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We used to do a lot of infographics, which were very often found through image search, so we found it very important then

This is something I've seen on websites of all sizes. I've worked with a couple of well-respected colleges - the type of site that you would think Google would automatically trust - and it took anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months from new pages being indexed to ranking as high as they can go without more help. We actually charted the rise of one article, written by a professor, with a link off the homepage of one of the college sites, and it took over a month to stop rising in rankings. For reference, this was about a year ago. So, I think Alan is exactly right: I think that Google wants a lot of confirmation signals that a page is legit, and it takes awhile for its crawler to identify all of them. Google values how long a page has been around, and click through rate, which comes over time.

I hear you loud and clear re. studying different query spaces. Do we know that in those query spaces where social shares correlate it is not actually down to links i.e can we remove the influence of links from the studies?

Thanks for posting your follow up. We're still waiting to see restoration of our images and it's been 13 days.

Thank you for your response.  Very Helpful

Be careful that you don't end up with multiple URLs for the same page...if you do want to go that way, then be sure to set a rel=canonical from one to the other. I don't know about a click-through advantage.  You might say that the brand stands out more and is more readable at the end of the URL, actually.

Hey! Yes, we made the switch to SSL and everything went smooth. We set up our 301 redirects and submitted to Google right away. No real loss in traffic and our rankings for the 100+ keywords we monitor either remained the same or increased a little over the first couple months. So, that was pleasant to see and experience. The real test is when we finish and launch the new design, however, we will be working to keep our URL structure the same, but will be adding many more pages to the site focused on more educational/SEO friendly content. Not really caring if searchers stumble across it in their browsing, but moreso that Google indexes the content for our targeted keywords those pages are designed to capture and rank for (inner landing pages). As long as we're keeping our authoritative pages un-drastically changed, the URL remains the same and the content is about the same, we shouldn't experience much loss in rankings of traffic. If anything, we should see new keywords ranking very well in a short amount of time and our traffic increasing. We'll see come end of 2015, into 2016!

Yeah, this one's a bit tricky. These are snippets Google is creating from on-page search results. To the best of my knowledge, this particular style of snippet is not based on any particular markup. Google is extracting it from source-code structure (like tables and CSS elements). If you don't have these and want them, all I can really suggest is clean HTML/CSS. Why and how they do this, exactly, is still a bit of a mystery. If you have these and don't want them, you're kind of out of luck. The only options are blocking snippets completely or trying to essentially make your source code so awful Google stops doing it, and the side effects of that are a lot worse than an undesired snippet format, IMO.

I think meta descriptions are important. They are your first chance to display a call to action to a customer and to get them to click through to your site.  Hence a poorly written one, truncated etc. is probably not as enticing as one within the 160 characters - that does not truncate. We have acted for several clients where we have optimized the MD and improved the CTR by .08% (ie less than 1%) but that has amounted to over 20,000 additional clicks on their site a year. Also I loved Rand's WBF which indirectly addresses the issue, but correlates with my view, though probably not as strong that dwell time is a significant factor on ranking. https://moz.com/blog/impact-of-queries-and-clicks-on-googles-rankings-whiteboard-friday On your questions directly:- Will it hurt your SEO? - Yes, two possible reasons 1/ you keyword stuff it. 2/ no-one clicks through because you have a bad MD On truncation - there are exceptions, but google generally does not if you fit within there pixel/character limit. My view - draft and implement your MD's properly... Hope that assists.

Just to add to what Dirk said, this is often an example of a fantastic opportunity. The keyword is so non-competitive that few authoritative sites are even using the complete phrase on their site! Time to write some great content and dominate!

Thanks Umar It would appear looking at the threads you provided that I cant use the Trustpilot review scores in schema mark up as they are from a 3rd party & google only allows onsite reviews to be displayed via markup................doesnt explain my competitor at Golden Charter is displaying stars in SERPs as they have no onsite reviews! Which means that i will have to set up a separate method, which will duplicate the Trustpilot work, to capture directly reviews from customers. Why is like never easy!! Ash

I would have absolutely no concerns over changing your content, as long as you are confident you are changing it for the better.

Alright, I see what you're talking about. I have tried to do similar search in Russian Google - it gave me the same suggestion. https://www.google.nl/intl/en-NL/policies/technologies/cookies/ As far as I understand Google uses your browser locale and settings to offer different language, so, if you say all your settings are in dutch, then I'd look into your normal usage - do you mostly search in english? do you mostly browse english websites etc. Additionally I noticed in past that even if you tell Chrome browser not to suggest to translate page, it still does it. There is even meme about that (can't find it now).

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of good info out there on this update. Can you give us any insight on the keywords/URLs you saw impacted?

Awesome, thank you!

Great list! Can you explain the importance of HTTPS and using a CDN? Are these factors really that important? If I change my site to HTTPS how should I handle redirects? Thanks

You can definitely leave it as it is, it probably won't influence much. It's more additional information that could help you in the long run but it won't harm you.

301 and only 301. Don't assume that "renowned websites" inevitably do also good SEO

Matt has summed it up, but my question is..why don't you get a wildcard certificate? It will make it much easier and if you ever move your website to a CDN network, an HTTPS website with a wildcard certificate makes the process smooth!

Robert Hmmm ok - this could possibly be an architectural and/or internal linking issue confusing Google as to which page it should rank. Or maybe it's your keyword targeting on both pages. Would you say the subcategory page is more optimized/focused on the keyword than the homepage?