The latest large brand to be hit with a user-generated content spam penalty notification is Sprint, the large US wireless communications company. Similar to Mozilla's penalty and BBC's penalty, Sprint was penalized for user-generated content spam on a portion of their site that was open to anyone to post links and content. Also similar to the BBC and Mozilla, Sprint went to the Google help forums to seek advice  because Google's warning message itself doesn't provide detailed information about what's wrong. The employee wrote: I received a message on 5/17/2013 that "Google has detected [...]

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

Want to have your company logo appear in Google search results, similar to the way authors get to have their pictures displayed? Keep waiting. New "organization markup" support that Google has announced won't do that, but it might be useful for putting your logo in Google Knowledge Graph boxes. Author Images Many are familiar with authorship images that appear next to some stories, such as this example: That's where I did a search for "google bing," and one of my own articles came up in the top results. My picture appears next to the article because I've gone through the steps to identify [...]

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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

When you begin to get into multilingual and multiregional SEO, you know that you have taken a step forward as an SEO expert. Why? Well, because you are probably dealing with a large, complex site that demands the expertise of someone who knows what they are talking about. If you are dealing in multilingual or multinational SEO, then you are managing a complex website strategy that serves multiple locations and languages -- not just one. Lucky for you, most everything you need to know about multilingual and multiregional SEO is listed in this post. So, even if you are a first-timer, you now [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | How To | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Multinational Search | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | SEO: Domain Names & URLs

Typically, the country-code top level domain (ccTLD) is just that -- a country code. For instance, example.co.uk has content for the UK, and example.com.au has content for Australia. Usually, registration of these domains is restricted. You have to prove that you are operating the site from the designated country. However, some countries have opened up registration to everyone. And of course, some top level domains, such as .com, are inherently generic. Google uses the location of a site in its ranking algorithms. A searcher in the UK is more likely to see sites from the UK in results. But [...]

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

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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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 [...]

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Google Webmaster Tools can be a powerful ally. But, if you make a mistake or put this power in the wrong hands, it can mean trouble for your search engine optimization. In this post, I provide a basic SEO Guide to Webmaster Tools to help get you started if you aren't taking full advantage of WMT yet. It is very important to point out that some of these things are more detrimental than others. Also, there could be multiple articles written about each of these tools and reports. This SEO guide to Webmaster Tools is a simple overview with a little insight. [caption id="attachment_153210" al [...]

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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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Advisor | Google: Antitrust | Google: Flight Search | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Place Pages | Google: Product Search | Google: SEO | Google: Travel Search | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

Google announced they have added three improvements to the Google Webmaster Tools verification system. View Verification Methods Now, you can not only see who the verified users on your sites are, but the verification method they used to achieve that status. Where appropriate, the verification details will have links to the correct URL on your site where the verification can be found. Here is a screen shot: Removing Verifications Method Prior To Un-verifying Users You simply cannot just delete a verified user without deleting or removing their verification method first. You now need [...]

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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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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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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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Google's Matt Cutts shared some new statistics in a recent video about the types of notifications Google sends out via Google Webmaster Tools. Google sends approximately "hundreds of thousands" of messages each month to webmasters. The categories of those messages break down as follows: 90% of those messages are black hat related 4% are notifications of content that have little or no value add 3% are hacking notifications 2% are about link buying 1% are about link selling Here is the video: The last time we had an update on the number or categories of types of notifica [...]

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Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video today explaining how a webmaster can locate which links pointing to their website is "unnatural." As you know, Google has been sending unnatural link warnings to Webmasters for about a year now. Webmasters should act when they receive this email; they should remove the unnatural links. What happens if you really do not know which links pointing to your site are unnatural? Google's Matt Cutts gives you two ways to discover these links. (1) You can sort your links to your site within Webmaster Tools by most recent links. (2) [...]

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Google has confirmed the reports of the removal of the "not selected" filter within Google Webmaster Tool's Index Status report. Google's John Mueller said it was removed because it "was causing more confusion than actually helping webmasters with their sites." That may be true, but many webmasters found the data useful. In fact, there were times when John from Google said himself that "not selected" data can be useful in some situations. Here is the comment from Google's John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analysts in Google Zurich. Yep, this was removed on purpose since it was causing [...]

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Over the past week or so, we've been hearing reports of the number of links being reported within Google Webmaster Tools drastically changing from what it was days before the change. Last week, we received some reports of Google increasing the number of links being reported in the tool. This week, we are seeing dozens of reports of the link count dropping significantly. Some suspect Google has a data display issue specifically with reporting on home page links, while others are not sure. Google's John Mueller, who I believe is currently on vacation, responded to the concerns in one Googl [...]

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With the news today that Chrome is moving to secure search, marketers may be wondering about the larger picture of using search data in Web analytics. The searches people do that lead them to a site is valuable data to an organization. What other data source do we have that gives us direct access to our customers' wants and needs? Sure, we can ask them, but customers can lie. Or choose not to answer. By looking at exactly what visitors have searched for, we can learn a lot about who our customers are, what they really want, and if we're providing it to them. Search marketers have valued [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Features: Analysis | Google: Analytics | Google: Chrome | Google: Privacy | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

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 [...]

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