Google has confirmed the reports of the removal of the “not selected” filter within Google Webmaster Tool’s Index Status report. Google’s John Mueller said it was removed because it “was causing more confusion than actually helping webmasters with their sites.” That may be true, but many webmasters found the data useful. In fact, there were […]
Over the past week or so, we’ve been hearing reports of the number of links being reported within Google Webmaster Tools drastically changing from what it was days before the change. Last week, we received some reports of Google increasing the number of links being reported in the tool. This week, we are seeing dozens […]
Matt Cutts, Google’s lead of search spam, wrote a blog post named “Why did our PageRank go down?” The post is a reminder to webmasters that selling links that pass PageRank can lead to a Google penalty. Back in October 2007, Google officially came out saying selling paid links can hurt your PageRank and then […]
Google has added a new option for downloading your links in Google Webmaster Tools. You can now click on a “download latest links” button. The latest links download option will download your links that Google Webmaster Tools discovered but do so sorted by date. Google will have the link in one column and in the […]
Google’s latest easter egg in the search results leads you to the Game of Life. Search for [conway’s game of life] and the search results page will start to be over run by cellular automaton. It was created by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970 as a zero-player game. Yes, once the game is […]
Google doesn’t always penalize you for bad links, they sometimes and very often, will ignore links completely that they find to be against their guidelines. Back in 2007, Google started penalizing sites for selling paid links and over the years they have penalized many sites for buying links. Recently, Google has stepped up their notifications […]
A number of websites are (or were) planning to “go black” this week while the U.S. Congress discusses issues related to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The website blackouts are part of a larger social media effort against the bills that our Greg Finn wrote about this morning […]
Not too long ago, the article Mobile SEO is a Myth got a lot of people fired up about the foolish notion that mobile SEO is a construct developed by salesmen to sell more SEO services. I responded in the comments to the author’s points, and have addressed this point in multiple articles over the years, so […]
There has been a lot of discussion and scare on Twitter and within the SEO forums that Google has disabled the Toolbar PageRank scores from working. The truth is, no they have not. As several sites have reported already, PageRank is still alive in the Toolbar, but Google changed the lookup URL. This change has […]
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 […]
Google has dropped the phonebook search operator due to the massive number of requests from people to remove their phone numbers from Google. I noticed it went missing this morning after spotting complaints in a Google help thread. Googler, John Mueller told me that it was removed and I can read more about this change […]
Over at the Search Engine Roundtable I reported that Google said they will be adding a “trustworthy” indicator to the new site performance report in Google Webmaster Tools. The reason behind adding this is because of the complaints and questions coming in from webmasters on the accuracy of such reports. As I explained, a Google […]
Over at Search Engine Roundtable today, Barry Schwartz writes about the latest comments from Google about domain registration and its impact on SEO/search rankings. In this case, it’s Google employee John Mueller suggesting in a Google Webmaster Help forum thread that Google doesn’t look at the length of a domain registration: A bunch of TLDs […]
There is no doubt that you can learn a tremendous amount of information on search engine optimization (SEO) by reading sites like this or ones in our blogroll, but there is always a lot to be learned from getting your hands dirty. Now, you can get your hands dirty by experimenting and trying SEO techniques […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google has announced the third ever webmaster live chat event is taking place this Wednesday at 9am (PST) or noon (EST). You can register for the event over here, Google will be using Google Moderator for the management of questions. Adam Lasnik is introducing the event, while John Mueller will be presenting for 15 minutes […]
Brian Ussery reported that Google has dropped two important bullet points from the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Those bullet points include: Have other relevant sites link to yours. Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
Did you miss the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat that took place last night? If you did, no need to worry, I was able to record the audio and export the full Q&A transcript, with well over 300 questions answered by Googlers. You can find the audio recording and downloadable Q&A transcript at the Search […]
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 […]
Whenever people say there’s a new Google penalty, often there’s not confirmation from Google that such a thing exists and even other webmasters may disagree that the penalty does exist. But with the -60 penalty that’s going on, there are more clues that make me think this is indeed real. First, let me start by […]