.

Don’t cater to search engines. Cater to users. Don’t settle for search engine optimization. Think bigger — user experience optimization. Internet marketing is SEO, PPC, content development, social media marketing, website design, and conversion optimization. Businesses are born to serve customers. Get back to your roots with your Internet marketing.

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