SEO-geddon Is Coming in January 2017
By now, most small businesses are aware of the effects of “Mobilegeddon,” given its severe and adverse impact 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 had never heard about it before, and some of them dismissed it. 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 valuable to consumers.
We are now at the advent of another such change. In January 2017, Google will implement a change that will once again “devalue” sites based on a specific condition. This time around, security is a priority, and its impact will be broader than the previous Mobilegeddon. When mobilegeddon happened, many 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 (Federal Trade Commission).
As data, particularly private data, becomes more relevant and secure, regulations will continue to increase, and so will oversight from government agencies like the FTC. It then becomes pertinent 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 as we advance 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
