Chris Hamlin emailed me screen shots of Google testing a new layout for the Google Sitelinks, the little links under a search result that provide quicker navigation to important pages within the site. Here are some screen shots sent by Chris, showing bolded links, with URLs, followed by normal sitelinks. Single one line sitelinks, and […]
As I reported days ago, over the weekend the popular, but virtually useless, add URL form on Google did not work. Google posted a known issue on Saturday, October 2nd. Today, October 6th, I am finally hearing reports that the add URL form is now working again. Google’s message that the add URL form was […]
No, this is not another top-level domain vs. sub domain article but one that goes more to a deeper problem global companies are having with a haphazard approach to their local language content management. I have seen far too many global companies large and small cobble together local language sites that make Frankenstein look like […]
What is the hardest task in search engine optimization? Whether the question is asked in a formal poll, on an online forum or over a cup of coffee, the answer most commonly given is “link building.” With good reason: an external link, by definition, is something outside an SEOs immediate realm of control. External link […]
After the 2009 Super Bowl, I monitored how the commercials drove searches and reported back on how well the brands did at ensuring visibility in organic search results. It didn’t go so well. The primary problems were: Microsites – Microsites aren’t inherently a bad idea, but too many of them can cause brand confusion, external […]
In October 2009, Google proposed a new standard for implementing AJAX on web sites that would help search engines extract the content. Now, there’s evidence this proposal is either live or is about to be. Read on for more details on the proposal, how it works, and why it might be past the proposal stage. […]
The Google AdWords blog announced a new change to their display URL policy for ads leading to hosted domains. The change is fairly simple, if you are hosted on a blogspot.com, wordpress.com or similar type of domain, Google wants you to show the subdomain portion of the domain, in addition to the main domain. For […]
The US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) issued warning letters issued in late March, 2009 to a number of big pharmaceutical companies, saying that their search ads were misleading and didn’t contain the required disclosure information mandated by US federal regulations. As one might have expected this caused the companies to temporarily pull their SEM […]
I noticed this morning that Yahoo has added a new feature named “Top Queries” to Site Explorer. I have not seen any announcement from Yahoo on this addition, but it seems pretty new. The tool shows you the top ten queries by day, week or month. It also shows you your top ten URLs by […]
As Google has grappled with newspapers firing rip-off accusations at them, one of the key responses has been from Google’s Marissa Mayer. A move to “living URLs” would drive them more traffic, she’s said, talking about it twice this past month. But such a system won’t work unless Google News fundamentally changes how it handles […]
Re-finding search behavior is common in web search, image search, and video search. What is it, and how can you make it easy for searchers to re-find your content?
The next time you login to Google’s Webmaster Tools, you may notice a few minor changes to the interface and functionality. Google announced four changes today — two of which seem worth highlighting here: Blocking non-home page sitelinks: The ability to block certain sitelinks from showing in Google results now applies to all pages on […]
Microsoft announced that MSNBot 2, which is currently in beta, may be ramped up a lot more and webmasters might begin to notice the new bot in their log files. The new bot has been out there since December 2008, and the useragent is just about the same as the original bot. New Bot: msnbot/2.0b […]
Google has always truncated the display URLs in the search results when it went beyond two lines, I believe. But now new reports from several sources are noticing that Google may be truncating the URLs to a single line, when applicable. Below is a screen shot of Google shortening URLs. As you can see, the […]
I reported Google appears to be testing a new click tracking method in the search results. In the past, Google selectively tracked clicks by appending tracking URLs to the search results. Now, it appears that those tracking URLs are done through JavaScript and are virtually invisible to the end user. Here is a sample of […]
Google’s Matt Cutts posted a recent video answering a question about the position of the keywords in the URL. The question asked, does the order of the words in the URL make an impact on one’s ranking at Google? Matt Cutts said one should not obsess about the order of the words but he said […]
The web is full of duplicate content. Search engines try to index and display the original or “canonical” version. Searchers only want to see one version in results. And site owners worry that if search engines find multiple versions of a page, their link credit will be diluted and they’ll lose ranking. Today, Google, Yahoo […]
Buzz has been growing over the past 4-5 days about what appears to be a new Google search results test that, if widely implemented, might spell doom for SEO rank checking software and some other tools. Many are concerned that it could kill web analytics software, too, but that may not be the case. Google […]
Earlier today, Google started placing malware warnings next to every site listed. TechCrunch has an excellent screenshot, and there’s much discussion on Techmeme. As part of its malware blocking system, this also meant anyone trying to reach a site by clicking on a link from Google were instead routed to a “do you really want […]
Just over a year ago, we reported how you can spice up your AdWords ads with ASCII art. I was unable to reproduce it back then and it might have been a link bait stunt, but I found it interesting so I shared it. The same company wrote how you can brand your URLs to […]
I was in a meeting this week and someone was talking about her New Year’s resolution to eat healthy this year, and how it was already making her miserable. I think her exact words were “I’m ready to eat my desk.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. Never have. […]
