Kaspar Szymanski a Search Quality Strategist based in Google's Dublin office posted the official one page Google SEO cheat sheet designed to dumb down webmaster and SEO related techniques. The Google SEO cheat sheet is in three steps: (1) How to make your search results look good in the search results. Google recommends you craft your titles properly, make sure your domain name and file name structure is descriptive of the page content and tailor useful and descriptive search descriptions. (2) Enable Google to really understand your images by giving them descriptive file names, us [...]

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Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, announced at SMX West today that their Panda algorithm will soon be more integrated into their overall continuous algorithm updates. Meaning, the Panda refreshes that we have been tracking in detail will start to be less severe and noticeable to webmasters and SEOs. The Panda updates will be more real-time, as opposed to being manually pushed out. When will this happen? As early as this weekend with the next Panda refresh. Here is the audio clip from the show where Matt Cutts announced this. Here is a partial transcript: Rather than ha [...]

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Google has just launched a help center for hacked sites, complete with step-by-step instructions and videos that outline each part of the process. The videos feature Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google (and her Googler colleagues), who told me "we wanted to connect our capability to detect and alert site owners of their hacked sites with improved resources to help them recover." For some time, Google's been letting site owners know when their sites have been hacked, but this new help center takes the next step and walks through how to fix the site and get the warnings remove [...]

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Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced new updates with Google's Penguin and Panda algorithms and new link network targets in 2013. Matt announced this during the SMX West panel, The Search Police. Significant Penguin Update Matt said that there will be a large Penguin update in 2013 that he thinks will be one of the more talked about Google algorithm updates this year. Google's search quality team is working on a major update to the Penguin algorithm, which Cutts called very significant. The last Penguin update we have on record was Penguin 3 in October 2012. Before that, w [...]

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Had a bad experience purchasing from an online merchant? Google says it wants to protect searchers from that, and it may crackdown later this year with changes intended to prevent bad merchants from ranking well. The news came during the "How to Rank Better in Google & Bing" session that I moderated yesterday at the SXSW conference in Austin. Google's chief Web spam fighter Matt Cutts responded to concerns one merchant had about bad competitors outranking him. Cutts said: "We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and [...]

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Unconfirmed reports are surfacing throughout the SEO community that Google has penalized yet another link network. The rumors within the industry are that the link network targeted by Google is named SAPE links. Webmasters who have used the SAPE link network are reporting that their sites have taken hard penalties within Google, resulting in a huge downgrade in ranking. Not all webmasters agree it is the SAPE link network but feel it may be a different network all together. There are forum thread discussions at Black Hat World and Black Hat Group that have webmasters and SEOs claimin [...]

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TorrentFreak is reporting that Google is demoting the rank of the search result for the phrase "Pirate Bay", the well-known BitTorrent tracker, on the UK version of Google. TorrentFreak research shows the actual Pirate Bay website is not listed in the first 100 results when searching on the UK site (independent of location) but continues to appear in the first position on other Google sites like Google.com and Google.com.au. The UK site currently has a Pirate Bay proxy listed as the first Google result. We tried several of the searches used in the article and got identical results. Torren [...]

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A new Google patent was awarded today named Systems and methods for detecting hidden text and hidden links. The patent was filed on August 25, 2009 by Google's Matt Cutts and Fritz Schneider. It was awarded today after being in pending status for over 3 years. The abstract reads: A system detects hidden elements in a document that includes a group of elements. The system may identify each of the elements in the document and create a structural representation of the document. The structural representation may provide an interconnection of the group of elements in the document. The syste [...]

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One of the more interesting aspects of Google's recently released "How Search Works" interactive infographic were the live examples of spam that were recently removed. The features allows users to see live spam that was recently removed (once they clicked through the disclaimer that offensive material may be included.) Just 4 days later our own RustyBrick (the company of our very own Barry Schwartz) has released a Web Spam Archive Replay tool that aggregates and saves the spam examples. Google appears to only provide 48 examples at a time, but this  tool allows users to flip through m [...]

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Interflora got penalized only 2 weeks ago, right after Valentine’s day with a huge coverage in the media and also a some-what indirect statement from Google’s Matt Cutts himself about Advertorials also counting as paid links if they pass Page Rank (i.e. do not have NOFOLLOW tags on them). Now, just this past Sunday, a week before Mother’s day in UK, they are already back for most of their rankings. Many wonder how that recovery was possible so quick and we’ll look at what was changed and what was cleaned up. More Than Advertorials As we could see in the Interflora Deep Dive Analy [...]

