Google says that YouTube isn’t going to somehow solely escape its new “pirate penalty.” Any popular site may be OK, as the penalty works off of more than pure copyright infringement reports. Nuances in calculating the penalty should save popular user-generated content sites, the company said. The Pirate Penalty Initially, it sounded as if sites […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Foursquare Tips Now Integrated Into Bing’s Social Sidebar In May Bing rolled out its new social sidebar that tied together social data from both Facebook and Twitter. Today another source has […]
Google announced they have now migrated the Panda algorithm to Japanese and Korean languages. Google also added that this is likely to affect about 5% of queries for those languages. No other Asian or other languages were affected by this update. This comes over 16 months after Google released the original Panda update for English […]
Google has announced they pushed out a new refresh to the Panda algorithm recently. This update “noticeably affects only ~1% of queries worldwide,” said Google on Twitter. There were earlier rumors of an update over the weekend but Google said the rollout started today and not over the weekend. The previous Panda update was on […]
TechCrunch reports Apple seems to have changed how they rank apps within the App Store search results. Prior, having the keyword in your app’s name would tend to work well in terms of ranking the app in the app store. Now, according to several app developers, Apple is also ranking the apps based off of […]
Google’s latest batch of search quality updates is online, and offers some insight into a variety of search- and SEO-related topics. Though some of Google’s monthly updates have included more than 50 items, this one comes in at 39. But it looks like there’s still plenty to digest. Here’s a look at what stands out […]
No matter that it’s late Friday night on the start of a three-day holiday weekend in the U.S., Google has just pushed out the first update to its recent webspam-fighting Penguin algorithm. Let’s call it Penguin 2. Google’s Matt Cutts announced the news a short time ago on Twitter, calling it a “data refresh” that […]
Earlier this week, Google Fellow Amit Singhal gave the opening keynote at SMX London. Although Matt Cutts has always been the public face of all parts of Google’s unpaid search, his realm is primarily web spam. Singhal has been speaking publicly more often (notably when Panda launched) and oversees search quality. Or, as he described […]
Google has confirmed they have pushed out a refresh on the Panda algorithm on Friday, April 27th. I noticed an uptick in Webmaster discussion around Google changes over the weekend, mostly at WebmasterWorld and asked Google to confirm if there was an update. Google confirmed they refreshed the Panda update on the 27th, but it […]
Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, has published a video talking about a topic that Google has never really talked about publicly before – Google Quality Raters. The video goes through the process used by Google with these Quality Raters. Matt Cutts specifically says these quality raters have no direct impact on the Google […]
Google’s latest search algorithm change designed to fight spam and improve its search results went live yesterday. Plenty of people are seeing its impact already. Better or worse? It’s easy to find some examples of things being bad; it’s hard to say overall if there’s been a net improvement or not. Judging Relevancy Is Tricky […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Launches Update Targeting Webspam In Search Results Google has announced that it is releasing a new search algorithm that it hopes will better catch people who spam its search results […]
Followers of news about Google AdWords know that problematic errors — instances in which ads that violate the company’s own advertising standards slip by — come up quite regularly. Most recently, Google, along with advertiser ProFlowers, was roundly and publicly criticized for AdWords that seemed to indicate that local florists were sold out in advance […]
The good folks over at Stone Temple Consulting released an in-depth interview with Bing’s Principal Group Program Manager for Bing Social Search, Paul Yiu. The Bing social search team integrates social content and indicators into the search results to add both personalization and relevance to the search results. Bing currently ties in data from both […]
How does Google create its search algorithms, its recipes for making the listings and search results you get? For the first time, the general public gets a glimpse into the decision making process, through a video that Google has posted of one of its search quality meetings. The Video I was fortunate enough to witness […]
Want to understand better how Bing creates its search results? Bing has announced a new “Search Quality Insights” series to provide a more behind-the-scenes look at its search engine. You know, like “Search Quality Highlights” series that Google launched last December. What’s going on with these? And how does Bing’s latest post help Google on […]
Google has confirmed a new Panda update at the same time that it’s announcing 40 search updates that happened in February (or are in progress right now). It would be all but impossible to fully sum up the full slate of changes here, but there are a few that seem especially noteworthy and will no […]
Roughly 100 million people in the US search for health information on a monthly basis, according to 2011 comScore data. Google has seen these queries up close and recently concluded that it doesn’t do a great job of servicing them. The company is thus introducing improved results that shorten the time from symptom-related search to […]
Amit Singhal is the man who is responsible for Google web search. All the searches done on Google are technically under his watch. So when an interview was posted named The human search engine, where Mark Prigg from the London Evening Standard interviewed Amit Singhal, I got excited. The interview shares some insights into Amit’s […]
It’s the first Friday of the month, and that seems to be when Google has decided to push out its monthly update of search tweaks from the prior month. The January update is out and it contains a few interesting nuggets. Panda In The Pipelines There’s a mention of the Panda algorithm update that we […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Major Entertainment Groups Accuse Google, Bing Of Directing Users To Illegal Content Several major UK entertainment industry groups are accusing Google and Bing of directing searchers to illegal content, and have […]
