Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Groupon Pages Part Of Company Evolution Into Local Search Site Depending on your viewpoint, Groupon’s new Pages offering is either a helpful new tool for local business owners or a bid […]
In July, Google began labeling the mobile search results that had results from Flash enabled sites with mobile warnings. The warning cautioned mobile users from clicking to the site, by showing a notice that reads: “Uses Flash. May not work on your device. Try anyway | Learn more.” That warning is rolling out to more […]
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 is testing a new mobile design interface, using the design principles from “material design,” that Google themselves has been heavily promoting. The new interface was first noticed by SEER Interactive and later by Android Police and Google Operating System shows how this is not a small test. Google is actively trying out the new […]
Two weeks ago, Google began testing mobile-friendly icons in the mobile search results, next to sites that were mobile-friendly. Maybe giving a carrot to sites that adopted good mobile-friendly web site practices? Yesterday, Google tried the opposite approach by testing non mobile-friendly icons in the mobile search results, next to sites that were supposedly not […]
At Search Marketing Expo East, Google engineer Gary Illyes talked a lot about user experience and how webmasters really need to focus on that. Over the past week or so, I asked Google about this and tried to understand why Google stressed this point so much at the event. Google told us in a statement: […]
Google’s Pierre Far announced this morning that Google is expanding the mobile Flash warnings searchers get when searching Google and finding a search result that leads to a site made mostly in Adobe Flash. The warning was first introduced back in July, and today has started to roll out globally, in multiple languages and geo-graphic versions […]
A couple weeks ago, we reported that Google began sending notices to webmasters over faulty mobile redirects. This notice was to inform webmasters of notices being shown to searchers that the searcher may be redirected to the home page as opposed to the specific page they are clicking on within the Google search results. It […]
Google Webmaster Tools has added two new features today, one for notifying webmasters of faulty redirects and the second to show color-coded- HTML syntax within the fetch as Google feature. Stop Redirecting Smartphone Users To Your Home Page Notification Google is now sending notifications to webmasters who are sending their mobile users to their home […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Indian Govt. Rages At Google Maps Outing Of Secret Bases In 2013, Google imitated a “mapathon” project in India, offering prizes to encourage people to help fill in gaps and improve […]
If you try to access Bing Mobile at m.bing.com, you will be presented with an error message. The error will read: The page you want isn’t available We’re working to restore service as soon as possible. The server error code also returns a major error, specifically a 503 error code which means the service is […]
Flash, Adobe’s multimedia based website technology, is not a friend of mobile devices or search spiders and now Google has decided to step up their campaign against such sites using the technology. Google announced that starting today, they will be issuing warnings to searchers when their algorithms detect that the website is not supported on […]
If you’re running Google Product Listing Ads, it’s time to revisit your feed. Google has updated the feed requirements for Google Shopping with several new attributes as well as some changes to existing content requirements. A new ‘mobile link’ attribute has been added to ensure users are taken to mobile landing pages from their smartphones. […]
We’ve been saying that it is just a matter of time for Facebook’s Graph Search to make its way to mobile devices. A test spotted yesterday by InsideFacebook shows that the launch may be close. The test shows an in-depth integration for mobile web users that contains the same bells and whistles as the desktop […]
Google is introducing a revamped flight and hotel travel search experience. To date both products have been mostly underwhelming. The big promises of Google’s ITA acquisition have yet to bear fruit but that may change with the new Google Flight and travel search experience. Previously the best feature of Google Travel was Flight Explorer (immediately […]
Don’t annoy mobile searchers. That’s the message behind a new warning that Google is showing in mobile search results on smartphones. On the Webmaster Central blog, Google alerted webmasters late yesterday that it will let smartphone searchers know if it thinks a website has a “faulty redirect” in place that sends the searcher to your […]
Google announced on their Webmaster blog that they have updated two of their guideline documents to improve the clarity around what sneaky redirects are against Google Webmaster Guidelines. Google has expanded their guidelines to ensure webmasters are aware that using sneaky redirects through mobile site detection and redirection, is not allowed if the content is […]
Mobile Advertising refers to advertising which is built specifically to appear on a mobile phone (or cell phone in the US). There are two primary types of mobile advertising – In-App or Web-Based. In terms of effectiveness and price, there is not really any difference between the two types as of yet. Web-Based Mobile Advertising […]
Google announced they are replacing the old smartphone crawler user-agent with a new one in order to make it possible for Google to index more smartphone content. Zhijian He, a smartphone search engineer at Google said that the previous user-agent “made it impossible for Google to index smartphone content of some sites, or for Google […]
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 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Image Mismatch: The Latest Google Webmaster Tools Manual Action Penalty Google has a new manual action penalty within their guidelines named image mismatch. Image mismatch is when the images on your […]
