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’s Matt Cutts: Websites Using ccTLDs Should Contain Content Relevant To The Specific County Code In his latest video, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts addresses whether or not it […]
Bing has added new pop-up alerts that are triggered when people search for terms considered to be related to child porn, according to the BBC, in reaction to the UK’s prime minister attacking Google, Bing & Yahoo over not doing enough to stop child pornography. But Google has reportedly rejected the idea of warnings. Microsoft told the […]
Google made a clear stance late Friday on the Google Webmaster blog that they will not tolerate webmasters pushing deceptive search results to searchers through the use of browser history spamming techniques. The technique uses a method of detecting a click on the browser’s back button. When clicked, a user is not sent back to […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Enhanced Campaigns: “Flexible Bid Strategies” Launching Soon Google will be rolling out “flexible bid strategies” in enhanced campaigns in the next couple of weeks. Flexible bid strategies will allow advertisers to […]
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 […]
Google has been at the center of heated geo-political controversy before, usually around disputed place names or borders on maps. A new controversy, however, has arisen about one of Google’s international homepages: Google.ps. That’s the page previously dedicated to the “Palestinian Territories.” On May 1 Google dropped “territories” and now calls it “Google Palestine.” This move follows UN recognition of the […]
What to do if Google sends you a penalty notice, and you can’t figure out exactly what it’s for? Turn to Google’s webmaster help forum, says the head of Google’s Web spam team, Matt Cutts. If you’re still confused after that, you can file a reconsideration request where you might be given more details. The […]
We reported yesterday that Google penalized Mozilla over user generated content. Today, we learn that it was a really, really small penalty that only impacted a single page out of Mozilla’s ~22 million webpages. Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, added more to the Google thread explaining that this manual penalty was applied in […]
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 […]
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted a 90-second video on what happens if a site that is selling links also links to your site. In short, Matt Cutts explains that when sites that sell links (with Google knowing about it) link to you, Google won’t pass value from that link seller website. So, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Search Week: March 18, 2013 Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below […]
Google did end commenting on why the BBC received an unnatural link notification despite offering us a “no comment” on our story this past Friday. Was the BBC penalized for unnatural links? Was it possible that the world’s largest news organization was not trusted by Google’s algorithms? The answer is, only one article was penalized. […]
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 Panda Update 25 Seems To Have Hit There are many webmasters and SEOs believing right now that Google has released an update to their Panda algorithm late yesterday. We’ve reached […]
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 […]
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 Panda Two Years Later: The Real Impact Beyond Rankings & SEO Visibility (Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of articles looking at the aftermath of Google’s Panda […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Ads Sticks With Improved Reporting Interface Bing Ads announced that the new reporting user interface released in October is now the default. Users will no longer see the option to […]
How much does Google figure into the “future of search,” whose advances will largely be determined by mobile and non-traditional devices? That’s a hard question to answer. On the one hand Google is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) brand in the world, with almost unlimited resources to develop technology or buy companies […]
Just over three months ago, Google launched the news keyword meta tag designed to let news publishers have a better chance of ranking for words they might not have included in their headlines. Adoption rate so far? Only about 5% of the sources within Google News use the tag, according to new data provided by […]
Google is awaiting a judge’s decision on damages before it decides what to do after losing a defamation case over its search results in Australia. A jury in the supreme court of the Australian state Victoria, ruled Tuesday that Google is liable for defamation because its search results connected the plaintiff, 62-year-old Milorad Trkulja, to […]
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 Q3 Earnings Leak: $14.1 Billion, Disappoint Surprised Investors Google’s Q3 “consolidated earnings” leaked early and are below analysts’ expectations. Search clicks were up 33 percent vs. a year go but […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Panda Update 3.92 Rolling Out (Or Is It Panda 20 Time?) Google’s announced that another Panda Update is being unleashed on its results, one that it says will impact 0.7% of […]
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 Removed The Pirate Bay From Instant Search TorrentFreak reports Google has removed The Pirate Bay from showing up in Google’s search suggestions within Google Instant Search. Google Instant Search will […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Amazon’s New Kindle Fire Tablets Use Bing As Default Search Engine Ubergizmo is reporting that Bing (not Google) will be the default search engine for the Amazon browser on the new […]
Even though large sporting events such as the Super Bowl have seen their share of mobile traffic, the current Olympic Games are the first truly multi-platform global sporting event. During the first two days of the Olympics, smartphone and tablet searches approached 50 percent of overall search query volume according to Google. In one case, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: It’s Not WHAT You Need to Go Viral – It’s WHO Everyone dreams of going viral. Think of the traffic! The links! The search signal boosts, the audience growth, the brand […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The Hideous Site: An Allegory For Oddities In Local Search Results The small, local businesses in a particular industry on this island all vied for top slot in Google’s rankings, since […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Wikipedia Appears On Google’s Page One 46 Percent Of The Time, Compared to 31 Percent On Bing [STUDY] A new study suggests that Wikipedia gets better visibility on Google than it […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Tips For Multinational Mobile Site Optimisation In previous posts in this column, I’ve covered the intricacies of multinational search from a technical SEO’s standpoint. Leveraging multinational markup while clearing up in-site […]
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 […]
It appears Google is testing showing fewer than the typical 10 web search results, in what might either be a test or possibly a bug. I spotted complaints in a WebmasterWorld thread where searchers were asking why is Google limiting the results for a search query on Google UK for bbc football, such as shown: […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The Paid Search Uncertainty Principle In 1927, Werner von Heisenberg documented what he referred to as an “Uncertainty Principle” governing quantum mechanics. The Uncertainty Principle holds that an observation cannot precisely […]
After China and the US, India is the third largest internet market in the world. But India has philosophically aligned itself more with China in pursuing a policy of censorship toward publication of content deemed “offensive” or “objectionable” by individuals, groups or the government. A recently enacted law seeks to remove all such content from […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 5 Common Tracking Problems: How To Troubleshoot & Fix Them I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what is wrong with some clients’ analytics installs. Unlike types […]
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 […]
Ads for illegal Olympic ticket resellers, ads for cannabis, and ads for fake identification cards and UK passports. All illegal, but all could, up until recently, be found on Google.co.uk, according to a British Broadcasting Company (BBC) investigation publicized today. Though Google shut down the illegal advertisers when the matter was brought to the company’s attention […]
Increasingly over the years, search engines — Google in particular — have given more and more support to SEOs and publishers. But 2011 marked the first significant reversal that I can recall, with both linking and keyword data being withheld. Here’s what happened, why it matters and how publishers can push back if Google and Bing don’t […]
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: Parked Domains, Scraper Sites Targeted Among New Search Changes In what’s now to be a monthly update on search changes, a new Google “Inside Search” blog post today tells us […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: How You Can Build Links Easily With Product Reviews The art of building links to increase search rankings has been a big topic in the SEO community for a long time. […]
Google boosts London’s Silicon Roundabout from BBC News reports Google has signed a ten year deal to lease the entire top floor of the seven floor building in what is known as the Silicon Roundabout. The Silicon Roundabout currently has about 300 firms in the area and it is located in the Old Street area […]
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 Wallet Now Live, But In Very Limited Availability As expected, Google has formally announced the first rollout of Google Wallet — the company’s first official entry into the growing mobile […]