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 […]
Last week at our SMX West show, Google and Bing spoke about how sites might get excepted from being harmed by particular signals in their search algorithms. Whitelists? Exception lists? List overrides? What’s it all mean? Below, a transcript of the answers, so you can read exactly what was said for yourself. The question came […]
During the Spam Police panel at the SMX West conference, both Google and Bing said they have “exception lists” for sites that might get hit by some algorithm signals. Neither suggested that such lists were used to boost sites in their search results nor exempt them from any overall algorithm changes. However, in the case […]
On Thursday, Google announced a major change to its search algorithm, designed to weed out shallow and low-quality content from its top search results. Content farms were seen by many as the target. Were they hit? Who was hit? Some figures are coming out.
Yes, Google might consider changing its ranking algorithm in response to an EU anti-trust investigation. However, that would fit in with Google’s general practice of changing its algorithm on a regular basis in response to anything the company thinks will improve its results.
What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? from earlier this month confirmed that Google and Bing were both using social signals from Facebook and Twitter in their search algorithms. Today, Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, posted a new video on the Google Webmaster YouTube Channel reconfirming Google uses social signals. The key takeaways […]
Earlier this week, the New York Times spotlighted how a merchant with bad reviews nonetheless was ranked well in Google. Today, Google has announced that changes to its ranking system are in place to prevent such things from happening again. Collecting Reviews But Dodging If They’re Used Google aggregates reviews about merchants from across the […]
Back in October, Bing announced that it uses over 1,000 signals used to determine how to rank pages. Google has typically quoted using more than 200. Game on! I predicted Google would quickly find a way to match Bing’s figure. Yesterday, it did. Google’s 200 Factors For several years now, Google has said that it […]
As you know, Google won’t show certain search results in Google Instant for search results that seem pornographic, violent or hateful. The includes the word “lesbian,” even though few would consider it to be pornographic on its own. I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google said they will try to fix […]
Bing accounts for 26.5% of all desktop searches in the U.S., according to Comscore (April 2021). With the recent prevalence of working from home, people are spending more time on their desktop computers, which might also mean that more people are now using Bing. If you do nothing, then you’re leaving your competitors with the […]
Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks. These frequent […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Live Matrix Wants To Be Your Guide To The Live Web If you’re looking for something to do, there are several event search engines you might use: Upcoming.org and Zvents are […]
Yahoo announced a new search index and algorithm update today. The update involves crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms changes over the next few days. Yahoo said, “you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.” The last Yahoo update was on March […]
Speaking today at SMX West in Santa Clara, Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig, said that PageRank is overhyped and probably needs a new name. His comments came during the morning keynote session in a conversation with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman. After being asked about search technologies that he thinks are […]
In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google opens up the curtains a bit on how it handles synonyms in search queries and results. It’s a fairly detailed peek inside one aspect of Google’s search algorithms — an aspect that Google says affects a lot of searches: “…our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 […]
The Twitter Blog has a short blog post mentioning that they have added technology “to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful.” Clearly, this is Twitter’s first step in improving Twitter Search by adding relevancy and search quality factors to the search algorithm. Currently, Twitter Search returns results […]
I guess Derek Powazek isn’t done with attacking SEO. Now he’s published an SEO FAQ page which, sorry, really doesn’t provide much FAQ about SEO. So what the heck. I’ll deconstruct it. Be sure to also read my previous post, An Open Letter To Derek Powazek On The Value Of SEO. What’s SEO? First, any […]
The Yahoo Search Blog has announced an index and algorithm update, aka a “weather report.” Yahoo said, “we’re rolling out some updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.” I spotted this update a couple […]
Yahoo has informed us that they will be rolling out a search update over the weekend. Yahoo said, that you can expect “some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon.” As always, expect the ranking to change, hopefully not too much […]
Google has historically been criticized for being a black box. But for the past couple of years the company has been trying to be more transparent in key areas (Matt Cutts in particular has been very helpful here). As the latest in a series of such posts, Amit Singhal, who runs the Google “ranking” team […]
The Yahoo Search Blog has posted that they are currently undergoing an index, crawl, and algorithm update. Priyank Garg of Yahoo said: Over the last few days, we’ve been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process […]
The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they are currently rolling out a web search update. Priyank Garg’s “weather report” said: We’ve been rolling out some changes to our fresh web data and crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed by the weekend. You may see […]