2 Recent Google Updates You Should Know About

1. New pagination tags

Value/Importance: [rating=3]

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Our commentary

A recent release from Google, these new tags are aimed at aiding the Google bot when crawling sites such as media sites (or other content rich sites) & large ecommerce websites. The new tags are to be used on the "Next", "Previous" & View All links on pages helping Google understand a paginated series of pages. This feature is particularly relevant to media sites that use the format of an article broken down into several pages (which I personally find annoying, but I know it's done to increase page views and so ad revenue).

Much like the canonical tag which is used to highlight duplicate pages on your website these new tags are aimed at helping the Googlebot index your website effectively. The two key points highlighted in the post / update from Google states it will help them understand:

• Consolidate indexing properties, such as links, from the component pages/URLs to the series as a whole (i.e., links should not remain dispersed between page-1.html, page-2.html, etc., but be grouped with the sequence)
• Send users to the most relevant page/URL—typically the first page of the series or View All - so not in the interest of advertisers revenue?

Marketing implications of these new tags

Coupled with effective use of Google Webmaster Tools & other tags such as the canonical tag & rich snippets I would recommend making use of any tool that Google gives you to aid indexing of your website. I do not believe any of these tags will transform your rankings but they should definitely be implemented, they are relatively easily to integrate into your sites templates & helping Google understand your website can only mean good things?! Google even mention the fact utilising these tags will aid with link consolidation to the primary page, I would imagine this will create opportunities for most websites, you just never know what those few extra links may do!

2. PDF's in Search Results

Value/Importance: [rating=4]

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Our commentary

PDF's are a rapidly growing format for publishing content online, especially in the B2B

space. Google has been indexing them and other document types of nearly 10years & this latest post from the Google Webmaster Blog provides answers to some of the more popular questions surrounding the indexation of PDFs. I have highlighted the 3 questions I believe you should consider if you publish a lot of PDF's online.

Q: How are links treated in PDF documents?
A: Generally links in PDF files are treated similarly to links in HTML: they can pass PageRank and other indexing signals, and we may follow them after we have crawled the PDF file. It’s currently not possible to "nofollow" links within a PDF document.

Q: Is it considered duplicate content if I have a copy of my pages in both HTML and PDF?
A: Whenever possible, we recommend serving a single copy of your content. If this isn’t possible, make sure you indicate your preferred version by, for example, including the preferred URL in your Sitemap or by specifying the canonical version in the HTML or in the HTTP headers of the PDF resource. For more tips, read our Help Center article about canonicalization.

Q: Can PDF files rank highly in the search results?
A: Sure! They’ll generally rank similarly to other webpages. For example, at the time of this post, [mortgage market review], [irs form 2011] or [paracetamol expert report] all return PDF documents that manage to rank highly in our search results, thanks to their content and the way they’re embedded and linked from other webpages.

The last two questions I find very interesting since I see PDF's utilised on the web. Generally PDF's are offered as a downloadable / offline way to consume content that is displayed on a web page. If you are going to have both HTML & PDF versions of content I would always recommend disallowing the PDF from search engines as people are more likely to link to a web page than directly to PDFs which will improve your chance of ranking , images will be indexed on web pages not in PDFs & its much easier to update & control web pages.