After 2012 being dubbed the “Year of the Penguin,” Google’s Matt Cutts has already hinted that the next “Penguin 4” update will be bigger and more devastating than ever. We have seen big brands like Interflora get penalized and bounce back pretty fast. But how did that work? And what’s coming up for the rest of us? After the havoc wreaked by previous Penguin updates, how should webmasters prepare for what Google has in store next? [caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Matt Cutts has more in store for us webmasters....[/caption] Toxic Link Cleanup Phase Over the past [...]

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Google & Yandex announced the new x-default hreflang tag earlier this month, and in doing so closed the final gap in executing ‘perfect’ SEO platforms for multinational brands. There is, however, the question of what language content to use as your default, and how you can bring a little quantifiable information to play to determine your best, overall, choice.

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Pop Quiz:  What is the first thing a searcher sees when they type your name into the Google search bar? If your answer was related webpages found in SERPs, you're wrong -- that would be the second thing. The first thing they see are the Autocomplete suggestions that drop down from the search bar. This is your true first impression! There are three basic facts of our Google-centric world: first, like it or not, we each represent the brand of our personal name; second, we are humans, and thus, we all make mistakes; and third, Google searches for individual names are tremendously popular [...]

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Google's Matt Cutts answered a question submitted by another Googler, John Mueller, on YouTube asking, "Should I add an archive of hundreds of thousands of pages all at once or in stages?" The question is, if you build out a new section of your website with tons of content - is it safe to just launch them all at once or should you do smaller chunks at a time? Matt said that Google can handle it either way, but he did say that if a site released hundreds of thousands of pages overnight, it may raise a red flag and warrant a manual review by the Google spam team. And if you do not want Goo [...]

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An online survey examining SEO assumptions by SurveyMonkey found that the No. 1 reason users would block a website from their search results was if the website contained too many ads. If given an option to remove a website from future search results, 68 percent of the respondents said they would block a website because it had too many ads, while 60 percent claimed they would block a site because of poor quality content. Respondents were more forgiving of typos and grammar mistakes, with 26 percent claiming to block a website with typos and only 23 percent blocking a website containing bad g [...]

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Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, posted a video answer to the question "Can I buy a domain that used to have spam on it and still rank?" Matt explains that there can be two penalties here, one on the manual side and one on the algorithmic side. If this was a manual penalty, you can fix the spam and submit a reconsideration request. Manual spam also has a time out, where the penalty will auto-expire if the spam is cleaned up. If it was an algorithmic penalty, then you need to wait until the algorithm picks up on the changes. Plus, if the spam was very aggressive, it would be much [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | SEO: Spamming

Google's Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog a new annotation designed to help communicate redirects and languages to Google for multilingual and multinational web sites. The annotation is designed to work with homepages of multinational and multilingual sites that are configured to point users to localized pages, either via redirects or by changing the content to reflect the user's language. When this happens, you can now communicate to Google of this action through the new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation. The rel-alternate-hreflang ann [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central

Can using Google's link disavow tool help remove penalties? Yes, the company says. But when it comes to manual penalties, disavowing links alone isn't enough. With algorithmic penalties, there may be a time delay involved. Below, more about how both methods work. Over the past few days, I've encountered a couple of cases where people are confused about how the link disavow tool works to remove penalties. So, I figured a clarification post was in order. Here's the situation, all of which I reverified with Google yesterday. Disavowing Links: "Don't Count These Votes!" If you submit a disavo [...]

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Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts posted a video explaining why it is not uncommon to see a new page rank very well in Google early on, and then, that ranking declines over time. Matt explains that sometimes, Google has a hard time figuring out the original source of a new piece of content. But over time, i.e., days, weeks, months, Google is better able to figure out the most relevant result for a query due to indexing more signals over time. Thus, over time, the search results may settle down to a particular state; but early on, new pages may rank high and lose their rankings over t [...]

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Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, posted a 90-second video on what happens if a site that is selling links also links to your site. In short, Matt Cutts explains that when sites that sell links (with Google knowing about it) link to you, Google won't pass value from that link seller website. So, if a site that sells links is linking to you, it most likely won't hurt you. Matt said that the link will not benefit you and most likely will not hurt you. Matt explained: (1) Websites that sell links will see their toolbar PageRank downgraded by 30, 40 or 50%. (2) The site wil [...]

