As you know, there are many sites going black to protest SOPA and PIPA. Google has already offered blackout SEO advice but they decided to take it one step further by slowing down their spiders today. Pierre Far from Google posted on his Google+ that Google is slowing down GoogleBot's crawl activity to reduce the effect on their site's search rankings, if they did not follow the Google SEO advice from yesterday. Pierre Far said: Hello webmasters! We realize many webmasters are concerned about the medium-term effects of today's blackout. As a precaution, the crawl team at Google has conf [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Blocking Spiders

A number of websites are (or were) planning to "go black" this week while the U.S. Congress discusses issues related to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The website blackouts are part of a larger social media effort against the bills that our Greg Finn wrote about this morning on Marketing Land. You may be thinking about joining the website blackout movement, but yikes ... what about the SEO implications? How do you take your site offline in protest without messing up your visibility in Google's search results? Well, Google's Pierre Far shared several tips [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: Duplicate Content | Top News

This morning we reported that the comments on Facebook are being indexed by Google. Google's Matt Cutts just confirmed on Twitter that Google is now able to "execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments." This gives Google's spider, GoogleBot, the ability to read comments in AJAX or JavaScript, such as Facebook comments or Disqus comments and others that are dynamically loaded via AJAX or JavaScript. In addition, this means, Google is better at seeing the content behind more of your JavaScript or AJAX. Postscript: Google now has an official blog post up with more details. Related [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: Flash | Top News

This morning, James Breckenridge discovered a loophole within Google's Webmaster Tools that allowed anyone to remove any site from Google. Both James and I sent this information to Google as soon as we heard of it. After several hours, Google has told us, "we're still investigating this report, and to be cautious we disabled all URL removals earlier this morning." So now, if you even own a site, you won't be able to remove the site or pages from the site using Google's URL removal tool. How did this loophole work? Pretty simple as James described. You use the following URL when logged [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | SEO: Spamming | Top News

Google announced on the Webmaster blog that they have removed a requirement for removing URLs via Google Webmaster Tools. Google no longer requires you to block access to the URL you want to remove from Google prior to submitted the URL removal request. Google said they have eliminated "the requirement that the webpage's URL must first be blocked by a site owner before the page can be removed from Google's search results." Why did Google drop this requirement? Simply because since you have already validated and verified you are the owner of the site, Google felt it was redundant to requi [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Blocking Spiders