As a site owner, you generally want Google to index as many pages of your site as possible. But there are certainly times when you find that you’ve accidentally let Google index confidential content or other information you don’t want published, and you want to get it removed as quickly as possible. Read on 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: Blekko, The “Slashtag” Search Engine, Goes Live Blekko, the long anticipated search engine founded by Rich Skrenta, has finally opened to the public. The service offers an interesting way to “slash” […]
In the past week, several SEO related topics are in need of summarizing. Here is a list of quick SEO takes in bullet format, for you busy SEOs and SEMs: Google Webmaster Tools has added “total links” to the revamped link reports. Yahoo seems to have fixed the broken site explorer linkage data. Google has […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Microsoft Records Their Q1 2010 Earnings, Bing Takes Loss Again Microsoft announced their Q1 2010 fiscal earnings with a 25% increase in revenue, $16.20 billion for the quarter ended Sept. 30, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Schmidt’s “Just Move” Joke About Google Street View & How It Went Missing Don’t like Google Street View taking pictures of your house? “Just move,” joked Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in […]
No one seems to be immune from a Google indexing problem that has many site owners baffled. Blogs and websites, big and small, aren’t being indexed as quickly as they normally are — if they’re being indexed at all. CNN.com, with its PageRank score of 10, is typically crawled frequently and deeply by Googlebot. But […]
With Google upping the ante on speed of delivery as a factor in relevance ranking, even medium to smaller sites may now need to consider a content delivery network to supplement the performance of their primary servers. A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of computers used to increase the speed of delivery of […]
At SMX East earlier this week, Maile Ohye of Google showed new parameter handling features in Google Webmaster Tools. Today, those features are available to everyone. Google first introduced parameter handling about a year ago. When I wrote about the launch, I described how optional parameters in URLs could cause canonicalization problems and gave a […]
Back in November 2008, Google published a 22-page PDF guide to SEO. The company has just updated that to provide some new features and content. You can download the new 32-page PDF guide over here. In particular, Google added a glossary of definitions and terms, additional example images to support the content in the guide, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Official: Yahoo’s Results Now Come From Bing Yahoo just announced the transition from Yahoo Search powered results to Bing powered organic Yahoo search results is now complete. The search ads are […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Q&A: comScore’s New “Core Search” & “Explicit Core Search” Figures Today, comScore is releasing an additional set of search market share metrics designed to better reflect “core” search activity, something that’s […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Study Calls Google ‘King Of Malware’ Google has twice as much malware in its search results as Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter combined. That’s one of the findings in the Barracuda Labs […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Report: Bing Generates More Clicks Than Google Chitika, a veritable fountain of data lately, has generated some new interesting findings from activity on its search-based advertising network. The company compared ad […]
The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced they are stepping up their notifications within Webmaster Tools. They will now send “SiteNotices” for a “significant increase” in unreachable content, that is when GoogleBot cannot reach a number of pages on your web site. Here is a picture of what a SiteNotice may look like: Google will only […]
Today, Microsoft launched a revamp of their Bing Webmaster Tools. I talked to them back in June, when they previewed the tools at SMX Advanced, and they told me that they were starting from scratch and rebuilding the tool from the ground up. So how are things different? They say they are focused on three key […]
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 Q2 Revenues Flat, Display & Net Income Up Yahoo announced generally flat Q2 revenues of $1.6 billion but improved net income today. That compares with revenues of $1.57 billion in […]
Last year, there was a seemingly endless parade of stories on how aggregators, search engines and news blogs were apparently killing newspapers that publish original content. This year, add the rise of “content farms” to the list. Riding to the rescue, or so it hopes, comes Perfect Market and its new search marketing tool, “The […]
Most web content is barely alive, even when it is first written. It is pumped out by content mills, optimized and uploaded. This kind of bulk content is often referred to as backfill content. I prefer the term “landfill content.” Dead and rotting from day one. In sharp contrast, living content is quality content. It […]
Search for [google adwords help] or [adwords help] this morning on Google and the AdWords help center is nowhere to be found. Search for the URL itself, and it doesn’t appear to be in the index.
