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 Adds NFL, Flight Information To Mobile Browser Bing has announced a couple additions to its mobile browser today: expanded NFL information and airline flight status reports. The NFL feature works […]
For years, Google’s discovery of web pages was solely based on links. If a page had no links to it, Googlebot had no way of knowing about it and therefore, would never index it. Along the way, Google provided an option for submitting individual pages, but that wasn’t really a viable option for site owners […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: An Open Letter To Derek Powazek On The Value Of SEO Derek Powazek launched an attack on SEO yesterday that really said nothing that others haven’t ranted about before. I’ve responded […]
Google Webmaster Tools has just launched a “labs” section, where you’ll find new features that may be early in the development cycle and not quite as robust as the rest of the tools. The features available so far are Fetch as Googlebot, which lets you see exactly what Googlebot is served when it requests 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: Google Says Domain Registrations Don’t Affect SEO, Or Do They? Over at Search Engine Roundtable today, Barry Schwartz writes about the latest comments from Google about domain registration and its impact […]
May it please the Italian court. Google does not ban newspapers that opt-out of Google News from being in Google at all, as a new complaint from Italian publishers alleges. It’s not actually a court that’s going to ponder this allegation. It’s Italy’s AGCM, which appears to be akin the the US Federal Trade Commission, […]
Changes that Google has made to search queries have a big potential implications for retailers and other merchants. Among the first to recognize this and make proactive site changes is Pinny Gniwisch, executive vice president of marketing at jewelry site www.ice.com. Ice.com is No. 166 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Most search engines, […]
Imagine that you fired up your computer and found that a bunch of your programs no longer worked, because behind the scenes, the operating system had been upgraded without any backwards compatibility. That’s what happened this week with Google. Some things that were working just fine now are broken, because Google isn’t being backwards compatible. […]
This week at Google I/O, Google talked a lot about the evolution of the technological capabilities of the web. HTML 5 is ushering in new era of browser-based development and applications. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, kicked things off with, “My message to you is that this is the beginning of the real win of cloud […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
A digital artist named Antonio Lizarazu Balué has created a piece he named GoogleBot. I spotted this via a Matt Cutts Twitter. Here is a low res of the art, but you can see them in better quality at this site.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
It used to be that, if you hoped Google would index a PDF file, you had to create a PDF that was text-based, not image-based; Googlebot couldn’t recognize the content of scanned or image-based documents. According to an announcement today, that’s no longer the case. Google says it’s now using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology […]
Google’s long had a “First Click Free” program that allows news publishers to make their content accessible to search spiders but requires human visitors to login if they’ve already viewed one page on the site for free — hence the “first click free” name. Earlier this year, Google said this program was OK for web […]
Much was made earlier this year of Google’s announcement that they’ve improved the indexing of Flash content. For years, search marketers have warned against building sites in Flash because they weren’t able to be indexed by major search engines; an all-Flash site was a kiss of death where SEO is concerned. More than three months […]
Ever since Google Webmaster Tools started reporting on broken links to a site, webmasters have been asking for the sources of those links. Today, Google has delivered. From Webmaster Tools you can now see the page that each broken link is coming from. This information should be of great help for webmasters in ensuring the […]
Google’s recent blog post recommending that webmasters avoid rewriting dynamic URLs caused a minor furor in the search marketing industry. Reactions ranged from nervous fears that sites with rewritten URLs should suddenly reverse out their extensive work, all the way to amazement and even anger that Google should recommend a halt to something that many […]
Today, the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center is launching its first major update since its initial debut last fall. The Live Search Webmaster Center is Microsoft’s hub for their communication with site owners, and the tools portion of that center now has new crawl issues reports, backlinks data, and download functionality. The Webmaster Center was […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
I really hate arguments over cloaking. Like really hate them. But Rand Fishkin recently did a chart outlining the degrees of "safeness" to cloaking that in turn riled up Google’s Matt Cutts in comments there. No doubt others at search engines also dislike the idea that any cloaking is "white hat." So I wanted to […]
Historically, search engines have been unable to extract content, such as text and links, from Flash (SWF) files. Subsequently, much of the Flash-based content on the web has been unavailable in search results. This situation has been frustrating for web developers, who have tried to come up with workarounds to help get search engines to […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable this morning that Google said if your robots.txt is unreachable, your site might not make it into the Google index. By unreachable, Google means that if your server simply times out and does not return any server response when Googlebot attempts to access your robots.txt file, then it […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Maile Ohye at the Google Webmaster Central Blog has “defined” what Google considers to be IP delivery, geolocation, and cloaking. On the geolocation front, Google recommends you treat “Googlebot as you would a typical user from a similar location.” So, if Googlebot’s IP is coming from California, then serve up the same page you would […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Link baiting entered a new area last week when Lyndon Antcliff had success with a fake story being picked up by some mainstream media sites as well as social news sites. Controversy erupted over the tactic, and now it likely will go into a second cycle after Google’s Matt Cutts has suggested that Google might […]
Since Google posted on how their search quality stuff works, I figured I take the webmaster view and tell you what webmasters and SEOs have been seeing from Google’s search quality as of late. As many of you know, my other search blog, the Search Engine Roundtable, covers webmaster and SEO related discussions from the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web
Google’s rolled out a new tool at Google Webmaster Central, a robots.txt generator. It’s designed to allow site owners to easily create a robots.txt file, one of the two main ways (along with the meta robots tag) to prevent search engines from indexing content. Robots.txt generators aren’t new. You can find many of them out […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google’s Webmaster Central is giving you a new way to access the diagnostics and stats for your sites. Rather than log into your Webmaster Tools account, you can add the Webmaster Tools gadget to your iGoogle page and access information from there. You can choose what components to display on your iGoogle page. Below are […]
Today, Microsoft announced changes to their Live Search crawler intended to reduce bandwidth resources during the crawl of a site. MSNbot (upgraded to version 1.1) now supports both HTTP compression and conditional get. The post on the Live Search Webmaster Center blog describes each feature in detail and includes links to tools you can use […]
Google’s Matt Cutts has lent his personal blog to the Google Images search team so they could debunk a rumor that Google censored an image of an Egyptian football player, Mohammad Aboutrika, stripping off his team jersey during the African Cup Of Nations to show a "Sympathize With Gaza" T-shirt underneath. No censoring, says Google […]
It’s just over a half-year since Google launched Universal Search, its method of blending results from its own various topically-focused or “vertical” search engines. Since that time, the system has evolved. In particular, Google Universal Search now fills more than just 10 spots on the page, while shopping and blog search results are among new […]