SMX Boot Camp: Link Building Fundamentals Presentations from SMX East – NYC, NY, September 2011 Ever since Google created PageRank more than a decade ago, every good search marketer’s motto has been "I link, therefore I am." Though linking seems easy, it’s a far more subtle art than most realize, and there are right and […]
Ironically, the trade group that created the Cyber Monday concept had its own CyberMonday.com site lost in cyberspace this week. Lost, that is, if you tried to use Bing to find it. The site, along with some Black Friday deals sites, have been deliberately dropped from Bing as being too “thin” in content. Bing’s Version […]
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 Get Started With YouTube Promoted Video Earlier in the year, YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the world’s second largest search engine. In June 2011, ComScore reported that in the U.S., […]
For many search marketers, SEO Book is a legend. Founded by (another legend) Aaron Wall in 2003, SEO Book now includes Aaron’s wife Giovanna Villanueva, Peter Da Vanzo, and Eric Covino. Membership works out to around $10 a day ($300 a month) and includes over 100 custom training modules, a private forum, exclusive members-only tools, and […]
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 Search Algorithm Change For Freshness To Impact 35% Of Searches; Twitter Firehose Remains Off Google announced they are rolling out a new search algorithm change that helps make the search […]
Bitly currently is the leader in shortned URLs, minimizing 80 million URLs each day. Not only is Bitly shrinking URLs, but they are now “crawling & classifying” each shortened URL thanks to a a new social search platform. An index has since been created that will allow searchers to view the most distributed, viral and highest clicked links […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Marketing solutions at Search Engine Land Understand Your Web Visitors Without Using Cookies Multi-site Management: Challenges and Solutions Holistic Marketing: Fitting All the Pieces Together What’s the Secret to Video SEO? […]
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 […]
If your website and/or web pages have low PageRank, it’s possible that they also suffer from poor spelling and grammar. Google’s top spam cop, Matt Cutts, made the correlation between low PageRank and poor spelling in a Google Webmaster Help video just made public today. In responding to a question about whether spelling and grammar […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Dear Bing & Yahoo: Pushing Deck Chairs Around Isn’t A Good Plan I swear, it’s like watching the Titanic having run into that iceberg, as Bing and Yahoo try to figure […]
At SMX Advanced earlier this year, a hot topic was the use of the rel=”canonical” attribute in conjunction with pagination. Maile Ohye of Google noted that the rel=”canonical” attribute was not intended to cluster multiple pages (articles, product lists, etc.) to page one of that series (although it can be used to cluster multiple pages […]
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 Gets More Personal With Adaptive Search Bing has announced at SMX East today a new personalization feature named adaptive search. It seems a lot like Google’s previous query feature but […]
In a new Matt Cutts video, the Google engineer answers why webmasters are likely to see a toolbar PageRank drop for their site. He mentions three reasons: (1) You simply lose a link from a third party page that had a lot of high PageRank. (2) You have weird canonicalization issues with your site and […]
Second in our review series are the link building tools from SEOmoz Pro; I was excited to review this tool set since it’s not one I use. Let’s start with a quick overview of what’s in the program and then focus on the link building tools. SEOmoz PRO SEOmoz PRO is a set of “software, tools and resources to maximize […]
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 12 Sitelink Experiment Returns Google is once again testing — or continuing to test — a jumbo-sized search result that displays a whopping 12 sitelinks below the main/top search result. […]
Today, Google launched a new way for site owners to request that specific web pages be crawled. How is this different from the other ways available to let Google know about your pages and when should you use this feature vs. the others? Read on for more. This new method for submitting URLs to Google […]
In 2009, Google launched the parameter handling feature of Google webmaster tools, which enabled site owners to specify the parameters on their site that were optional vs. required. A year later, they improved this feature by providing an option for a default value. Google says that they’ve seen a positive impact from the usage of those […]
Google has announced the end of supporting the Google Toolbar for Firefox. Google said the Google Toolbar works in versions of Firefox 4 or younger, but not the new version 5 of Firefox. Google explained, “many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browser.” So […]
In 2008, Google removed directory links from Webmaster Tools and in December 2010, Google dropped the search box from the Google directory. Today, Google has completely removed the Google Directory as a Google service. Going to directory.google.com will show you a notice that reads the “Google Directory is no longer available.” Yesterday the directory was […]
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 […]
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 Kills The Quarter: $9 Billion In Revenue Google had a huge Q2, with revenues of $9.03 billion — a new record. This represents growth of 32% over 2010. Net income […]
