Last night at SMX Advanced, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts was on stage to answer questions about Google search and webmaster topics with Danny Sullivan. We covered the session in live blog format and pulled out several key points. Of all my years watching Matt Cutts talk, I believe it has been over ten years now, I have never seen Matt reveal so much new information and announce so many new things in a single hour at a conference. Here are the highlights from last night, with links to those individual stories: Google Payday Loan Algorithm: Google Search Algorithm Update To [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Featured | Google: Mobile | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

Dr. Peter Meyers, the Marketing Scientist at Moz (formerly SEOmoz), tipped us off to a new Google search interface test. It appears Google is testing showing "in-depth articles" in the search results for local queries. In the screenshot below, Pete triggered these results by searching for [mexican restaurants]. The local results and maps came up, and also restaurant reviews from Reason, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Below is a screen shot (here is a full size screenshot): We've reached out to Google for a comment on this finding but have not yet heard back. Google is [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Google: User Interface | Google: Web Search | Top News

A new video by Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, talks about how potentially using rel="author" structured data can help Google's Web spam team improve search quality. Matt Cutts explains that moving from the anonymous Web to a Web with identity helps Google understand the authority and trust of the person writing that content. It can help identify a spammer from an author with a lot of authority and credibility. The example given by Cutts is of our own Founding Editor, Danny Sullivan. If Danny writes something in a low PageRank forum, Google may consider that post written by Dan [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Authorship | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Schema.org | Top News

Google announced today a new, fun and useful tool to help webmasters markup their webpages with schema structured data. Structured data markup can help a webpage enhance its search listings by adding rich snippets to the search results page. Google announced two upgrades here to the structured data tool. Google added a new tool to allow webmasters to visually markup their webpages and then download the the HTML markup code to add to their HTML. The tool is named Structured Data Markup Helper. The tool lets you click on the various content and images on the page and then mark what data it [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Schema.org

Google is keen for structured markup -- to put it mildly. In the not-too-distant past, I wrote about Google's Data Highlighter for event data, a tool which allows webmasters to indicate structured data for events without having to actually mark up the site's HTML code. It has the charming feature that the resultant extracted data is viewable by the webmaster only in Webmaster Tools in the Structured Data section; and, of course, the data is available to Google itself. As there is no actual structured markup ever placed on the page (i.e., no schema.org, microdata or any other markup), th [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: Webmaster Central | Schema.org

Google has quietly added support for six additional data types to the data highlighter rich snippet markup tool they introduced back in December. Google initially launched a visual rich snippet markup tool in December to allow less tech-savvy webmasters to markup their event based data. The tool only worked with event data and nothing else. Google has updated their help page showing the six new data types, in addition to the events data type. They include: Articles Movies TV Episodes Products (link currently broken) Local Businesses Software Applications Google will like [...]

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If one theme was abundantly clear at SMX West in March, it was the question over the importance of authorship and how it might impact future rankings in Google. During the “What’s Needed For SEO Success In 2013 & Beyond?” panel, I asked Matt Cutts if Google planned to expand authorship credit (and potentially the rich snippet) beyond just written content (like blog posts) and begin incorporating other content types. In reality, content creators could truly author various types of content, including photos for photographers or video for videographers. Just because a piece of con [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | Google: Authorship | Google: Rich Snippets

There are expectations in some quarters that publishers will soon be able to have their logos showing up in Google in the way that authors can have their pictures appear. But, Google says there are "no plans" for some type of "publishership" to go live similar to the way it handles authorship. Expectations were raised after Kahena Digital and Standing Dog noted that publishers using rel=publisher can see how their logos would look in Google's Rich Snippets testing tool. However, Google told us generally that this has been working that way in the testing tool for months and that there are [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Authorship | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

In a June 2010 Semantic Web Meetup in San Diego, Peter Mika of Yahoo!'s research division gave a presentation entitled, "The future face of Search is Semantic for Facebook, Google and Yahoo!" As the title suggests, the presentation focused on the ever-growing use of semantic markup as a means for helping computers parse and understand content. The talk focused on what was then the current state of the Semantic Web, as well as upcoming formats/technologies in development and the research being done in the field of semantic search. The idea that the Semantic Web would be central to search [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Facebook: Facebook Search | Google: Knowledge Graph | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: Web History & Search History | Google: Web Search | Schema.org | Search & Retail

Last month, an excerpt from Eric Schmidt's forthcoming book came out where he discussed how identity and authorship might be used to better rank search results. Since then, I've seen that widely cited as proof Google is already doing "Author Rank." It's not, nor was Schmidt describing a Google-specific system. But that could come, and Google's existing authorship program may be a part of it. Schmidt On Potential Future Of Profiles & Ranking The excerpt came from the Wall Street Journal, which quoted from The New Digital Age, the book due out next month that Schmidt has coauthored wit [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Authorship | Google: Google+ | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Top News

