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 […]
Google has created the Google Webmaster Tools Quick Start Guide to help webmasters learn the features and reasons to use the tool. The ten step guide displays details on the dashboard, the overview section, the diagnostics section, the top search queries screen, crawl stats page, the “What the Googlebot Sees” page, the links page, the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Robots reading cereal boxes in the supermarket? Googlebot at the art museum? Street signs and building addresses snatched from Street View images for local search, image search, and product search? Three new patent applications published at the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office this week explore the intricacies of reading text in images taken from Google’s […]
Matt Cutts of Google has written two posts on the topic of SEO: Detecting more “undetectable” webspam The anatomy of a search result
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
The Pennsylvania State University conducted a study that showed webmasters favored Google over other search engines in terms of allowing access to their web sites. An associated BotSeer search engine that allows searching across a collection of robots.txt files was also released.
The long expected webmaster support area from Microsoft has arrived. Microsoft Live Search has launched Live Search Webmaster Center and a new “Webmaster Tools” beta as part of the support services. I had posted detailed screen captures of the tools several days before the public beta was announced. Now that people have access to this […]
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.
Google has informed us that today they are releasing a new update to Google Webmaster Central’s tools. The new features include a way to manage your Google Sitelinks, more historical query statistics, an extension of sitemaps to support code search, an improved message center and a warning that may help notify you of possible duplicate […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google offers a variety of products beyond its traditional search engine, and many of those products could help a small business owner grow an online business. Even more enticing is the fact that many of Google’s products are free. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a small business should use all of Google’s products. In part […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
The Open Directory’s home page appears to have gone missing from Google’s search results. For example, a search on dmoz (the Open Directory’s nickname) does not return the home page in the search results. Here is a screen capture: Similarly, searches for open directory or open directory project also don’t list the site at the […]
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.
Lifehacker points to a two-page Google Cheat Sheet PDF document that contains information on the company, their services, the IP addresses for Googlebot, Google domains, famous operators and much more. But aren’t there more Google cheat sheets? Sure — here are some others:
Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from July 2007:
Matt Cutts of Google has invited people to vote on the next possible Google Webmaster Central feature. The available features on the poll include:
Last week we reported that Google was to add an “Unavailable After” META Tag. Since then, we’ve spoke to Dan Crow of Google, who provided more information on how to use it, as well information on a new way to send robots blocking info within HTTP headers.
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.
Getting Into Google by Jill Whalen reports Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, saying that Google is releasing a new META tag named “unavailable_after.” The “unavailable_after” tag will allow you to tell Google when Googlebot should no longer crawl that page. Jill explains that this tag comes in handy when you have a […]
There are two projects going on today to see if we can survive without the major search engines. The first project is for searchers, to see if they can search alternative search engines without using the five major engines. The second project is for search marketers, to see if they can generate enough traffic and […]
The Google Enterprise Blog recently featured the Volkswagen web site for using Google Enterprise search to power a new feature on the VW web site. As you can see, the Volkswagen home page has a huge search box in the middle of the page. Cool, right? Danny and I think so. As Danny was explaining […]
Maybe SEO isn’t rocket science, but the wrong SEO decision (say knowing the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect) could be costly. That’s illustrated in a Wall Street Journal article today on news search engine Topix and SEO issues in general. A look at that, revisiting Google’s webmaster support efforts plus new confirmation […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Last week, I covered a new command for the meta robots tag — one to prevent search engines from using Yahoo titles and descriptions. In doing that, a number of questions came up about the meta robots tag syntax itself. Google Webmaster Central has now posted “Using the robots meta tag,” providing some clarity from […]
Sigh. Double sigh. Triple sigh. I guess now that the SEO industry has had the required twice-yearly debate about the reputation of SEO, it’s time to do the go round about cloaking once again. A quick word about cloaking has Google’s Matt Cutts trying to clarify concerns that Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped has been […]
Yahoo! Search Support for ‘NOYDIR’ Meta Tags and Weather Update from the Yahoo Search Blog covers how at long last, you can now tell Yahoo to not use Yahoo Directory information to make a title and/or description for your web page listings. It also cover how Yahoo’s currently doing a reindexing change that might impact […]
Matt Cutts has a fun weekend debunking Google rumors at his blog. He covered rumors that the toolbar leads Googlebot to index pages, a story about Google funding terrorism (a topic I avoided on purpose), Google working with the CIA as a conspiracy, and Google cheating on AdWords for their own ads. He also wrote […]