Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Starbucks & The Economist Admit To Using Google+ For SEO More Than Social Last Friday, a New York Times report on Google+ spotlighted Starbucks and The Economist as two brands currently […]
Google announced they are replacing the old smartphone crawler user-agent with a new one in order to make it possible for Google to index more smartphone content. Zhijian He, a smartphone search engineer at Google said that the previous user-agent “made it impossible for Google to index smartphone content of some sites, or for Google […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Use Google Keyword Research To Target The Long Tail In Local Search There’s something of a void where local business marketing is concerned. Local marketers understand they need to target keyword […]
Pierre Far, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced a new feature within Google Webmaster Tools that shows webmasters crawl errors specific to smartphone devices. The issue is: it is often hard for webmasters to detect and thus fix errors that happen on smartphone devices. Google decided to add a section to the crawl errors report that […]
A gay slur from the Wikipedia page about the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team made its way into Google’s Knowledge Graph box for a short time this week. The slur has been making news with stories appearing in a number of press outlets. The Cardinals’ Wikipedia page has been home to a great deal 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: Facebook To Retire “Who Can Look Up My Timeline By Name?” Search Setting For All Users As of today, Facebook announced that it is completing the removal of its “Who can […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video yesterday clearly stating the geo-location or redirecting users based on their location is not spam. Google will not consider a site that uses geo-location techniques as spam. What Google does consider spam is when you redirect GoogleBot to a web page of content that users […]
In a video, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts published today an answer to the question, “Should I use rel=”nofollow” on internal links to a login page?” Matt Cutts basically said you shouldn’t, but said it won’t hurt you if you did. Matt said, “It doesn’t hurt if you want to put a nofollow […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video explaining the consequences of a site going offline and how that can negatively impact that site’s ranking in the Google’s search results. In short, a site that temporarily goes offline for a short period of time, such as less than 24 hours, should be fine. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: 50 Percent Of Companies Struggling With SEO Aren’t Integrating Social Media [Survey] What’s one key difference between companies that are successful with SEO and those that aren’t? According to a new […]
At SMX Advanced, I moderated a panel about technical SEO. Google’s Maile Ohye spoke about SEO best practices for technical implementation of mobile sites based on how Google crawls, indexed, and ranks mobile content and presents it to searchers on mobile devices. She also talked about Google’s recent announcement that the mobile user experience is […]
Day one of our SMX Advanced show is almost over, but there’s one last session still to come: the traditional “You&A with Matt Cutts” keynote session. Search Engine Land’s founding editor, Danny Sullivan, will be sitting down for a lengthy chat with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team. The session is due to […]
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 […]
(Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of articles looking at the aftermath of Google’s Panda algorithm update, which launched February 24, 2011. To catch up, please see the first article in the series: Google Panda Two Years Later: Losers Still Losing & One Real Recovery.) Google’s Panda algorithm update, which launched two […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Auto Industry Benefiting From Growth In Mobile Search Approximately one-third of all search traffic for auto industry related terms comes from mobile devices. This underscores why it is critical for auto […]
Google posted some tips for building a search engine friendly mobile tablet experience for users and search engines. Google is clear to point out these tips are NOT specific “recommendations for building search engine friendly tablet-optimized websites.” Google does not have guidelines or official recommendations for tablet-optimized web sites but they did want to offer […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Can Blogging Be Your Secret Weapon For Local SEO? I get called frequently by local companies wanting a quick fix for local rankings. In many cases, they discover that local SEO […]
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 Facebook Friends’ Photos On Bing Microsoft announced on the Bing Search blog that you can now search Bing to discover your friends’ photos within Facebook. If you activated the social […]
The Google Webmaster Central blog announced that the Site Errors report now is a lot more detailed and useful for webmasters. Now, the errors are broken down by each category into more specific errors. For example, if your site is not accessible to GoogleBot, Google will try to say it is because of a DNS […]
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: Further Penguin Update “Jolts” To Come; Panda Is Smoother & Monthly Fasten your seat belt, if you’ve been spamming Google. The anti-spam “Penguin Update” will have more jolts in the […]
When you block GoogleBot, Google’s web crawler, the page that is blocked can still show up in the Google search results because of links pointing to the page. When that happens, the search listing looks awkward, because Google isn’t able to crawl the page and make a title and description. Instead, Google will make a […]