Patrick Altoft posted on Twitter about a new Google rich snippet designed for snow conditions. He searched for [geilo snow report] in Google and up came a rich snippet showing the snow conditions on that mountain. Here is a picture: As you can see, this rich snippet is pulled from the data on onthesnow.com. It contains the snow depth statistics, new snow stats within 24 and 72 hours, the conditions of the snow, the lifts currently open on the mountain, the trails currently open on the mountain and the current weather. It also shows the last time the data was updated on that web page. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search

Google announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog a new tool that makes it incredibly easy for site owners to markup their pages with structure data. The Data Highlighter tool. The Data Highlighter is a browser based point-and-click tool that lets authorized site owners add rich snippet / structured data markup to their web pages. Prior, the only way to add structured data markup to your web pages was to go into the HTML code and add it there. No longer do you need to know HTML to add this markup data - you can now use the Data Highlighter tool. The Data Highlighter tool is currently [...]

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If you happened to do certain abortion-related searches in the past few days, you might've been surprised to see the late Truman Capote getting Google+ Authorship credit for an article from The New York Times. What makes it odd, of course, is that Capote died in 1984. He wrote numerous classics that showed up on the Times bestseller list but, as far as I know, he never actually wrote for the Times itself -- and he certainly didn't write an article that was first published in 2010. Capote also died a couple decades too soon to have a Google+ account, which makes this search result -- shar [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Authorship | Google: Google+ | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: Web Search | Top News

Semantic markup is becoming more and more popular in conjunction with large scale SEO. Adding rich snippets to send rich signals to alert search engines as to the relevancy of your content − whatever vertical they may appear in − is not only a wise move, but an SEO best practice. Included below is an illustrative guide highlighting currently available Chrome extensions, which you can leverage to both test on-site markup as well as expose any information regarding your competitors. An example is illustrated below, and what follows is a guide to getting the information.   Installi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Enterprise SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate | Schema.org | Search Features: Enhanced Listings

There has been a lot of discussion in the SEO world lately around structured data and rich snippets in the SERPs. If you are not familiar with structured data, it is basically a way to explain the content of your website to the search engines in a trusted (structured) format. You can think back to the good-old-days when all you had to do was update your META tags… until this was abused so much that Google stopped using them. What Is Structured Data & Why Should You Use It? Although Google doesn’t currently use structured markup data for ranking purposes, there are several benefits [...]

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing | Channel: SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | Schema.org

The movement toward structured data markup (i.e., increasing use of standards like Open Graph, Schema.org, RDFa, etc.) has bothered me for awhile, but I could not exactly put my finger on the issues. A few weeks ago at SMX East, there were some great presentations on these topics, and I finally realized that I have many major reservations about the proliferation and use of these standards, on many levels (mostly from a publisher perspective; for end-users they are generally a very positive development). What Are These Standards? They sound complicated, but in layman's terms, I would say: [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | Schema.org | SEO: Tagging

If you're searching for movie information on Google, you can now watch trailers right in your search results. Google posted about the change this afternoon, saying that a new "trailer" button will appear on searches for specific movie titles, and on queries like [showtimes nyc] or [movies nyc]. On that more generic type of search, Google offers a list of movies with corresponding trailer buttons, like this: Clicking a button brings up the trailer in a full-screen pop-up window, with the video coming from a "Googlemovietrailers" YouTube account. The YouTube trailer page is unlisted [...]

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Google has confirmed that there's a hidden benefit to having authorship status: If a user returns to the search results after reading an author-tagged search result for a certain period of time, Google will add three additional links to similar articles from the same author below the originally clicked link. Say what? A couple visuals will help explain what this is, so follow along. If I do a Google search for "marketing land feedburner," Google shows one of my recent MarketingLand.com articles in the top spot, and it includes my authorship status -- name, avatar, Google+ information, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Authorship | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Google: User Interface | Google: Web Search | Top News

Did you receive an email from Google Authorship this morning? It seems that many writers and bloggers who work with sites that have set up Google Authorship have received email confirmations from Google today, confirming their participation. The email welcomes the participant to Google Authorship, and shows how authorship works in search results. Here's the email: Not everyone who uses authorship received confirmations, however. Only a few of us here at Search Engine Land and Marketing Land received the email, so it's unclear what the criteria was to get one. At SMX Advanced 2 [...]

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Google has renamed its rich snippets testing tool in webmaster tools to Structured Data, improved it to better reflect what the search result will actually look like and has expanded the types of structured data supported. Google first launched rich snippets -- enhanced markup of search results -- in 2009 and has been adding the types of support markup ever since. In 2011, in conjunction with Microsoft and Yahoo, they launched schema.org, which expanded the types of markup available, although not every type of results is in the enhanced display (yet). Implementing structured data that r [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: Webmaster Central | Schema.org | Top News