Google Index

Google Switching Fully to Mobile-First Indexing

After a long changeover period, Google has announced that crawling of websites will be switched completely to mobile-first indexing from September 2020. Find out what it means, and what to take into account, in this article.

Giphy.com’s Drop on Google – Things You Should Never Do

Two Weeks ago, Barry Schwartz wrote the following blog post: “Giphy CEO: We Own Happy Birthday On Google. Next Day They Get Hit”. And indeed, Giphy.com has lost 91% of their Visibility in the UK, 84% in the USA, 87% in France, 88% in Italy, 83% in Germany and 85% […]

The consequences of negative user-signals on Google’s rankings

The homepage of the German domain hotel-bonn.de offers a great example for how much influence user signals can have on Google’s rankings for a specific keyword. The domain is an ancient exact-match domain for the keyword “hotel bonn” and the two words “hotel” and “Bonn” (the former German capital) also […]

Crawling and Indexing for extensive websites

As soon as websites exceed the size of a typical private homepage, there are a number of new challenges that arise. One of them is that the existing content belongs in the Google index, as complete and up to date as possible. While this may sound easy, very large websites […]

Why the Visibility Index does not want to be an SEO-traffic index

The SISTRIX Visibility Index is often mistaken for an SEO-traffic index. As a result, we see blogposts pop up on a regular basis which either show how well or how badly the Visibility Index development correlates with the actual SEO traffic. Most of these articles are based on a fundamental […]