SEOGEDDON IS COMING JANUARY 2017
By now, most small businesses are aware of the effects of “Mobilegeddon” given it’s severe and negative effects on their search positioning and subsequent traffic to their websites. After it happened, we helped several new clients address drops as large as 80% due to the effects of this change. Some of them never heard about it before and some of them dismissed it. At the end of the day, you can choose to hide under a rock but that will not stop the changes that engines like Google will make in what they think are initiatives that will make the web more attractive and useful to consumers.
We are now at the advent of another such change. January 2017, Google will be implementing a change that will once again “devalue” sites based on a condition. This time around is security and it will definitely have an effect that will be broader than the previous mobilegeddon. When mobilegeddon happened, a lot businesses had already identified the mobile opportunity and optimized their sites to adapt or respond to mobile devices. This time around, it’s not so clear-cut. While a lot of websites may use SSL and deliver their content through https; they usually restrict that to their e-commerce and registration pages and not their entire website. With this change, it will be essential to deliver everything through a secure connection. The argument is that it is “possible” to implement these changes for “free”. This is not necessarily accurate, while it is possible for someone that knows how to implement their own SSL to do so for “free”, it is not a straightforward process and the implications of a failed implementation may be severe to both the security of the site and the data it secures therefore rendering both the site and data liable to privacy and security issues and the FTC.
As data and especially private data becomes more relevant and secure, the regulations will continue to increase and so will the oversight from government agencies like the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). It then becomes absolutely relevant to work with someone knowledgeable in implementing security on your website at any level. Whether with us or with someone else, make sure to “hire what you don’t know”. We already know we will be addressing this issue for people going forward in 2017 but for now, we need to make sure our existing clients are aware and have a chance to implement these changes in time.
Get a sense of the implications of this issue at this link:
https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-secure-web.html