In a video released today by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, he said you don’t have to worry about there being a down side, related to SEO, when using a responsive design approach for mobile web sites. The question posed to him was: Is there an SEO disadvantage to using responsive design instead […]
Google’s Hotel Finder, which launched in June 2011, is now available on mobile devices. Google said all you need to do is go to www.google.com/hotels directly on your smart phone and search for your destination. Listings will come up almost immediately, giving you the ability to filter the search results by price, hotel class, user […]
Google has just rolled out their new “more unified design” of displaying search results for mobile devices, including smartphones and tablet devices. As expected, Google said A new “more unified design” will offer “cleaner and simpler, optimized for touch, with results clustered on cards so you can focus on the answers you’re looking for.” Here […]
It’s amazing to me that it took Yahoo so long to update its Answers property. Once a thriving Q&A network and social search site, Yahoo really let Answers go to seed. However the company announced yesterday that it was rolling out a new user-experience including mobile optimization. Even in its dilapidated state, Yahoo Answers is […]
One second. That’s about how long it took you to read the two words above, and it’s also the focus of Google’s latest advice for webmasters when it comes to developing mobile websites. The company has published new guidelines that emphasize why sites should deliver above-the-fold content in less than a second. The emphasis there […]
When we updated our Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors last month, we came very close to adding a mobile element to it. Now we’ve actually done so, in the wake of Google giving explicit advice that sites with issues for mobile devices might not rank as well, in the future. We were close, so […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced at SMX Advanced that Google is likely going to roll out a version of the site speed ranking factor for mobile sites. Back in 2010, Google said site speed is a ranking factor. Google’s Matt Cutts said expect something similar to come to mobile search soon. This […]
Is your site not doing a good job for mobile visitors? Better get that fixed. Sites with mobile experience issues won’t rank as highly in Google’s mobile or smartphone search results, in the future. Bad Mobile Site? Fewer Smartphone Search Rankings, For You Google’s Yoshikiyo Kato and Pierre Far said about the change in a […]
The Local Search Association has released a new Local Mobile Search report, which affirms many of the big themes and trends in the market now: PC traffic is flat, mobile is gaining rapidly and mobile is heavily used for local search. The Q4 2012 data in the report are from comScore. And because the data […]
Bing announced they have relaunched the Bing Business Portal under a new name, “Bing Places For Business.” The change doesn’t currently do much with your listings, outside of move the location of where you manage your business Bing Maps listing to bing.com/places. It also removes some features that were available in Bing Business Portal including: […]
The Google Operating System blog noticed Google is testing a new form of Sitelinks on the mobile interface. These new sitelinks are sub-sitelinks, secondary levels beyond the sitelink you’d find in the normal search interface. Sitelinks are designed to help searchers quickly find the section of the website they are trying to navigate toward. It […]
Toward the end of 2012, I read an interesting article theorizing that Google will be crawling APIs instead of mobile websites in the future. API means Application Programming Interface which allows software, including websites and mobile apps, to provide direct integration based on functions permitted by the API. Websites and mobile apps use APIs predominantly to share content […]
ConstantContact’s SinglePlatform division has released the results of a new survey of small businesses (SMBs). The “headline” finding is that nearly half (49 percent) say they’ve never updated their listings online. The survey polled “more than 350” SMBs. Most small businesses are overwhelmed and confused by even basic online marketing. This is reflected in some […]
Bryson Meunier from Resolution Media posted an update on his personal blog about the correlation between mobile content and ranking in Google. The study came out with three findings: (1) Having mobile optimized and rendered content is still highly correlated with getting organic traffic from Google. The study showed that 89% of the sites in […]
Rich Skrenta and team at blekko are launching “izik,” a new tablet search engine (and browser) designed to deliver a “from the ground up,” tablet friendly search experience. You can also use it on the PC; however the experience is best on a tablet. It’s available as an app for the iPad or Android tablets. […]
Google seems to be testing a new feature named “Quick View” in their smart phone enabled search results. The feature lets you load a page from the source web site in a quicker method, instead of loading the full page, which might require longer download time. Here is a picture of searching for [seo] on […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: How To Gather Evidence To Help Determine If It’s Time For A Mobile Website Is t time for a mobile website? I was talking to some clients a few weeks ago […]
Google launched a new mobile interface for navigating various Google services. Now if you load Google on your smartphone, you will see a menu icon made up of three lines. When you tap it with your finger, a black navigation bar will slide out from the left of the screen. Here is a screen shot: […]
As we wait for a new native Google Maps app for iOS 6, the company has introduced Street View imagery this morning to Google Maps for the mobile web. It’s another attraction that may pull Apple Maps users over on the iPhone and iPad. Below, a look at some of the key features in Google […]