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 News Has Major Redesign: Personalization, Sharing & “News Stream” Offered Today, Google News is undergoing its first major redesign since being launched in 2002. Gone is the default “section” view, […]
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 “Search War” With Google Mostly Sound And Fury The people running Facebook are an ambitious crew; they see Facebook as a successor to Google in many respects. In fact many […]
What you need to know about Google's indexing system.
Google announced they added “soft” or “crypto” 404s to their “crawl errors” report in Google Webmaster Tools. Soft 404s or crypto 404s are page not found pages that return the server response code of 200. Technically, 404 pages should return a server status code 404, which means page not found. Sometimes webmasters make a mistake […]
Google Maps (or Local, or Places, or whatever it is calling itself this month) is the bane of my existence. Well, maybe 3rd place behind Bing and Yahoo PPC platforms…but you catch my meaning. Inevitably, I can expect at least one phone call or email a week from a client asking why they’re not showing […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Keynoting SMX Advanced Seattle: Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi Microsoft’s Bing is turning one year old, and according to just-released comScore qSearch data continues to gain market share at the expense 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: Yahoo Announces Q1 2010 Earnings: Income Up 87% Yahoo announced (PDF) their first quarter 2010 earnings and showed a revenue increase of 1% and income increase of 87% from the first […]
Google has kept a promise it made last year: Site speed is now a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, and is already in place for U.S. searchers. But Google also cautions web site owners not to sacrifice relevance in the name of faster web pages, and even says this new ranking factor will impact very […]
The home page of OpenOffice.org, the well-known Microsoft Office competitor, is missing from Microsoft’s Bing search engine. While it sounds suspicious, the problem has nothing to do with Bing itself — it’s a technical problem on OpenOffice.org’s end. Ian McAnerin noticed earlier today that OpenOffice.org doesn’t show up in Bing on searches for [open office] […]
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 Hits All-Time High Market Share: Nielsen The latest search market share numbers from Nielsen are out, and it’s more good news for the folks in Redmond. Nielsen says Bing’s market […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Geo-Targeting For Local Placement: Just How Narrow Is OK? Advertising exists to help merchants sell products and services to people who need those same products and services. Bringing the merchant together […]
Michael VanDeMar has documented possible evidence that Google is using fake referrers, possibly to detect forms of spam. Michael said the GoogleBot is being cloaked and is sending fake referrers for keywords the site is not related to and has no chance in ranking for. Bing has been doing this for years, fixed the issue […]
Back in November 2009, Google News announced they were “in the midst of an exciting transition period” that included a change to the News Sitemap Protocol. News publishers have through April 2010 to modify their News Sitemap to accommodate the new format. What’s so exciting and transitional? I asked Google, thinking that they were changing […]
In October 2009, Google proposed a new standard for implementing AJAX on web sites that would help search engines extract the content. Now, there’s evidence this proposal is either live or is about to be. Read on for more details on the proposal, how it works, and why it might be past the proposal stage. […]
The Google Reader blog announced you can now track changes to any web page, even the ones without RSS feeds. How does this come in handy? Well, let’s say you want to track when Google changes their webmaster guidelines. All you do is copy the URL into Google Reader and click on “create a feed.” […]
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 Logo The Worst Identity of 2009, According To Brand New Under Consideration’s Brand New devision posted their best and worst identities of 2009. Guess who made the top of 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: How To Group Your Keywords; Plus: Q&A With WordStream’s Larry Kim Organizing your paid search keywords into the right ad groups can be a difficult task for even the best 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: Search & Real Time Madness Make no mistake. I think real time search is indeed one of the most exciting developments that’s happened in the search space in years. But I […]
Google announced they have added a new supported user agent that can be used to block Google from indexing stories specifically on Google News. You can now specific the user agent Googlebot-News in your robots.txt file to exclude documents from being crawled and displayed in Google News. Google has several user agents for controlling how […]
Google has written two spam related posts over the Thanksgiving period on the Google Webmaster Central Blog tackling the issue of comment spam. The first post focuses on the futility of comment spam, saying: At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is […]
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 In Pictures: Google México Party, One Republic @ Google & Pineapple 5K In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people […]