Happy New Year! Another year, another changing landscape for internet marketing. 2015 was an exciting year for SEO, and 2016 is shaping up to be even better.

Don’t worry if you haven’t been keeping up-to-date with all the latest SEO news for the New Year. We’ve got you covered with our wrap-up below:

Page Ranking Might be Improved by Mobile Speed

Mobile search is no longer the future. It’s the present! Google’s continued preference for mobile usability continues into 2016.

February will see the release of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, or AMP. Sites which use AMP will likely receive a small ranking boost. They’ll be labeled as “fast” in mobile SERP’s\ and treated favorably. Think of the label “mobile-friendly” and how it applies to Mobilegeddon.

Google’s Influence on Digital Certificate Security

Google will soon be making moves which might impact anyone with a Class 3 Public Primary CA from Symantec Corporation. Google has announced they’ll soon move to distrust those certificates across Android, Chrome and Google products.

They’re doing this in response to an announcement by Symantec, who informed Google that the certificates will no longer comply with CA/Browser Forum’s Baseline Requirements. This announcement was made in December, 2015, so the situation in still unfolding.

Symantec says that their customers won’t be affected. But common sense says if Google wants to make a change, everyone else will feel the impact. This will be an issue to watch in the next few months.

The Importance of Link Building Could be Changing

Link building isn’t going away anytime soon. But Google shows a lot of signs that user experience will be their major focus from now on.

Content, user satisfaction and personalized results are going to have a significant impact on ranking. The recent updates to Panda and Penguin help confirm this as well.

Claims that link building is dead have been made before, and they turned out to be incorrect. Links will continue to have an impact on search rankings. But this is the year you want to make user experience your main priority.

Publisher Blocking

We enter 2016 with many web developers expressing frustration with Google. The search giant’s focus on mobile and apps point towards a future not every SEO professional is happy with. Is Google closing the web? If data becomes harder to access, large brands will benefit while upstarts will suffer.

While it’s too soon to say for sure, there’s something you can do now to prepare. Focus on local search instead of national. A small business, with a niche product or service, located in a small city, can buy search terms for a great price. Local SEO is always a good idea regardless how accurate these claims of publisher blocking turn out to be.

The Year of Mobile

Apps are only going to grow in popularity. Google’s mobile-friendly updates might mean an eventual move to a massive change. Is 2016 the year of app indexing, searchability and advertising?

Maybe or maybe not. This year seems to be “the Year of the App.” But are apps just a fad, or is this the start of a permanent trend?

As people spend less time on mobile internet and more time on mobile apps, there’s an actual decrease in overall web browsing. Desktop and laptop browsing were on the decline as 2015. This trend will likely continue into at least the early part of 2016.

Foreign URL Caching

Have you found Google caching the wrong versions of your pages? This seemed to be a growing trend as last year ended. Users were finding that Google either cached a totally different website or the site they cache is the wrong country code. An example would be .ca instead of .com.

This might be a hacking issue. No one definite cause is known. Has this happened to you? Let us know in the comments.