Google posted some guidelines on how you can conduct A/B or multivariate testing and stay clear of any issues with being listed in its search engine, such as avoiding penalties. No Cloaking Google says you shouldn’t cloak, show its crawlers something that humans wouldn’t see. From its post: Make sure that you’re not deciding whether to […]
Google announced they are now sending out Google Webmaster Tools alerts for crawl errors. Google grouped the errors in two buckets. (1) Site Error alerts for major site-wide problems (2) URL Error anomaly alerts for potentially less critical issues The Site-Wide Problems Alerts Can Include: Your DNS server is down or misconfigured. Your web server […]
Today at SMX Advanced during the iSEO panel, Pierre Far, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced clear guidelines and recommendations on mobile SEO. In short, Google recommends you go with a responsive design when possible, otherwise you can use device-specific HTML but Google asks you to take certain steps to communicate when you are using device-specific […]
Today at SMX Advanced, Bing has launched a revamped version of their webmaster tools product, with a new user interface and improved features. Much of the changes are just sprucing up existing data (showing better summaries/dashboards and the like), but of particular interest to some is the new Link Explorer, which is a partial replacement […]
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 Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new technology is being used to provide popular facts […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: A Glossary Of 15 Really Useful International Search Marketing Terms A conversation with a number of international search marketers recently showed that their range of experience ranged from expert to beginner, […]
While Google’s new smartphone bot has been announced, it does not appear to be widely deployed yet; at least that is what I said during a recent presentation in Sydney, where I had the pleasure of meeting Alistair Lattimore (Al). Al does CRO, SEO and agency management for Mantra Group, which is the second largest […]
Google announced they are removing three features from Google Webmaster Tools. Google made the announcement on the Google Webmaster Central blog saying the three features going away include the site performance report, the subscriber stats and the robots.txt creation tool. Google placed reversed the order of these features when they wrote about it, trying to […]
Google has been displaying more than blue links in search results for a while now. And soon, users will be able to find more facts and direct answers to their queries on top of search results. This comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reported on an interview with Amit Singhal, a top Google search […]
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 Makes Android Maps Cleaner, More Personal If Siri is the differentiating feature of iPhones, then Google Maps (and Navigation) are that for Android. It’s the most popular Android app as […]
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 duplicate content and avoiding multinational homepage calamities is no easy matter to coordinate for big site SEO. Bringing all of those strategies to bear, and then also attempting to integrate […]
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 Says Panda 3.4 Is ‘Rolling Out Now’ Google has announced the latest in its ongoing updates to the Panda algorithm that targets low-quality websites. And they’ve taken the somewhat novel […]
Earlier this week, I wrote about my disappointment that granular data (the number of URLs reported, the specifics of the errors…) was removed from Google webmaster tools. However, as I’ve been talking with Google, I’ve discovered that much of this detail is still available via the GData API. That this detail was available through the […]
Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google is working on a search ranking penalty for sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed.” Matt announced this during a panel Search Engine Land’s Editor-In-Chief, Danny Sullivan and Microsoft’s Senior Product Marketing Manager of Bing at SXSW named Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!. The audio for […]
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 Research: Yes, You Still Need To Keep Buying Search Ads Though most marketers likely think of their SEO activities and their paid search advertising as complementary, you’ve probably wondered, at […]
Google’s latest blog post provides details and a video from Maile Ohye about how they handle the pagination attributes within a page’s source code. You can use these attributes to indicate pages in a series (such as a multi-page article or set of product listings), which enables Google to cluster the pages into a single entity […]
Google has just revamped the crawl errors data available in webmaster tools. Crawl errors are issues Googlebot encountered while crawling your site, so useful stuff! I originally started this article by writing that in most cases, these changes are for the better and in only a few (really maddening) cases, useful functionality has been removed. […]
One of the most sought after features in Google Webmaster Tools was to easily give third-party people access to your Google Webmaster Tools account without giving over your own username and password and without giving them full control of your site. Google has finally satisfied this request by adding user administration to Google Webmaster Tools. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Matt Cutts Convinces Some South Korean Govt. Websites To Stop Blocking Googlebot Matt Cutts, international diplomat? That might be the more appropriate title for Google’s chief spam cop. According to the […]