Yesterday, Google webmaster tools launched Index Status (available under Health) that charts the number of indexed pages for your site over the last year. Total Indexed Count Google says that this count is accurate (unlike the site: search operator) and is post-canonicalization. In other words, if your site includes a lot of duplicate URLs (due […]
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 “Voice Assistant” Not Quite Siri-Smart But Most People Won’t Notice At Google I/O this week Google introduced spoken search results, which mimic Siri’s functionality on the iPhone. Siri had been […]
Search launches seem to come in threes. A couple of weeks ago we had Bing Social, then came Google with Knowledge Graph and now Yahoo introduces Axis. When I met with Yahoo earlier this week to hear about it I received the now familiar speech that Yahoo is still very much in search and continuing to “innovate” around […]
People absolutely love Google Doodles and today Google has went way over the top to pay respect to Bob Moog, the man who is credited for revolutionizing modern day music. He invented the first electrical music device, he named the Moog Synthesizer. The Moog Synthesizer was first introduced at the Audio Engineering Society convention in […]
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: 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 […]
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 […]
Last week, we saw some reports of people finding they can’t search on Google unless they accept cookies. Google confirmed to us there was a bug causing this that’s now been fixed. Google emailed us: This was a bug that was flagged and the team quickly resolved on Thursday. We apologize for any inconvenience. A […]
It’s been about a day since we covered Google’s sponsored post campaign to promote its Chrome browser, a campaign that produced posts that violate Google’s guidelines against “thin” content and potentially those against buying links. Yes, it was a Google campaign, but not what the company says it signed-up for. One agency is falling on its […]
Google, the company that has been fighting against paid links and “thin” content, seems to be behind a campaign that’s generating both on behalf of its Chrome browser. File this under “what were they thinking.” “This Post Sponsored By Google” Aaron Wall wrote about the campaign today at SEO Book, spotting how a search for “This […]
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 […]
Add-on commenting systems like Facebook Comments enhance the user experience, but can make it harder for search engines to index content. Most third party commenting systems leverage javascript to display information and add bells and whistles. However, Labnol.org reported that now Facebook Comments are being crawled (and ranking) in Google’s SERPs effectively breaking the mold for third party […]
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’s Matt Cutts has just issued a “weather report” about upcoming changes to be expected from Google’s Panda algorithm. If you’re not familiar with algorithmic weather reports, sit back and learn. Because they’re back, and that’s a good thing. Before There Was Panda, There Was Florida At the end of 2003, Google released what became […]
Three weeks have passed since the surprising news that Google would be shutting down Google Labs, its playground where experimental product ideas went to live or die. We now know a little more about which ones will live and which won’t. Over the past several days, Google has been updating GoogleLabs.com with the status and […]
Google announced they have now speed up the Google +1 button for websites. The button is now automatically up to 3 times faster and best of all, webmasters do not need to update their code for the speed changes to take affect. The change is automatic. Google said, “no action is required on your part, […]
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 Tests Ads Within Organic Search Results? The RKGBlog blog posted a screen shot of Bing testing search ads directly in the organic results. Honestly, I almost cannot believe it – […]
Whenever I’m asked what usability is, I get tongue tied. “It’s about humans and computers,” I may say, but they’ll picture robots and talking cars. “I help make web sites that work,” is closer, but vague because technically, if it’s on the Internet, it’s working. Then I’ll hear myself try to make it clearer by […]
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 […]
In 2009, Google proposed a standard for crawlable AJAX. A few months later, that standard went live and while I thought it was great Google was providing options to content owners to ensure their sites were indexed well, I noted at the time that “this method doesn’t work for search engines other than Google. So […]
When I first logged into Google+ I was a bit underwhelmed, but the more I used and explored the site, the more I liked it. While it has already been deemed Google’s Facebook competitor, it is quite different. I want to share my opinion on the pros and cons of the site to help shine […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Up Close With Google’s Search By Image: Hits, Misses & More Earlier this week at its Inside Search event, Google announced a new way to search the web called Search By […]
