If you search in Google for [offers] Google will return the shuttered Google Offers page as the first search listing. But if you look carefully, you will see that Google has blocked the page from spiders within their robots.txt file and the page itself says “This site is no longer being supported.” Here is a […]
Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines document has been leaked once again! Version 5.0 was leaked a few days ago, where Google has reportedly completely revamped the guidelines. Jennifer Slegg has documented most of the new guidelines on her blog. You can also read the full new 160 page guidelines on scribd.com. I am actually surprised the […]
It turns out that those in the European Union asking Google to “forget” links they don’t like that appearing for searches on their names are also getting links removed for any search that involves their names and additional words, rather than just their names alone. Until now, it wasn’t clear that Google was removing links […]
Figuring out when and why Google indexes a specific Tweet has long been a conundrum and point of angst for many SEOs. Of course Google does index Tweets, but the methodology has seemed like a total crapshoot — until now. The good folks over at Stone Temple Consulting have attempted to crack the Twitter indexation […]
Many searchers and Google users are asking, will the Right To Be Forgotten form be a feature and option coming to the U.S. on Google.com. The answer is no! A few weeks ago, Google told us the removals will only be available in the European Union, that is until the U.S. government and court finds […]
SEOs and Social Marketers speculate on the impact that Social Media marketing has on how well their websites perform in search results. There has been much conjecture with many people interpreting an array of correlations as causation. Both Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Duane Forrester have come out (on more than one occasion) to emphatically […]
In the latest video by Google’s Matt Cutts, he talks about how Google may determine the quality of a page of content without there being many links. By Matt’s expression, he seemed to give off the feeling that without links, it is really hard for Google to determine the quality of the page. He said, […]
Google announced that their App Indexing protocol, the ability for Google to link search results to your mobile apps direct deep content now supports eight new languages. App Indexing lets developers markup their content so that if a searcher has an Android app installed on their phone, and the search result comes up, it would […]
Maria Belen Rodriguez is an Argentina-born model, actress and TV personality who now lives and works in Italy. She successfully sued Google and Yahoo in 2006 in her native country, alleging that her likeness was wrongfully appropriated by porn sites and then indexed/republished or disseminated by search engines. There was an alleged sex tape involving Belen Rodriguez (in […]
Google has announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog that in the “coming days” they will be releasing a new tool to help debug your site’s JavaScript issues. Specifically, Google is going to show you if they have issues crawling and indexing your site because of JavaScript implementation mistakes. Google said: We have been gradually […]
After what we think was about a week of being de-indexed, the controversial Ripoff Report website is showing up again in search results on Yahoo’s Australian website. But a company spokesperson tells us that some URLs are still blocked. Late Wednesday night (May 21), we noticed that a site:ripoffreport.com search on Yahoo7 — the Australian […]
Yahoo7, the Australian version of Yahoo, has de-indexed Ripoff Report after receiving “significant complaints” about defamatory content showing in its search results. As you see above, a site:ripoffreport.com on Yahoo7 produces no results. A Yahoo7 spokesperson gave us this statement on the decision to de-index that entire domain: Yahoo7 has received significant complaints in regards […]
According to the Washington Post, 24 state attorneys general are trying to pressure Google to discontinue ads and the indexing of sites they argue teach or enable criminal activity. In particular, they continue to pressure Google to eliminate advertising connected to the sale of illegal or fake prescription drugs. The attorneys generals’ complaints were initially […]
A few weeks ago, we reported on cases where Google was misattributing content for select news publishers. We showed examples of Google showing URLs of large news publishers but those URLs listed were not the source URLs and thus, redirecting from Google’s search results to a completely different URL. Yesterday, a few weeks after we […]
Google is the dominant mobile search engine with nearly 90 percent of the market in the US and an even greater share internationally. The problem is that search engines aren’t used as often in mobile. Large volumes of content are consumed in apps. Google is trying to address that challenge by indexing more app-based content, including […]
On June 7, 2011, Google announced support for a new type of markup called the Authorship Tag. This was the rel=”author” tag. It did not take long before the speculation started — when would Google start using data from this new tag to impact rankings? The industry took to referring to this concept as AuthorRank. […]
One of the most frustrating experiences for any publisher is discovering that someone not only has copied your content but outranks you on Google for searches related to that content. Now, Google seems to have heard the complaints and has launched a tool to help. Called the Google Scraper Report, it was announced by the […]
