Have user generated content on your site? Pay attention to what those users are doing. That’s the takeaway from Google hitting Mozilla with a spam penalty this week, along with another takeaway. Despite Google’s saying it’s being more transparent about spam actions, people clearly find it hard to know what they’re in trouble for. Mozilla […]
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 […]
Pick your survey, and one of the top activities on a smartphone is to use Facebook. That’s what the new Facebook Home is all about, making it easier for Facebook users to get Facebook. But it also makes another top activity — search — harder to do. On Android devices, search is almost always just […]
Good news! As best I can tell, the poor performance of Google Alerts that has plagued Google’s monitoring service for months finally seems over. I asked, but Google won’t confirm that it’s made any changes. Still, it’s pretty clear to me that something has happened for the better. I noticed an improvement that began on […]
Yes, it is harder to find pages to iTunes apps in Google. But no, the company says, it’s not part of some nefarious plot. Rather, Google’s having technical problems gathering iTunes Preview pages, an issue it’s working to solve. Google has confirmed the issue, saying: We’ve been having some issues fetching pages from the iTunes […]
News publications having “sponsored content “deals are on the rise, and Google’s apparently concerned enough that it’s issued a warning today that publishers should keep such content out of Google News. In a post today on the Google News blog, the company writes: If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing […]
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 […]
Did you know that the higher a site is listed in search results, the more traffic that site is likely to receive? If you’re a search marketer, or anyone with a dose of common sense, you do. But Microsoft had research conducted to yet again prove this point, in an attempt to influence the ongoing […]
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 […]
The commercial in the middle of an episode of “Worst Cooks In America” this weekend caught me off-guard. Was that an ad for the Google Search App? It sure was, and the restart of Google’s campaign to push its cross-platform search tool. It was the first time I spotted this particular campaign on TV, though […]
Over the past year, Bing’s been steadily growing the “Snapshots” it shows on the right-hand side of its pages. Now, Bing says those are taking another leap to better understand relationships between people, places and things, using an expansion of what it calls its “Satori” technology. Bing writes on its blog today saying: Today, we […]
Last month, I wrote my Dear Google Alerts: Why Aren’t You Working? story. Soon after, Google told me things were improved. That’s not been the case for me; and now, another open letter about how poorly the service is working has appeared. The latest letter is from The Financial Brand, a website for financial marketers. It writes, […]
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 […]
Along with our new writer and editor hires announced today, more news: Elisabeth Osmeloski and Monica Wright are gaining new titles, reflecting their work on growing and working with our Search Engine Land community. Elisabeth started with Search Engine Land as our managing editor in September 2008, then became its Executive Features Editor in December […]
Engadget spotted and has archived a promotional video that suggests the Google Search App for iOS may be gaining Google Now support. That support might help boost usage of the Google Search App, which barely makes the iTunes Top 100. Google Now No Longer Android-Only? Google Now is Google’s predictive search assistant, which tries to […]
Google has largely ignored Bing’s Scroogled campaign, the one attacking it over the pay-for-play change to Google Shoppping & Gmail privacy. But today, Google search chief Amit Singhal pushed back a bit, saying Bing perhaps should focus on making better products rather than attacking Google. Speaking at the SXSW conference, when taking a question posed via […]
The growth of mobile search is like seeing a second child grow up. SEO isn’t bull. The knowledge graph, speech recognition and natural language are search’s biggest challenges. And, he really, really likes Star Trek. That’s just some of what the head of Google’s search efforts, Amit Singhal, shared when talking at SXSW today. Singhal is […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Today, Facebook has shared information that “hundreds of thousands” of people are using its Facebook Graph Search service, highlighting that people still use it like “old’ Facebook search — to find friends. Facebook then suggests some ways to go beyond that, for those who have the new search feature. New Ways To Find Friends From […]
Google keeps increasing the amount of information it will show from your Gmail account within your Google searches, if you’re part of the Gmail Search Field Trial. The latest addition? Your calendar results. The idea is that if you do a search, you’ll see matching information from your calendar showing within Google’s search results, when […]
A day after warning publishers against advertorials, will Google’s search team now have to penalize parts of its own company for running advertorials? Perhaps, and if so, it wouldn’t be the first time. It’s also another absurd chapter in Google’s war on paid links. Google Says: Advertorials, Beware! After news came out yesterday that Google […]