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In the latest video from Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, he addresses Google's standards for manually removing spam from the Google index. Matt Cutts first said and repeated it a couple times within the video that Google will not penalize or ban a site that is being critical of Google. Matt said: "One thing that we don't do it is just say or someone has been critical of Google, therefore take action. We're big believers in the Voltaire saying of I might not agree with what you say but I'll defend to death your ability to say it. So just because you're critical of Google that's no [...]

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In my January column I resolved not to discuss the responsive Web design issue anymore, as the One URL versus multiple URL issue is moot now that Google has announced a way to consolidate link equity for equivalent mobile URLs. Unfortunately, the rest of the SEO community isn’t following suit, as responsive Web design still seems to have the undeserved reputation for being the best option for SEO. In reality, mobile URLs could be the best option for SEO, depending on your circumstances. The Madness Of Crowds For example, though I praised her in my last column for sharing her mobile SEO [...]

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Interflora, the major UK flower delivery service, is showing up again in Google's search results -- just 11 days after it was penalized. According to some tweets and posts on Google+, Chris Gilchrist was first to spot Interflora's resurrection today. As you can see in the screenshot above, Interflora is ranking again on searches for its company name, and its Google+ brand box is appearing again on the right side of the search results. (As Dan Barker pointed out on Google+, that wasn't showing during the penalty.) Based on my Google.co.uk searches here in the US, Interflora is also ra [...]

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As part of today's big "How Search Works" reveal, Google also took the big step of sharing its Search Quality Rating Guidelines for the first time. This is the document that Google's human search quality raters use when grading Google's search results. But the new, public document is actually an edited version of the old one that circulated quietly several times amongst webmasters and SEOs. In fact, "gutted" is more accurate than "edited" -- where the most recent non-public version of the document was 161 pages, the public document released today is only 43 pages. What's Changed The bi [...]

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In Google's new How Search Works, Google is showing real live examples of spam that was recently removed from their search index. Most of these examples are of pure spam, as Search Engine Land founding editor Danny Sullivan explained in his write up, Google Charts “Manual Actions” Against Spam In Search For First Time. Most of the examples are spam removed from the index within the past hour or so. You can see them live over here, but note some of the examples given can be offensive. Google warns users, "these screenshots are generated automatically and are not manually filtered. Wh [...]

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As part of the How Search Works interactive infographic Google released today, they have decided to publish their search quality rating guidelines publicly to the world. You can access the 43-page PDF document over here. It was most recently updated November 2, 2012. As you may remember, the document has been leaked back in 2008, 2001, 2012 and other times, when finally they said they were considering going public with that document. Today, they have. Search quality raters are third-party people Google hires through a third-party agency to rate the search results. It is not used to ra [...]

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How often does Google take "manual action" against websites for spam, where a human being reviews a site and decides it deserves some type of penalty? For the first time, Google's released a chart showing this, going back nearly 10 years. The chart is part of Google's new "How Search Works" area, and it stretches back from August 2004 to today (click to enlarge the chart): "Legacy" indicates manual actions that Google took that weren't classified into a more specific category, Google told me. Until around the end of 2007, most everything was either over "unnatural links" or "legacy" -- I.E [...]

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Ever wondered how Google Search works, finds pages from across the web and decides how to list them in response to a search? If so, Google's got a new resource designed to answer questions. Called "How Search Works," the new area announced today is an interactive infographic that explains more about the search process, including how Google deal with spam issues. The new area was inspired by Google's The Story Of Send, an interactive infographic that Google released last year to explain how it handles email. "We were looking at this site [The Story Of Send], Matt Cutts [Google's chief [...]

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SISTRIX, a German-based SEO tools company, launched a Google Updates history page where you can track all the major Google updates in one place. SEOmoz published and maintains a very similar list over here as well. Both provide date information, with the name or type of the update that was believed to have happened. SISTRIX will also link to more details, when they have it, from studies they've published about the update. SEOmoz will also do something similar but they also link to outside sources with more details about those updates. One thing this tool does that none other do is the [...]

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[caption id="attachment_112063" align="alignright" width="205"] Image credit to ShutterStock[/caption] You may see a drop in rankings or traffic and immediately panic. Have I been Panda-slapped? Even now, as we look at the two year anniversary of Google's Panda Update, the likelihood is that you have not. Rankings and traffic fluctuate for many reasons, most of which are not related to penalties from search engines. But, how can you tell? Instead of watching rankings overall, watch categories of keywords. If you separate your keyword categories by topic, you can more easily spot trends t [...]

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