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It seems people have strong feelings for or against responsive Web design. My thanks to those with open minds who responded to last month’s column on SEO problems with responsive Web design with either praise or reasonable criticism. While I answered the most common criticisms already, one recent comment from Google’s John Mueller stood out to me. When he posted Luke Wroblewski’s results of sites that have seen success with responsive Web design to Google+ with the caption #rwd #ftw, I wanted to remind Google and other responsive Web design advocates that responsive Web design, whil [...]

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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

Don't want your content to be included in many of Google's vertical search services, such as Google Shopping or Google+ Local? Google's got a new tool for that, a result of its agreement earlier this year with the US Federal Trade Commission over anti-trust charges. Announced on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the new tool is located within Google Webmaster Central and allows publishers to keep their content out of: Google Shopping Google+ Local Google Flights Google Hotels Google Advisor (financial product search) Oddly, several of these services only allow you to be inc [...]

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One of the highlights from the SMX West show a week ago was the session named "The Search Police: Matt & Duane's Excellent Search Engine Adventure." The panel featured Google's Matt Cutts and Bing's Duane Forrester as Bill & Ted with Danny Sullivan playing Rufus. Matt (Bill) and Duane (Ted) both give presentations and then answer questions from the attendees. Here is the full video: There were a lot of nuggets that came out of this video, from the next Penguin and Panda updates to link networks being discredited and penalized to a discussion of whether the PageRank indicat [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO

Google has published over 500 videos on the Webmaster Help YouTube Channel, most of those videos features Matt Cutts answering quick SEO related questions. Sometimes you want the quick answer from Matt Cutts and sorting through hundreds of videos with the average length of two to five minutes can take a while. That is where The Short Cutts comes in! TheShortCutts.com is a searchable directory of all videos Matt Cutts produced, with quick question and answers printed right under the video. You can search or browse the question and answer videos right on that page. For example, this vid [...]

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Some are spotting new author images appearing in Bing's search results today, similar to the way Google shows author images. Except, they're not really author images. They're what I'd call subject images, something that might be coming more formally to Bing. Author Images At Google Here are two examples of authorship images as they appear on Google: The first is a picture of Kara Swisher, next to a search that brought up an article that she wrote on the new season of Game Of Thrones. The second is for myself, for an article I wrote about a test I ran to see if my two boys would ch [...]

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Google did end commenting on why the BBC received an unnatural link notification despite offering us a "no comment" on our story this past Friday. Was the BBC penalized for unnatural links? Was it possible that the world's largest news organization was not trusted by Google's algorithms? The answer is, only one article was penalized. John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland, said in a Google Help thread: Looking into the details here, what happened was that we found unnatural links to an individual article, and took a granular action based on that. This is not nega [...]

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There are many webmasters and SEOs believing right now that Google has released an update to their Panda algorithm late yesterday. We've reached out to Google to confirm or deny the Panda update, as we've done 24 times previously; but this time, Google told us they are unlikely to confirm future Panda updates since Panda will be incorporated into their indexing processes. It would not be surprising if this was indeed a Panda update since Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, did say at SMX West that a Panda update will be rolling out this Friday through the weekend. Matt then said al [...]

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What's that, a Panda Update you just felt? Some believe so. But Google says it is unlikely to confirm that or any future Panda Update, as it has done in the past, because of the new "gradual" rollout infrastructure it is using for Panda Update changes. Earlier this week at SMX West, Google's Matt Cutts said a new Panda Update might hit this week, then later said that the update — and future updates — would no longer be apparent as an abrupt change. Rather, Panda changes would roll out over a series of days. Because of this, Google now says it's unlikely it will confirm officially if [...]

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Google has sent the world's largest broadcast news organization, BBC News, an unnatural link notification last Saturday. The Search Engine Roundtable reports Nick, a BBC News representative, posted in the Google Help Forums about the notification. Nick was seeking advice from Google or SEOs on how he may find those unnatural links so the BBC can remove them and submit a reconsideration request. Nick wrote: I am a representative of the BBC site and on Saturday we got a 'notice of detected unnatural links'. Given the BBC site is so huge, with so many independently run sub sections, wit [...]

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