The average person today will digest more information than at any other point in history. Through the internet, music, TV and plain old fashioned print media, they’ll encounter around 100,000 words. Or about 2.5 novels. In total, they’ll process the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information every day; 5 times more than 30 years ago.

These figures could give the impression that society in 2015 is more educated. With Google, Siri, and blogs like this just a few clicks away, we can encounter a wealth of information, learning whatever we feel like, whenever we feel like. Want to know tomorrow’s weather? Who was King of France in 1390? How tall Noel Edmonds is? There’s nothing stopping you.

However, have you ever thought that a lot of the information you encounter, process and learn might be wrong? Google has, and they’re wanting to rectify this.

For just under a year, Google has been developing their Knowledge Vault, a huge store of information taken from all across human history. Knowledge Vault is an ever expanding database that autonomously collects data from around the internet. This information is then cross referenced with similar or corresponding information in order to sift facts from falsities.

Google’s existing Knowledge Graph works in a similar way, albeit on a smaller scale. However, rather than compiling information from the whole of the internet, the Knowledge Graph uses “trusted” sources like Wikipedia and Freebase to offer a collection of related and relevant information on a given search term. For example, if I search “Noel Edmonds”, Knowledge Graph provides a collection of useful and unimaginably interesting facts on the man himself, as visible below.

Very recently, a Google research team published a research paper announcing aspirations to implement Knowledge Vault as a search ranking factor. This means that rather than a collection of information simply being shown to users alongside search results – as with Knowledge Graph – the Vault would control all the information on the search results page. Sites that contain information Google considers true would be ranked highly, and sites that contain dubious information would be penalised.

Whilst this is a suggestion still only in its formative period, it’s one that would entirely alter the way Google search works.

At the moment, sites are ranked according to a number of factors, one of these being links. The more links a site has from trustworthy sources, the more trustworthy that site is considered. This is a largely human process; when you link to a site, you’re showing a vote of confidence.

However, a ranking based on the Knowledge Vault would take away this human influence. As the Vault is an autonomous system, it and it alone decides what separates fact from truth, and what makes a site trustworthy.

Current ranking factors like links are far from perfect; something testified by algorithms like Penguin designed to halt manipulative link-building. However, possibilities for manipulating the Knowledge Vault in theory still exist. If the Vault is simply collecting together information it views as similar, and deciding truthfulness based on this, then what’s to stop webmasters from sprinkling their “facts” across the web in an attempt to manipulate higher rankings? Plus, what about dubious information that large numbers of people on the web consider to be true? Does this mean that moon landing conspiracy theories and folk health remedies should be considered facts, and afforded a high ranking? What about “facts” that are opinion based? Should the statement “Noel Edmond’s best days are behind him” be deemed any more truthful than “Noel Edmonds has a long and fruitful future ahead in show business”?

Perhaps more importantly, the implementation of a Knowledge Vault based ranking system is a step towards Google controlling a large flow of information. Whereas with the current ranking system, if a piece of dubious information is encountered, this can be argued against; a healthy discussion can be formed. However, with the implementation of this algorithm, there will be no need for discussion; just a nod of the head as Google pumps out a stream of complete, inarguable “facts ”. With this move, Google could be taking the power to invest confidence in information and sites away from users; something surely more important than encountering the odd “spider eats dog” article.

With this being said, and as Google haven’t imposed any real plans for implementation, at this point we can only speculate how a knowledge based search rankings system would work. It may be that Google could simply decide to implement a fact ranking alongside existing systems – perhaps displayed within a search snippet – something which at the time of writing seems a safer and more feasible option. In the unlikely eventuality that a full overhaul does take place, users may even become savvier, and more clued up to whether they’re being shown sketchy information. In any case, it’s not as if Google has never made big changes to the way search works before, and we’ll look forward to watching and adapting to whatever plays out.

One of the main talking points in the SEO industry right now is Google’s recent announcement that they will count https as a ranking factor.

Google say the update is a “light” ranking factor, impacting 1% of queries, but it is likely they will decide to turn up the dial in time. To quote the announcement:

“…while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web”

Having seen Google’s softly softly approach before, reading between the lines they appear to be telling site owners rather than suggesting to them that they should be updating to HTTPS. I imagine there will be an amnesty period “to give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS”, but eventually HTTPS will become a fully blown ranking signal. This is what Google wants, and you either play by their rules or suffer the consequence of lowered rankings.

