Google: Try To Avoid Link Building Because It Can Do More Harm Than Good
Google's webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller, recommends you do not focus on link building and if you do, it may lead to more harm for your web site than anything good.
Topic: John Mueller
Google Says There’s No Whitelist To Save You From Panda Or Penguin
Google's John Mueller said there is no whitelist for the Penguin and Panda algorithms, like there is for the SafeSearch algorithm.
18 Days Later, Google Penguin 3.0 Continues To Slowly Roll Out Worldwide
Friday night, October 17th, Google finally pushed out a refresh/update of the Penguin algorithm, we code-named Penguin 3.0. We discovered later it was a worldwide update, impacting less than one-percent of English queries and that it would roll out for the next few weeks. 18 days later, two weeks and four days since, the roll […]
Mobile Usability Reports Come To Google Webmaster Tools
Google announced a new feature available in Google Webmaster Tools this morning for tracking your mobile usability issues. The new report is named the Mobile Usability report and it is available at google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-usability within Google Webmaster Tools. The tool will show you common usability issues with your mobile site, so that you can fix them […]
Google Penguin 3.0: Worldwide Rollout Still In Process, Impacting 1% Of English Queries
Google updated their Penguin algorithm with version Penguin 3.0 late Friday night. The Penguin algorithm primarily looks at a site’s backlink profile and may demote a site that appears to have a poor backlink profile. The Penguin 3.0 release was communicated very poorly by Google. With Google only confirming the update 24-hours after the update […]
Google Revamps Change Of Address Tool Within Webmaster Tools
Google’s John Mueller announced they have made significant changes to the Change Of Address Tool they initially added to Google Webmaster Tools in 2009. The new changes help walk-through a webmaster through the process of using the tool, while validating most of the important steps are complete. John said the tool will now “guide you […]
Google Toolbar PageRank Finally & Officially Dead?
In October 2013, Google head of search spam Matt Cutts implied we would likely not see another Google Toolbar PageRank update before the year end. Well, by accident, Google updated Toolbar PageRank in December 2013. Since then, we have had no Toolbar PageRank updates. Google’s John Mueller said in a Google Webmaster Hangout video that […]
Be Careful Of Switching To HTTPS To Improve Google Rankings: The Buffer Story [UPDATE]
Thinking about moving your site to HTTPS, in order to tap into the promised chance to rank better in Google? Buffer recently discovered that the technicalities of doing it could cause you to plunge in traffic. In August, Google announced that sites moving to secure servers would get a minor ranking boost in search results. […]
Nearly A Year Later, Are We Finally Going To Get A Penguin Update Refresh?
In 22 days from now, it will be the year anniversary of the release of the fifth update to Google’s Penguin algorithm, code-named Penguin 2.1. As you can imagine, waiting 11 months and 8 days can be excruciating for those who were negatively impacted by the punitive algorithm. They’ve likely by now cleaned up their […]
The Confusion Over Google’s Algorithm Updates & Refreshes
I personally spend a lot of time within the SEO space investigating claims of Google algorithm updates; it is a fascinating topic because there are so many variables involved and a lot of secrecy on Google’s end around its search algorithms. Often, Google will not confirm updates or algorithm refreshes. Plus, with manual actions and link […]
It’s Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results
Anyone who follows Google knows that nothing it creates is immune from elimination. Like so many efforts before it, Authorship is fading into the sunset.
