Matt Cutts, international diplomat? That might be the more appropriate title for Google’s chief spam cop. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cutts is in South Korea this week and, in a presentation Monday night for about 80 government officials, webmasters, lawyers and journalists, managed to singlehandedly convince some government reps to let Googlebot crawl […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Yandex Joins Bing, Yahoo In Using Nokia-Navteq Map Data Russian search giant Yandex announced that it will be licensing data from Nokia-owned Navteq to offer better and more comprehensive maps coverage […]
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 Revamps Submit Content Page Google has updated their URL submission tool page and redesigned their Submit Your Content page. The old URL which was at google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url/ now returns a page […]
Do you shove lots of ads at the top of your web pages? Think again.
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 5th “Doodle 4 Google” Contest Opens For K-12 Students Google has launched its fifth annual “Doodle 4 Google” contest, and this year’s version appears to be bigger than ever and […]
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 […]
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 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Stalls In Congress The U.S. House Judiciary Committee abruptly adjourned today without voting on the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), a controversial measure that would […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Googlebot Identifies Smartphone Content With New User-Agent Google has announced that its mobile crawler now has a user-agent that’s specific to smartphones. The company has already had a user-agent that targets […]
Google has announced that its mobile crawler now has a user-agent that’s specific to smartphones. The company has already had a user-agent that targets feature phones. The new Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +https://www.google.com/bot.html) […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Yahoo Product Runway: Livestand And IntoNow Yahoo held its second now annual “Product Runway” event, mc’d by product chief Blake Irving. Irving was assisted by some younger executives from companies that […]
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, posted a long video that he named the “definitive cloaking video.” Here is the video, I will post the main points below: Cloaking is showing different content to users than GoogleBot Cloaking Violation of Quality Guidelines Cloaking is High Risk It Is Often Used For Deceptive Reasons No […]
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 Can Now Execute AJAX & JavaScript For Indexing This morning we reported that the comments on Facebook are being indexed by Google. Google’s Matt Cutts just confirmed on Twitter that […]
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 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Cats & Dogs Living Together: Bing Promotes Firefox If you ever wanted proof that Microsoft has learned that for Bing to succeed, it needs to spread its wings beyond Microsoft, look […]
Google announced they have stepped up their webmaster communication for notifying webmasters of both manual and automated penalties. In the past, Google let you submit reconsideration requests and then added that they received those requests. Now, Google may reply if your site was affected by a manual spam action and that you are no longer […]
Google has just announced the closure of several well-known products, including Fast Flip, Sidewiki, Aardvark and Subscribed Links. Some of these are part of the ongoing purge of Google Labs products, while others that are being shut down were not part of Labs. And Google has also announced that other Google Labs projects have “graduated” […]
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 Signals Upcoming Algorithm Change, Asks For Help With Scraper Sites Google is calling for help in identifying a long-running problem: scraper sites in its search results — and particularly scraper […]
Today, Google announced that they will no longer be crawling news sites with Googlebot-News and instead will crawl news sites with Googlebot, the same bot that crawls sites for web search. However, you can still block your content from being indexed in Google News by disallowing Googlebot-News in robots.txt or using a meta robots tag. […]
Today, Google launched a new way for site owners to request that specific web pages be crawled. How is this different from the other ways available to let Google know about your pages and when should you use this feature vs. the others? Read on for more. This new method for submitting URLs to Google […]
In 2009, Google launched the parameter handling feature of Google webmaster tools, which enabled site owners to specify the parameters on their site that were optional vs. required. A year later, they improved this feature by providing an option for a default value. Google says that they’ve seen a positive impact from the usage of those […]
In the last few days, several noticed that the Google Toolbar PageRank value for www.twitter.com had plummeted to 0 (it’s now back to its previous 9). Was Google punishing Twitter for how things went down with the feed expiration that temporarily derailed Google’s Realtime search efforts? Nah, Twitter’s website has just been suffering from technical […]
Day one of our SMX Advanced conference is wrapping up with a late afternoon tradition: Danny Sullivan’s “You & A” conversation with Google’s top spam cop, Matt Cutts. The session is due to start at 5:00 pm PST but, just between us, it’s bit hectic up front and gut feeling is that we’ll be a […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Introducing: The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors SEO — search engine optimization — is one of the most important marketing activities available to companies and publishers, but it’s too often […]
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Twitter Intros Instant Follow Button In a bid to increase its presence across the Web, Twitter today announced the “follow button,” a snippet of code that can be placed on any […]
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 Doctor Is In: Using An Unbranded Health Site Recently, I had an amazing experience. I was invited to be a part of an all agency partner meeting. Throughout the day, […]
Monday I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google’s Webmaster Central team has begun stepping up webmaster communication, once again, this time by responding to reconsideration requests more actively then in the past. Google is now telling webmasters that submit reconsideration requests if their penalty is not a manual Google penalty, then there is […]
Website owners often put a website online and let the entire world access its contents. Essentially, they are claiming to service the world. But how often is this really the case? We found that on average, 10% of our clients’ website traffic was coming from outside of their geographic target market. This average is from […]
An amazing amount of great information came out of SMX West this week. Below is a summary of some of what I found to be the most actionable and useful. Google’s Own Words About the Farmer/Panda Update Google’s Matt Cutts said that while the change isn’t 100% perfect, searcher feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. He […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: LinkedIn Lauches a Social News Site If Digg and its myriad imitators were part of “social news 1.0″ then a recent wave of personalized news sites, including Flipboard and Zite 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: Building Empathy For Googlebot With one persona, copywriters and designers will gain a better understanding of Googlebot and do a better job of creating a site that will appeal to him. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Should Korean Search Engine Naver Worry About Local Competitors Or Google? For just about the last decade, Naver has been the dominant player in the south Korean search market holding a […]
Pierre Far from Google wrote a blog post on how to design mobile friendly websites while considering Google’s webmaster guidelines and best practices. I’ve pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format: Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones. Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type 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: Instant Replay: Where To Find The Super Bowl Ads Are you one of those people who get upset when the Super Bowl gets interrupted by football or corny half-time events? You […]
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
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 New China Plan: Target Display Advertisers, Report Says Despite its ongoing struggles in China, Google reportedly has a new plan for its business there: targeting display advertising, particularly amongst the […]
The head of Google spam fighting team, Matt Cutts, has tweeted that Google will be looking more at cloaking in the first quarter of 2011, perhaps with more clarification of what exactly cloaking is. Cloaking, which is against Google’s webmaster guidelines, is defined by Google as follows: Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different […]
Some of the members of the Search Engine Land team spent some time at Google last week. They put together a 12 Days of Googlemas Carol for all to listen and watch on YouTube. Sitting in front with the laptop and yellow shirt is Google’s Matt Cutts. In the blue shirt in front is Danny […]
I generally enjoy John Gruber’s writings, but today he’s dishing out SEO advice about HTML title tags. Some of it is bad advice. So with respect, here’s how I’d suggest you write page titles in a way that can please search engines and humans alike. What Is An HTML Title Tag? Let me go back […]
The Google Webmaster Central blog announced Google has published a new set of documents in the Google Code section on how to control Google from crawling and indexing your site. You can read the set of documents over here. The technical documents are broken down into five section: Getting Started Robots.txt specification Robots meta tag […]