In January 2011, Google began sending out more webmaster tool spam notifications including notifications that your site has been penalized because of selling links. Now there are reports that Google is notifying webmasters that they have bad links pointing to their web site, as opposed to bad links on their web site pointing outwards. Here […]
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, MSFT, Yahoo In Talks To Buy Hulu: Report Hulu is apparently a popular dance partner at the moment. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are […]
The latest blog post from Google Webmaster Central remind site owners what many of us have been saying for years: The Google Toolbar PageRank number is a terrible SEO metric (I may be paraphrasing a bit). Webmaster Trends Analysis (and knitter extraordinaire) Susan Moskwa, who wrote the post, says: “I posit that none of us truly care […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: New: Google Now Showing Local +1 Counts Last week we confirmed Google was showing raw +1 counts in the search results and now today, Google seems to be testing showing location […]
With Google Panda Update 2.2 upon us, it’s worth revisiting what exactly Panda is and isn’t. Panda is a new ranking factor. Panda is not an entirely new overall ranking algorithm that’s employed by Google. The difference is important for anyone hit by Panda and hoping to recover from it. Google’s Ranking Algorithm & Updates […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Twitter Intros Instant Follow Button In a bid to increase its presence across the Web, Twitter today announced the “follow button,” a snippet of code that can be placed on any […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Is It Time For A New Compensation Model For Search And Digital Marketers? Pay for performance is certainly not a new concept. But a number of digital marketing industry pundits have […]
A story on TechCrunch today notes that a Sequoia-backed shopping site called Milanoo appears to be spamming Google with hoards of paid links that are helping them rank for things like [cheap dresses] and [evening gown]. They got news of the situation by way of a site called Digital Due Diligence that checked Milanoo’s backlink profile […]
Ask The SEOs Presentations from SMX West, March 2011 You’ve heard the lingo: PageRank sculpting, duplicate content penalties, canonical tags, sitemap structure, nofollow… and most recently a lot about the potential impact of Google Instant. In this session, you can ask questions and get direct answers from engineers from Google, Microsoft and the other search […]
Many SEO professionals try to understand information architecture (IA). Do information architects try to understand SEO? Here are some of my beefs with information architects.
For the past several months in this column, I’ve been asking a number of people the same question: Where will search go from here? For the next two columns, I wanted to sum up what came out of those conversations and find the common themes. A Shift In Our Expectations Of Success A number of […]
An amazing amount of great information came out of SMX West this week. Below is a summary of some of what I found to be the most actionable and useful. Google’s Own Words About the Farmer/Panda Update Google’s Matt Cutts said that while the change isn’t 100% perfect, searcher feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. He […]
Last week, J.C. Penney made the news for plummeting in Google rankings for everything from “area rugs” to “grommet top curtains”. Turns out the retail site had a number of suspicious links pointing at it that could be traced back to a link network intended to manipulate Google’s ranking algorithms. Google, in order to protect […]
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 Simplifies Site-Specific Bidding on Display Network Google is eliminating managed placement default bids in an effort to simplify bidding on its Display Network. Now Display Network advertisers who use managed […]
What do you do if Google warns you about a violation of its paid links policy and you can’t find any such links on your web site? If you’re a small webmaster you might go to Google’s Webmaster Help forums and ask for help. But if you’re part of the website team at a major […]
Yes, Google uses data from its Google Toolbar to improve its search results. But no, Google reasserts, it doesn’t use its toolbar to mine search behavior on other search engines in the way that Bing does.
New research designed to analyze Google’s personalized search results and make the process the search engine uses more transparent has generated interesting and controversial findings. The study examined a number of commonly held notions about personalization, including the idea that personalization is subtle, that it can often surface more long-tail results, and that personalization is […]
Today, the New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization investigation of J.C. Penney. Perplexed by how well jcpenney.com did in unpaid (organic) search results for practically everything the retailer sold, they asked someone familiar with the world of search engine optimization (SEO) to look into it a bit more. The investigation […]
Part of this week’s debate over whether Microsoft’s Bing search engine is learning from Google involves data that Bing gathers through Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Google has suggested Microsoft isn’t giving fair disclosure. I disagree. To better illustrate, let’s turn the tables and look at the Google Toolbar and disclosure.