New Google Easter Egg For SEO Geeks: Server Status 418, I’m A Teapot
Google has a new easter egg, mostly designed for server geeks and SEO geeks, at google.com/teapot. The page itself serves up an 418 response code, which is a server status code, named “I’m a teapot.” The 418 code itself was an April Fools Joke from 1998 and is not meant to be implemented or be […]
SearchCap: Microsoft Catapult, Google HTTPS Factors & Bing Conversational 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: BrightLocal Opens Its 2014 Local SEO Industry Survey Local SEO firm BrightLocal has posted its third annual local SEO industry survey, asking SEO professionals to answer 20 questions on SEO business […]
Explainer: How Google’s New SSL / HTTPS Ranking Factor Works
Last Thursday, Google launched a new ranking signal to give HTTPS sites a ranking boost, a small ranking boost, to encourage webmasters to migrate their sites from HTTP to HTTPS. In our story from Thursday, we covered why Google is doing this and the concerns some SEOs had with the migration, as well as the […]
Google Investigating Bugs With Structured Data Report In Webmaster Tools
There are hundreds of complaints within the webmaster and SEO community around the Structured Data report within Google Webmaster Tools showing massive drops in structured data elements being shown. The good news is that everyone seems to be affected by the issue and that Google’s John Mueller said on Google+ that Google has “been looking […]
Google+ Authorship Images Live On
Search engine optimization professionals were caught off-guard back in June when Google’s John Mueller announced that the search giant would be “simplifying” the way authorship is displayed in search results. This simplification involved the removal of profile photos and circle counts from the search listings of pages with authorship enabled. We all know the author […]
Some Of The Weird Issues When Google’s Quick Answers Come From Random Sources
As Google’s Hummingbird algorithm continues to shape the answers within Google’s search results, webmasters, SEOs and searchers ask themselves, why is Google showing this knowledge graph or that quick answer. Often webmasters find themselves at a loss because Google takes their content and puts it at the top of the search results. While searchers ask, […]
Google: Redirecting A Penalized Site To Penalty Free Site Likely Won’t Negatively Impact The Site
On Friday, Google’s John Mueller answered a question I proposed in a Webmaster/Search Helpdesk Hangout about the issues around a penalized site being redirected to an unpenalized site. The question was: What if a competitor takes a site that has a severe penalty and 301 redirects it to my penalty-free site — would it cause […]
Google Drops Profile Photos, Google+ Circle Count From Authorship In Search Results
Google’s John Mueller has announced that Google is making a major change in the search results around authorship. Specifically, Google is dropping the profile photo and circle count from the search listings where authorship is assigned to a web page. Mueller said that the “click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the […]
Learnings From SMX London: The Impact Of Social On Search
SEOs and Social Marketers speculate on the impact that Social Media marketing has on how well their websites perform in search results. There has been much conjecture with many people interpreting an array of correlations as causation. Both Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Duane Forrester have come out (on more than one occasion) to emphatically […]
Google Fixing Reverse DNS GoogleBot Verification
Google has confirmed that there are some GoogleBot useragent spiders not properly passing verification protocol. Savvy webmasters noticed that GoogleBot over the .249.70.0 /24 IP range was not returning the proper reverse DNS verification details. The response given was “no such host is known,” but the activity webmasters noticed was that it did appear to […]
Is Chasing AuthorRank A Waste Of Time For SEOs?
On June 7, 2011, Google announced support for a new type of markup called the Authorship Tag. This was the rel=”author” tag. It did not take long before the speculation started — when would Google start using data from this new tag to impact rankings? The industry took to referring to this concept as AuthorRank. […]
Hiding From That Google Penalty? It May Find You At Your New Home
Did you know that even if you try to run away from your Google penalty, it might end up finding you anyway? In a recent Google Webmaster Hangout, hosted by Google’s John Mueller, John said that even if you move your penalized site to a new domain name and don’t redirect the penalized site, Google […]
Google Offers Advice On Faceted Navigation & Infinite Scroll Web Pages
Google has offered up two very technical blog posts on SEO topics covering infinite scroll and faceted navigation search engine friendly techniques. Infinite Scroll Web Pages Infinite scroll is what you see on a lot of newer style web sites such as Pinterest, Google Image search results, many landing pages with a lot of products […]
Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors Reports Now Showing Errors On Final Redirect URL
Google’s John Mueller announced on the Google Webmaster blog this morning that the Google Webmaster Tools team has updated the crawl errors report to show errors on the final URL of the redirect, as opposed to the origin URL of the redirect. What this means is that Google is now showing the errors on the […]
Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries Adds Mobile Stats & No Longer Rounds Data
John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced on the Google Webmaster Blog that they are no longer rounding the search query data within the Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries report. John said, “data in the search queries feature will no longer be rounded / bucketed,” and you will start to notice these changes in Webmaster […]
Google Launches Improved URL Removal Tool For Third-Party Content
Google has released an improved URL removal tool that the company says was specifically designed to improve the ability to remove third-party content from its search engine. John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced the change on the Google Webmaster Central blog. Google’s long had this tool, so what’s new? We checked with Google directly and were […]
Google Offering Online Site Reviews This Monday, November 18th
Google’s John Mueller announced that on this Monday’s Google office-hours, Google will be offering “short website reviews” for webmasters who are looking for advice. To participate, you must add your website to this Google Moderator page. Then, if Google has time and wants to review your site, Google will review it live, this Monday, November […]
After Blocking Keywords In Referrers, Now Google Stops Sharing Through Google Webmaster Tools – A Bug?
