Robots.txt is not the answer: Proposing a new meta tag for LLM/AI
Using robots.txt for managing data usage in LLMs is the wrong approach in this new age of generative AI products. Here's why.
Topic: Pierre Far
This day in search marketing history: February 22
Google page experience update for desktop rolls out, plus: Google’s Pirate Update impact, Google Shopping experience scorecard and more.
This day in search marketing history: January 18
Google's SOPA/PIPA prorest, plus: URL changes, Google core algorithm updates, AdWords mobile targeting, stop words and more.
Some cheers, a few sneers for Google’s URL solution for AMP
Solution addresses one of the most prominent AMP criticisms, but its implementation doesn’t come without controversy.
Fetch and Horror: 3 examples of how fetch and render in GSC can reveal big SEO problems
Columnist Glenn Gabe demonstrates why discovering how Googlebot sees your desktop and mobile content is essential to any good SEO audit.
SearchCap: Bing Emoji, Google Webmaster Guidelines & Gmail Messages In 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: Bing Now Lets You Search By Emoji Want to search for something using popular emoji characters? Microsoft’s Bing search engine now supports this. Bing announced the news in a post today, […]
Google Webmaster Guidelines Updated To Warn About Blocking CSS & JavaScript Files
Google announced they’ve updated their webmaster guidelines to specifically note that blocking your CSS or JavaScript files may have a negative impact on your indexing and search rankings in Google. Pierre Far, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, said the “new guideline specifies that you should allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files that […]
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 Mobile Warnings For Adobe Flash Sites Expand Worldwide
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 […]
Using Adobe Flash For Your Web Site? Google Mobile Results Will Issue Searchers A Warning.
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 […]
SearchCap: Google On Site Moves, Google Shopping API, Greece Okays Google Maps Street Views
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 Takes Down Japan’s Honinbo Shusaku Doodle On Google UK On D-Day, Offers Apology The Telegraph reports Google has taken down a Google Doodle, aka Google Logo, from Google UK and […]
Google Updates Documentation & Guidelines On Moving A Site
Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, Pierre Far and Zineb Ait Bahajji, posted on the Google Webmaster blog today that they’ve updated their official guidelines for moving your web site and having Google in mind when doing so. They broke out the process based on two ways of moving your site: (1) Move a site with no […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 19, 2014
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 Matt Cutts: We’ve Taken Action On A Large Guest Blog Network Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced really early this morning on Twitter that Google has taken action […]
Google Voice Search Easter Egg Unlocks “Cheat Mode”
Googler Pierre Far has found a Google Easter egg that opens up “Unlimited free Google searches” for everyone. According to Far’s Google+ post, doing a Google voice search for, “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right” on his Android phone prompted the voice response, “Cheat mode unlocked, unlimited free Google searches.” According to Search […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, December 4, 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: Consumer Watchdog Claims Google Shopping Makes Consumers Pay More, Further Evidence Of Google’s “Search Monopoly” Consumer Watchdog has lodged a new complaint about Google’s “search monopoly” with the US Federal Trade […]
Google Webmaster Tools Adds Smartphone Specific Crawl Errors
Pierre Far, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced a new feature within Google Webmaster Tools that shows webmasters crawl errors specific to smartphone devices. The issue is: it is often hard for webmasters to detect and thus fix errors that happen on smartphone devices. Google decided to add a section to the crawl errors report that […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 16, 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’s [Not Provided] At 87% Of Google Search Traffic To Major News Sites [Report] If you’ve been hoping that the hypocrisy of Google hiding keyword referral data from natural search traffic […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 4, 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: Searching For The Voice Of Siri: Voiceover Actor Susan Bennett Says, “It’s Obviously Me” A story on CNN.com claims that Atlanta voiceover professional Susan Bennett is the original voice of Siri, […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 2, 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 Authorship Launches Within Image Search Today at SMX East, Google’s Pierre Far told the audience Google launched a small update to authorship by adding authorship rich snippets to Google Image […]
Google Authorship Launches Within Image Search
Today at SMX East, Google’s Pierre Far told the audience Google launched a small update to authorship by adding authorship rich snippets to Google Image Search. To see it, go to Google Images and search for named of people who may have authorship. Click on the image and if the image has markup on the […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 4, 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 May Be Updating Their Algorithm But They Won’t Confirm It Today, September 4th, and last week, August 21st, there were huge spikes in chatter amongst the SEO and webmasters about […]
Google’s Data Highlighter Adds Support For Book Reviews