So what exactly does HTTPS mean?

HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, which creates a secure connection for the user and stops sensitive information from being leaked – HTTPS has therefore been a standard implementation for securing ecommerce shopping carts. Google’s recommendation is to make all static content secure and not just pages that transfer sensitive data. The main benefit for site owners is that it prevents “Man-in-the-Middle” attacks, a type of hack that relays data between two parties through a third middle man.

As per Google’s announcement, instructions for implementing HTTPS in a satisfactory way are as follows:

• Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
• Use 2048-bit key certificates
• Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
• Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
• Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address (although it soon became apparent that Google Webmaster Tools doesn’t allow site moves from HTTP to HTTPS yet)
• Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
• Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.

Moving to a full HTTPS implementation gives site owners the benefit of a fully secure connection, but with some minor downsides. The first is the cost of implementation – it costs around £50 for a certificate (avoid free or cheap certificates) and then a couple of hours for the server configuration – so not exactly prohibitive costs. The biggest challenge is getting the implementation right, so it’s important that someone with experience sets the server up. One final downside is that HTTPS requests will slow page load down slightly, ironic given Google’s constant banging of the drum on improving site speed.

To conclude, unless you’re in the (unclear) 1% of queries impacted, it’s unlikely that switching to HTTPS immediately will provide a noticeable improvement to your rankings. But given Google’s ominous tone of saying they are “giving webmasters enough time” and they “may decide to strengthen”, it’s fairly clear which direction they would like to head in, and adding HTTPS implementation should be on your road-map for the coming months.

I’ve seen couple of interesting pieces from Google recently around mobile SEO and reading between the lines I think we could be seeing a bigger push from them in the next couple of months with regards to rewarding sites with a good mobile experience, or more ominously, demoting sites that don’t tow their line.

On an Official Google Webmaster Central Blog post a couple of weeks ago, Google announced they might highlight underneath a search result that you may be redirected to the site’s homepage rather than the page you were hoping to land on, because a mobile equivalent doesn’t exist. It’s been an issue since the dawn of the smartphone, where many sites will blanket redirect users on mobile devices to the homepage rather than equivalent mobile URLs. It was common for developers to use this shortcut when rushing to develop a mobile site, but it’s always resulted in a frustrating user experience and it looks as though Google is highlighting they share this opinion.

Google call these “faulty redirects” and they have helpfully provided a report in Webmaster Tools that shows if this is an issue for your site. The report can be accessed under Crawl > Crawl Errors and then the smartphone tab. From here you can get an idea of the scale of any issues as well as problem URLs.

Depending on your resources, our preferred order of fixes would be:

• Develop a responsive or adaptive site which resolves all content regardless of device
• Redirect users to an equivalent mobile URL
• If the mobile URL doesn’t exist, present the desktop page instead. To quote Google, “Doing nothing is better than doing something wrong in this case”.

Another tidbit of information suggesting Google’s mobile direction came from Matt Cutts at the recent SMX Advanced conference. To quote Sugarrae in her Matt’s You&A talk wrap-up:

“He kept saying how important it was for us to be mobile ready. He asked the audience how many people had auto-fill markup on their mobile site forms. Hardly anyone raised their hands. Danny said “that’s not mobile” and Matt said “yes it is“.

Emphasis is mine – once again Google are hinting at the importance of mobile user experience, and that they may be seeing UX and “traditional” optimisation as interchangeable.

Another interesting quote came from UK head of performance Matt Bush, who says he’s “yet to see a really good creative mobile campaign“.

It all suggests to me that Google will be placing a much higher emphasis on mobile in the coming months, and I think we could be 12-18 months away from seeing substantially different search results for mobile devices than those on desktop. And that’s before you even consider voice search or wearable media! The “faulty redirect” development would also suggest that mobile factors are going to play a bigger part in organic algorithms overall.

With our clients seeing anything up to 40% of traffic just going to handheld devices, but often without conversion rates to match, it’s essential that site owners start getting their houses in order and not just from an SEO perspective, but also UX, creative and cross device tracking.

I’ll leave you with another quote from Matt Cutts’ SMX Advanced speech: “The mobile dominant Internet is coming faster than most people in this room realise“.