Last week, Google moved to send all searches through Google SSL Search, setting up the ultimate end of keyword data passed along via referrers non-advertisers. Now, Google’s official alternative channel for this information — Google Webmaster Tools — has also stopped sharing the data, most likely due to a bug. A Bug Or An Intentional […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 11, 2013
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 Quietly Brings Back RSS Feed Option To Google Alerts The Next Web reports Google has quietly added back the RSS Feed option to Google Alerts. I’ve confirmed the RSS Feed […]
Google: Unlinked URLs Are A Source For Indexing New Content
John Lincoln from Ignite Visibility spotted a Google Hangout where Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Google will use URLs or domain names within content that are unlinked, i.e. without an a href attribute, to discover and index new pages of content. John went on to add that typically no PageRank or trust is flown from […]
Google: We Prefer To Assess Reconsideration Requests On Links Within Webmaster Tools However…
What do webmasters do when receiving a manual action from Google telling them they have a penalty because of paid or bad links pointing to their site? Google told us back in June that we should use Google’s “links to your site” report within Webmaster Tools to analyze bad links pointing to our sites. In fact, […]
Google: Links In Press Releases Should Use Nofollow Like Paid Links
Friday we broke the news that Google updated their link schemes webmaster guidelines. Now that the dust has settled, I aimed at getting more clarification on what Google meant by the new example around keyword-rich anchor text links within articles or press releases. The specific line in the link schemes document is: Links with optimized […]
Google: Authorship Bug Affects “Very Few Sites,” Actively Working On A Fix
Google has confirmed that there are current issues with displaying authorship rich snippets on “very few sites.” A Google spokesperson told us “it’s something we’re actively working on” but that “it affects very few sites” on the Internet. This is a topic I’ve personally been tracking very closely, as my own site is impacted by […]
Google: Guest Blogging For Links? You Better Nofollow Those Links
Marie Haynes spotted two video responses from Google where Google’s John Mueller, said in general, it is best you nofollow links in stories you write, especially when those stories are guest blog posts for the purpose of link building. In general, that is Google’s advice. If you link to something with the intent that it […]
Google Hits Mozilla With Spam Penalty Over User Generated Content
Have user generated content on your site? Pay attention to what those users are doing. That’s the takeaway from Google hitting Mozilla with a spam penalty this week, along with another takeaway. Despite Google’s saying it’s being more transparent about spam actions, people clearly find it hard to know what they’re in trouble for. Mozilla […]
Google: Adding Too Many Pages Too Quickly May Flag A Site To Be Reviewed Manually
Google’s Matt Cutts answered a question submitted by another Googler, John Mueller, on YouTube asking, “Should I add an archive of hundreds of thousands of pages all at once or in stages?” The question is, if you build out a new section of your website with tons of content – is it safe to just […]
Google Penalized One Article On BBC’s Web Site
Google did end commenting on why the BBC received an unnatural link notification despite offering us a “no comment” on our story this past Friday. Was the BBC penalized for unnatural links? Was it possible that the world’s largest news organization was not trusted by Google’s algorithms? The answer is, only one article was penalized. […]
No, Google Hasn’t Released Unannounced Penguin Updates
Is Google pushing Penguin Updates without announcing them? A recent Google video might give that suggestion, but the Google tells us this is not the case. Confusion Over Penguin Refreshes The last time Google has confirmed a refresh or update to the Penguin anti-spam filter was back in October 2012, with Penguin Update 3. That was […]
Search In Pics: Brin’s Kiteboat, Al Gore @ Google, Google+ Circus & Scary Android Eyes
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.