Mobile web usage slows in USA

Mobile Internet is something that many people expect to catch on globally, but especially in the USA in the very near future. Well, the latest reports indicate otherwise as according to a "Mobile Tracking Study" by comScore, the use of Mobile Internet is far more widespread in European countries than in the USA.

Percent wise, 29% of all European Internet users use mobile services on a frequent basis to access the Internet, while only 19% of Internet users here in the United States use mobile devices to access the Internet. Statistics per country: Germany (34%); Italy (34%); France (28%); Spain (26%); and the UK (24%).

Bob Ivins, Managing Director of comScore Europe said, "The uptake of mobile usage started sooner [in Europe] and is more evolved than in the USA. The ability to have a mobile phone carrier in the UK and fly to France and use the mobile phone, those connectivity walls broke down sooner than in the USA."

The study also find that while in the USA, major Internet portals such as Google and Yahoo are visited most frequently using mobile services here in the USA, these portals make up just 34% of all web sites visited using mobile browsers from European countries: 34% in Italy, with smaller audiences in the UK (31); Germany (29%); Spain (28%); and France (24%).

"Across Europe, the portal doesn't translate well, and carriers have created mobile-specific sites," said Ivins. "I think people in the USA are familiar with the concept of a portal…and some of the portals in the USA are pushing content suitable for a mobile device."

The comScore research study is an “ongoing mobile tracking study” that is studying the differences between how Europeans and Americans use mobile web browsers.

To find out more on mobile web usage join our SEO forum or leave a comment here. Also try our articles page for more great resources such as this article on "How to Optimise your Web Site for Mobile Browsers".

Take control over page snippets

Did you know that you do have some control of the snippets that appear under your page’s link in Google SERPs? Snippets, or otherwise known as descriptions, can have a huge impact on whether an internet user clicks on your link in the SERPs.

A snippet of text appears under the blue links in a search engine’s list of results for a particular query, as seen in the image below.

Google uses a number of sources to generate snippets, such as page content, references to that page from other sites, the Open Directory Project and META description tag. Unfortunately we’ve even seen Google using menu lists and other navigational links as snippets, which looks unattractive. So you can see just how important in SEO to monitor your site’s snippets.

The snippet is usually taken from the description META tag embedded in the HTML document, but hidden from human visitors. Very often the keywords used in the original search will appear as bold letters in the URL and snippet. The description tag will take the form:

<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”A small sentence of meaningful text that best describes the content and theme of the page” />

It’s important that you write a meaningful sentence and don’t keyword stuff descriptions because many canny search engine users will skip over a spammy looking description to a site ranked below yours if their snippet looks more relevant. A spammy description is unlikely to help improve your rankings, but it could hurt your click through rate.

Another consequence of having a spammy, keyword stuffed description is that a search engine can pick it up as being unhelpful and decide to build a snippet from text on the page. In other words you control over the displayed snippet. We’ve seen that this can also happen if you build a site with identical descriptions on every page.

It’s possible that if you duplicate spammy, meaningless descriptions (and titles), your site could lose a certain amount of “trust” in the search engines, so it’s important you pay attention to these tags.

There are many SEOs and web site owners that wouldn’t want Google to show snippets from the Open Directory Project. Good news is that Google (but not all search engines) supports a META tag that directs search engines to not use the Open Directory Project for snippets.

Remember that these META tags will only take affect once Google (or other search engines) crawls that page and refreshes their index.

Just add this META tag to your pages: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP" />

Or to direct only Google’s Googlebot: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP" />

This article is based on a post by Vanessa Fox at Google Webmaster Central.

Join our SEO forum to help on maneuvering you web site through the SERPs.

SEO hell - the Supplemental Index

There are lots of people in various SEO forums are asking "why has my site gone supplemental?" in other words removed from Google's main index and put into a backup one. The supplemental index is only used if Google can't find enough results from their main index. That often (but not always these days) means a huge drop in rankings in Google.

Google's parallel, supplemental index used to be made up of stale pages, and particularly "dropped" pages which had links from the site removed. Since BigDaddy, we've noticed increasingly that many otherwise apparently healthy sites have pages that are falling into the supplemental index. We see this especially in low PR sites that have made major navigational changes, such as renaming pages, changing link structure and so on. It's also common in sites with little text content and have duplicate or near duplicate page titles and Meta descriptions.

A highly respected person in the SEO community said that "supplemental pages are like a cancer for a web site". In other words, once a few pages from a site go supplemental there's a knock-on effect. Maybe it's because these supplemental pages don't pass back any PR to the site, and it sinks even further causing more pages to go supplemental and so on, like a chain reaction.

In any case, it's clear that anyone doing SEO has to check their sites regularly using Google's site: operator to look for pages that are going supplemental. If you see supplemental pages, be sure to act quickly, checking their titles and descriptions to make sure they are unique and perhaps increasing the text content on those pages. We’ve also found that getting a fresh links to a supplemental page can help get it back. It doesn't have to be an off-site backlink; a link from your blog entry will often do the trick.

You should also avoid any on-site changes such as renaming pages, moving or deleting links if you have a low PR site. By all means add fresh content though.

If your site does end up in supplemental hell and your rankings have dropped considerably, we've found that a high PR7 link can get your pages indexed again within a week. Such a link would cost around $30 a month. A relevant link will be the best but might be more expensive in some markets. However, it wouldn't have to be a relevant link if you just wanted to get your pages back in Google's main index.

If you do want to make major site changes and move content to new pages then it's vital that you use HTACCESS to 301 redirect the old page to the new one. Deleting the old page and updating the link alone will probably not be enough to avoid one of the pages going supplemental.

Even if you do a 301 redirect, this may not help because of the timing. It's possible that the new page will be updated and indexed before Google has figured out that the old page has been moved. You'll then be in a situation where you have two pages with the same content, and if you have moved or renamed a large enough number of pages simultaneously it could trip a filter that would land your site in the supplemental index.

If you've had pages going into Google supplemental index, we'd love to hear your experiences and perhaps you could post a link to your site in our forum for an SEO site review with as much background information as possible.