Since at least 2005, Google has been using a large, worldwide focus group to help review its search results and the quality of the web pages that rank well in its algorithm. The people in this program are called Quality Raters and, as you can imagine, the work they do is important to search marketers […]
Among several interesting new search tweaks in Google’s latest monthly recap is a project internally called “Megasitelinks,” along with improvements to Google’s image search tool, its detection of “byline dates” on web documents and much more. Google just began doing monthly overviews of its search changes in November, and this latest overview includes 30 tweaks […]
I’ve seen some weird Google results in my time, but this one is pretty strange. Search for “define an english person” or some related queries, and Google brings up the Wikipedia page about the C-word in response. As spotted by Search Engine Roundtable, people were asking in Google’s help forums why various searches related to […]
First Google questioned Mitt Romney’s chances of winning the US presidential election. Now it’s suggesting that Austria is less important than Australia. You Say Austria, Google Says Australia In a search for Austria’s biggest companies, Google automatically changes the query and searches instead for Australia’s biggest companies: Forbes spotted the glitch, which is the second major problem […]
Google just posted about ten new algorithm changes it has made to how it shows and ranks search results. These include showing rich snippets more often, improving the quality of snippets, a better way of showing page titles for times when Google ignores the HTML title tag itself and a ranking boost for “official pages,” […]
Major brands and a variety of news sites — from established outlets to internet-only gossip sites — are among the winners from Google’s recent algorithm update that aimed to reward fresh and more recent content.
Google announced they are rolling out a new search algorithm change that helps make the search results “fresher.” The big news here is that besides for the results being fresher, the results will change for about 35% of all searches. Caffeine Was Infrastructure, This Is Algorithmic Fresher results can make for more relevant results, which […]
On around September 27th, Google launched what’s being called 2.5 of its Panda algorithm. On October 5th, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted: “Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).” Panda-related flux? Indeed, this seems to be the case, with site owners reporting Panda-related […]
Twenty months later, Yahoo and Bing have announced the completion of the organic (algorithmic) transition from Yahoo powered search results to Bing powered search results globally, with the exception of Korea. If you do a search on any Yahoo powered site via your desktop or mobile device, with the exception from within Korea, the search […]
After quietly testing in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, Google will roll out a new algorithm globally that gives more weight to landing page quality when it comes to AdWords Quality Score. This means ads with landing pages that Google deems to be most relevant to the query will be able to rank […]
Precision evaluations. Side-by-side experiments with human focus groups. Click evaluations. All of it led to more than 500 algorithm changes in 2010. Eric Schmidt is speaking today at a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC, about Google’s business practices, and answering claims that Google’s business practices are anti-competitive. As part of his appearance, Schmidt (as […]
Google published a nice 4 minute video on how they go about improving their web search algorithms, the quality of results and the user interfaces. They talk about finding problems, coming up with new ideas, testing those ideas, approving or rejecting those ideas and implementing the ideas. Overall, much of this is not new to […]
In March, LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Today, which was dubbed as a news source from your connections and peers in the industry. It has quickly grown to drive massive amounts of traffic to popular content. This service works by aggregating news from industries, connections and sources that you follow, then displaying stories in a visually appealing […]
Over the past few weeks, Google has been testing really large expanded Sitelinks in the search results for some queries for the past few weeks. After much testing, Google finally posted official confirmation that these new large sitelinks are here to stay. Google Expands Sitelinks: Google said the Sitelinks will now be “full-size links with a […]
Google has just announced that their “Panda” rankings changes, first launched in the United States in late February and rolled out to English language indices internationally in April, have now launched internationally in all languages other than Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Their post notes that for non-English indices, this change impacts 6-9% of queries (vs. […]
This week, several webmasters at WebmasterWorld noticed that the results in Google Images seemed to surface the original source of the images more of the time than it did in the past. I wrote about this at the Search Engine Roundtable as Google Images possibly improving their image source detection algorithm, but it is more. […]
SEOmoz announced they have published the Google Algorithm Change document detailing all “major updates” that happened since the Boston update in 2003. SEOmoz did it with style in this graphical document: While I agree with a lot of the updates listed here, I had worked up a list of my own a few months ago. […]
On Wednesday, I moderated a special panel at the Churchill Club involving the Googlers who oversee Google’s search algorithm, its search features and its spam fighting efforts. We covered a wide-range of search issues, and a video of the talk is now available. Three Kings Of Search In my opening to the session, I joked […]
With Google Panda Update 2.2 upon us, it’s worth revisiting what exactly Panda is and isn’t. Panda is a new ranking factor. Panda is not an entirely new overall ranking algorithm that’s employed by Google. The difference is important for anyone hit by Panda and hoping to recover from it. Google’s Ranking Algorithm & Updates […]