Google prepared — and briefly was showing — a special logo in honor of today’s near miss with Asteroid 2012 DA14. However, the company removed that out of respect, following the meteor explosion over Russia. Below, you can see the logo — or “doodle” as Google calls them — that was intended to run today […]
One of Google’s oldest features is Google Alerts, where you can enter keywords you want to monitor and get an email report each day about any new search results that match those terms. It was awesome; but for several weeks, it’s become nearly useless. My long-standing settings have been for Google to check each day […]
No question. Google remains the most used search engine in the world, far outdistancing competitors. But, over the past three months, its share of unique searchers had dipped below 80%, suggesting it has lost some regular searchers. Still, the huge percentage remaining at Google are searching more than ever. Meanwhile, has Yandex really taken the […]
There’s a strange bug on Google where search queries that should return no matches are instead turning Google into a porn search engine, almost as if an “anti-SafeSearch” feature is being enabled. Impossible Queries = Porn! The Verge highlighted a Quora post about the bug, where doing some searches for “contradictory” or impossible to solve […]
For ages now, Twitter has only allowed you to search for tweets back for about a week. Looking for a tweet older than that? You were out of luck, at least using Twitter itself. But now, that’s changing. In a post today, Twitter says that some older tweets are now going to be available. How […]
In 2011, Google rolled out a feature allowing searchers to block web sites they don’t like from appearing in its search results, which drew great attention. That got dropped last year, when Search Plus Your World was launched last January. A year later, Google says there are no firm plans for it to return. Google’s […]
Like how Google Image Search works on a tablet? Good news, then. That simplified experience is coming to Google Images on the desktop. Out With The Old Currently, viewing an image through Google Image Search is a multistep process. You do the search, see several images and can hover to get a slightly larger thumbnail: […]
Search engines continue to go old school, encouraging people to “tag” content in a way that makes it feel like it’s 1999 all over again. Today, Bing makes another push in that direction, making content you tag with “Bing Tags” more visibile. Honestly, I feel like this tagging crazy is simply Google and Bing falling […]
By now, everyone’s used to Siri’s wit. Tell her you love her, and Apple’s Siri digital assistant may respond that all you need is love — and an iPhone. Or that it will never work out. And she’s got jokes for a variety of other queries. But who’s the woman behind Siri? Or the man? […]
We’ve covered the launch of Facebook Graph Search, explored how it differs from Google search but now it’s time for the hands-on. Come along for a tour of how it works. Sign-Up & Wait To get started, you have to sign-up, where you’ll be added to a waiting list. There’s no particular ETA of when […]
At long last, Facebook’s search challenge to Google has arrived. But it has arrived in a much different format than many expected. Indeed, Facebook’s not using its data to provide a better search than Google. Facebook is providing a new type of search that you simply can’t do on Google or anywhere else. The Connections […]
I was saddened to see the news that Aaron Swartz had committed suicide. Such a tragedy. Swartz is known for a wide-range of things, such as helping create Reddit, RSS and being an internet activist. But I remember him most as one of the earliest Google bloggers. The Google Weblog went up on March 17, […]
Turns out, StumbleUpon is getting regular requests each week from people asking for it to remove links to their sites, people who are worried that being linked to from a popular and long-standing social media sharing site is somehow hurting them with Google. The linksanity sadly continues. Every since Google stepped up its attack on […]
While saying he’s “still investigating,” the head of the European Union’s antitrust regulatory body has told the Financial Times that he’s convinced Google is “diverting traffic” and that it will be forced to change its results. From the FT interview: “We are still investigating, but my conviction is [Google] are diverting traffic,” Mr. Almunia told the […]
When Google introduced a new format last month for the definitions it sometimes shows at the top of its search results, something was missing. The source URL wasn’t a clickable link. That’s now been fixed. Here’s an example, the definition box that Google shows for a “define speed of light” search: The URL shown under […]
On Friday, Windows Phone users supposedly found themselves unable to access Google Maps. But Google said it made no sudden change on its end to cause this. What happened? It seems likely many people simple noticed for the first time long-standing redirection that Google had in place for those not using Android or iOS devices. Windows Phone […]
Do a search on Google Finance for the word “sell,” and Google returns the stock chart for Apple. Why? Some thought Google had rigged this as an “Easter Egg” or joke. However, Google says this isn’t so. In the first edition of this story, I could see no good reason why this was happening, something […]