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 Market Share Static, 2.2 Billion Local Queries On Google ComScore released its May 2011 search market share rankings this afternoon. The data essentially show no change from last month in […]
On Tuesday morning, SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin presented evidence at our SMX Advanced conference that there’s a high correlation between Facebook Shares and ranking well on search engines. In afternoon, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts said that Google doesn’t see Facebook Share data at all. An SEO-search engine catfight? No, both actually […]
It’s day two of the Google I/O developers conference. Call it “Chrome Day,” because yesterday was all about Android. What to expect? How about a Chrome computer for $20 per month? That’s what’s likely to be revealed during the keynote. Techmeme is buzzing with the headlines of details that have leaked out so far. The […]
When Facebook rolled out its Send button last week, I laughed. I even mocked on Twitter that Facebook wouldn’t be happy until our pages were full of buttons. But the Send button, as well as integrating other aspects of Facebook into websites, does make a lot of sense. In fact, it’s beginning to make so […]
Even though Google’s +1 button isn’t supposed to be ready for webmasters for a few months, they’ve already been spotted in the wild — and they appear to work. Yvo Schaap points to Fanity.com, where a +1 button has been embedded in a social widget next to Facebook and Twitter buttons. (See image at right.) […]
How did we go from the New York Times seeming to single out visitors from Google with a “5 free visit per day” policy to supposedly all search engines being limited in such a way? And what’s up with there being no limit for visitors coming from anything that’s not a search engine, including Twitter […]
Google is making good on promises it made to speed its AdSense code, rolling out an overhaul aimed at relieving the drag on publishers’ Web pages. The company estimates that its helping pages load faster by a half a second or more, when, previously, Google acknowledged that its code could delay page loads by 12 […]
Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video describing how and when Google will remove a search ranking penalty for a site. I will embed the video below for you all to watch. Matt explains there are two groupings of penalties a site can receive in Google. (1) Manual Penalties, such as reports submitted to Google for […]
There are confirmed reports that Google Instant Previews may be skewing your web analytics data. It appears that in some cases Google will conduct an on-demand fetch of your page to dynamically create an Instant Preview. The on-demand fetch happens when a searcher places his mouse over the search result on Google and the image […]
The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted an update on their Flash indexing capabilities. Google said, as of today, they are able to index and understand “almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site.” Typically, Flash has been one of those big No-Nos in the SEO space. […]
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 […]
Dear coders: please write your HTML/XHTML code to be standards-compliant. Yes, I know — we’ve been down this road before. Folks have tested compliant versus non-compliant code, and it doesn’t help with search rankings, so why bother, blah blah blah. Just use the damned standards, OK? Standards compliance does impact rankings, albeit indirectly: Standards compliance […]
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 Turns 12 Years Old Today Today is Google’s 12th birthday and to celebrate, Google has posted a special Google birthday logo cake. The birthday cake was designed by Wayne Thiebaud, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Hunch: Traffic Down, Registrations Way Up & We’re Smarter Even though its traffic is down, Hunch says new user registrations have risen dramatically recently. And as more users register, Hunch says […]
This is the year in which we will see video grow from a “frill” some businesses occasionally include on their websites, to an essential, competitive differentiator that drives SEO and increases brand identification. Knowledgeable companies have already embraced this shift and made video a central part of their online offerings. The most advanced have found […]
If you had the time and resources to personalize every sales pitch, every piece of marketing collateral, every special offer, how would that affect your bottom line? If your customers told you, “I don’t want that, but if you offer me this in a different color, I’ll buy three,” you would listen, right? Onsite behavioral […]
Welcome to our live blogging coverage from SMX Advanced in Seattle. Google’s Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team, is doing his traditional keynote that ends the first day of the conference. He’ll be sitting down with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan for a “You & A” conversation that’s due to start at 5:00 […]