The best time to start working on SEO is before you start building your site. It goes back to that old saying: “If you don’t have time to do it right, will you have the time to do it over?” And, of course you don’t have time to do it over. One of the biggest […]
It was just a few months ago when Google.com added search suggestions to the main page. Now, I am receiving reports that Google is testing enhancing those suggestions by showing URLs in the suggestions, in some cases. For example, Sam at Oh! Nuts emailed me a screen shot of Google showing his URL in the […]
This morning I reported that the “fairer” AdWords quality score changes went live. In that post, I asked you to submit your questions, because I had scheduled a call with Google’s Nick Fox to answer some questions I had over this quality score change. The call is now over and I have some pretty transparent […]
Almost two years ago, Google updated their guidelines to say that they can now properly handle crawling dynamic URLs. But last night, Google posted a blog entry now telling webmasters not to use rewrite rules for dynamic URLs, at least in most cases. Google say, in bold, “avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it […]
How big is Google’s web index? Google hasn’t said for years and still isn’t saying — but it is blogging today about how it "knows" of 1 trillion web-based items. Joy, we haven’t had a search engine talk about pages it knows about to confuse things since the Lycos days. Glad to have Google making […]
Remember Google announced that they will be strictly enforcing the AdWords display URL policy a few months back? Well, they actually started enforcing the policy at the beginning of this month. Some advertisers who had display URLs that did not match their destination URLs were impacted. It appears that some of those advertisers are now […]
A week ago Google announced the release of a safe browsing diagnostic tool. To use the tool, just append a URL to the end of https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=. For example, to test this site, you would enter https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=https://searchengineland.com/. Google will then return four sets of security information about that page.
Google has an official post that they will be strictly enforcing the AdWords URL policy. Yes, we covered this last week, but I wanted to make sure everyone is notified about this change in policy enforcement at AdWords. In short, the policy requires your ad’s display URL match its destination URL. You can review the […]
Web Browsing, Search, And Online Ads Grow More Risky, Google Says from InformationWeek reports on a recent Google Study named All Your iFRAMEs Point to Us that shows 1.3% of Google searches returned at least one malicious result. Niels Provos, a security engineer at Google, lead the study that took 10 months of data containing […]
PPC Hero wrote that Google would be making changes to the AdWords display URL policy on April 1st. I asked Google for more details on this policy change and they informed me that the policy is remaining the same, but starting April 1st, Google will begin “strictly enforcing” it. Last Saturday, account managers began notifying […]
For the past few years, I have been silently listening to and observing other search engine optimization (SEO) professionals speak and write about the topic of search-engine friendly web site design. I’m the one in the back with the black wig, sunglasses, mustache, and trench coat. All joking aside, I am genuinely interested in how […]
Trying to figure out the impact of last week’s oil spill in San Francisco Bay, which happened after the container ship Cosco Busan hit the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge? There are maps to the rescue! Links to them below, along with some observations on the difficulty in finding community-built maps like these in Google Maps. […]
Aaron Wall has released a new tool named the Website Health Check Tool. The tool reviews a site’s title tags, descriptions, URLs, and page status codes. It then returns problems the site may have with missing title tags and descriptions, any duplicate title tags or descriptions, www versus non-www issues, index page health, and error […]
The adCenter Blog announced new changes that have been implemented in the adCenter console. The changes include a real time editorial ad feedback feature, changes to campaign management features, and additional reporting upgrades. The largest change was the immediate editorial feedback on keywords or ads you create in the adCenter console. In short, Microsoft seemed […]
AdSense Disallowed On URLs Containing “Google”, Google Says from Google Blogoscoped shows an almost comical AdSense ban of a portion of his site. Reportedly, Google has disallowed him from displaying Google AdSense ads on the Chinese version of his site because it is located at https://google.blogoscoped.cn/. Google sent him the following explanation:
If you are one of the growing numbers of in-house SEOs working on larger web sites, things can get a bit “scratch-your-head, where-do-I-start” difficult. If you’re managing tens of millions of pages, or even tens of thousands of pages, there’s no doubt you need to automate things. Even those working on smaller sites that produce […]
Google Operating System discovered that Google is now attempting to fix search typos of URLs. For example, a search on https://searchengineland.com/googles.php returns: No results found for https://searchengineland.com/googles.php. However, there are results from websites with similar addresses
SEOmoz released its latest SEO quiz today, which is now getting some buzz as folks poke at the accuracy of the questions. Below, my own spin through the test, which constantly had me disagreeing with many of the "answers," plus some links to more of the chatter about it.
The Yahoo Search Blog announced a new Site Explorer feature that enables webmasters to inform Yahoo about dynamic URLs that might be creating duplicate content issues or crawl barriers. The new feature is named “Dynamic URL Rewriting,” and it allows webmasters to view potential duplicate content issues and have Yahoo rewrite those URLs at the […]