Google has quietly added support for book reviews rich snippets with the data highlighter tool. Pierre Far from Google announced it on his Google+ page saying “you can now use Data Highlighter to tell us about pages on your site that have book reviews.” That means you can now mark up pages with this tool […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 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: DuckDuckGo Passes 2 Million Daily Searches DuckDuckGo, the upstart search engine that hangs it hat on protecting its users’ privacy, hit a new milestone on Monday: its first day with two […]
Google: In Future, Pages With Bad Mobile SEO Won’t Rank As Well In Mobile Search
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 […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 10, 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: Apple Makes Bing The “Default Search Engine” For Siri One of the things that you might have missed if you weren’t paying really close attention to the live blogs of the […]
Google Expands List of “Generic” Top Level Domains and Makes Them Geotargetable
Typically, the country-code top level domain (ccTLD) is just that — a country code. For instance, example.co.uk has content for the UK, and example.com.au has content for Australia. Usually, registration of these domains is restricted. You have to prove that you are operating the site from the designated country. However, some countries have opened up […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 10, 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: Bing Ads Says Product Ads Are Coming This Summer (U.S. Only) Today Bing Ads announced on its Developer blog that they plan to roll out Product Ads in the U.S. sometime […]
Google Adds A New Webmaster Annotation For Multilingual & Multinational Sites
Google’s Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog a new annotation designed to help communicate redirects and languages to Google for multilingual and multinational web sites. The annotation is designed to work with homepages of multinational and multilingual sites that are configured to point users to localized pages, either via […]
Google Launches Streamlined Image Search
Like how Google Image Search works on a tablet? Good news, then. That simplified experience is coming to Google Images on the desktop. Out With The Old Currently, viewing an image through Google Image Search is a multistep process. You do the search, see several images and can hover to get a slightly larger thumbnail: […]
The Latest On Google’s Hreflang Tag & Other Learnings From International Search Summit @SMX Advanced
Google has been moving lots of goal posts for us all recently and the “Hreflang” tag is a case in point. A succession of Google speakers has presented the latest “Hreflang” thinking at International Search Summits @SMX throughout 2012. On each occasion, the presentation and explanation was different from the one before. The bad news […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 6, 2012
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 Finally Takes A Clear Stance On Mobile SEO Practices Today at SMX Advanced during the iSEO panel, Pierre Far, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced clear guidelines and recommendations on mobile […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 26, 2012
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Major Entertainment Groups Accuse Google, Bing Of Directing Users To Illegal Content Several major UK entertainment industry groups are accusing Google and Bing of directing searchers to illegal content, and have […]
Now Test Your Sitemaps Before Submitting Them To Google
Google has quietly added a feature to Google Webmaster Tools that allows you to test your sitemap files prior to submitting them to Google. Google’s Pierre Far confirmed that this is indeed a brand new feature built to help webmasters debug their sitemap files prior to submitting them. One of the most common complaints about […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 18, 2012
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 5th “Doodle 4 Google” Contest Opens For K-12 Students Google has launched its fifth annual “Doodle 4 Google” contest, and this year’s version appears to be bigger than ever and […]
Google Slows Web Crawlers To Help Blackouts Sites
As you know, there are many sites going black to protest SOPA and PIPA. Google has already offered blackout SEO advice but they decided to take it one step further by slowing down their spiders today. Pierre Far from Google posted on his Google+ that Google is slowing down GoogleBot’s crawl activity to reduce the […]
How To Blackout Your Site (For SOPA/PIPA) Without Hurting SEO
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 […]
Google Sending Additional Reconsideration Request Responses To Webmasters
Monday I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google’s Webmaster Central team has begun stepping up webmaster communication, once again, this time by responding to reconsideration requests more actively then in the past. Google is now telling webmasters that submit reconsideration requests if their penalty is not a manual Google penalty, then there is […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 22, 2011
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Should Korean Search Engine Naver Worry About Local Competitors Or Google? For just about the last decade, Naver has been the dominant player in the south Korean search market holding a […]
Google On Designing Mobile Friendly Websites
Pierre Far from Google wrote a blog post on how to design mobile friendly websites while considering Google’s webmaster guidelines and best practices. I’ve pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format: Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones. Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of […]