Bing has quietly updated their Webmaster Guidelines to include a stern warning to webmasters who think they can use keyword stuffing techniques to manipulate their rankings and get away with it. The warning says Bing may demote the site or delist the site that is using keyword stuffing. The new section was added sometime yesterday […]
According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook’s recent earnings call, Facebook’s Graph Search will hit mobile devices ‘pretty soon.’ It’s now been a full year since Graph Search was launched and mobile integration only makes sense. According to cnet, Zuckerberg stated the following quote in regards to Graph Search on the call: “Pretty soon, I think, […]
Earlier today, Twitter announced that it was bringing a number of new search filters to the site. These include: people, photos, videos, news. There are also “people you follow” and “near you” filters that further refine results. If one were to search for “Super Bowl,” results could then be filtered by those tweets that incorporated […]
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 […]
Google is now dynamically changing the top search menu/filters based on the search query entered by the searcher. So now, what options you see at the top might differ or be in a different order based on the query you enter into Google’s search box. A Google spokesperson told us this based on noticing that […]
If you search for [gmail] in Google and if you click on the sitelink that reads “Google mail” — Google may push you to a page that composes an email to a Google Apps user. Here is the search result you may see when you search for [gmail]: Clicking on that sitelink below the main […]
Bing posted their 2013 highlights on the Bing Search Blog, summarizing some key statistics they wanted to share with everyone. They did it as an infographic, I wonder what Google would think about that? Here is the infographic stats in bullet format followed by the infographic. Bing.com home page views equals the number of people […]
Google announced you can now search content within Android apps through their new App Indexing protocol they launched at the end of October. Currently available on Android smartphones, when you search Google and there is an app that has content related to your Google search, you will see search results that open the app, directly […]
Nearly ten years after it began and eight years after Google was sued over it, Google’s program that scans books in order to make them searchable has been found legal. A judge found fair use, especially in that “Google Books does not supersede or supplant books because it is not a tool to be used to […]
Google announced that they can now index the content within Android apps. The mechanism for doing so, they call, is app indexing. App indexing allows webmasters to connect pages from your web sites with specific content within your Android app. This enables Android smartphone users who have your app installed to open it directly from […]
It’s been less than a month since Facebook expanded Graph Search to include status updates and posts, and the feature still isn’t available to all users. Nonetheless, Facebook search engineer Ashoat Tevosyan shared an “under the hood” look at how it works — and why it took so long to become reality. There’s nothing incredibly […]
Over the weekend, Bill Hartzer noticed that some Google searches returned Bing search results. As of last night, Google search results are once again Bing-free. What happened? Taking a closer look, the Bing search results weren’t www.bing.com/search URLs, which are correctly blocked by Bing’s robots.txt file. They were coming from www.bing.com/entities/search. This pattern is not […]
Searchmetrics has released their SEO ranking factors for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, today. Similar to their Google ranking factors, Searchmetrics analyzed 10,000 popular keywords and 300,000 websites appearing in the top 30 search results and looked at how various factors correlated with rankings. The top five key findings were: (1) Top brands rank higher on […]
As part of the US government shut down, many .gov sites have also shut down, replaced by messages like this: “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available. We sincerely regret this inconvenience.” But one day, the government will start up again and government agencies will once again focus on ensuring […]
Over two years ago, Google removed BitTorrent from the instant search auto-complete search suggestions. Now, it appears that when you begin typing [bit…] into the Google search box, Google now shows BitTorrent as a search suggestion within Google Instant search. Here is a screen shot of the search auto-completion within Google: Over the years, Google […]
John Lincoln from Ignite Visibility spotted a Google Hangout where Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Google will use URLs or domain names within content that are unlinked, i.e. without an a href attribute, to discover and index new pages of content. John went on to add that typically no PageRank or trust is flown from […]
It’s pretty easy to sit back and slam Google for how you think it should make decisions when it comes to search listings. It’s much harder to actually make those decisions, when you have a deeper understanding of all the implications involved. To experience this better, here’s a chance to put yourself in Google’s shoes […]
Google is adding a new feature in Webmaster Tools that will leave no doubt when a site’s search rankings are affected by a manual webspam action. It’s called the Manual Actions viewer, and it’s available today under the “Search Traffic” tab. The new tool complements the email notifications that Google already sends when it takes […]
Search for “edward snowden petition” on Google to find the petition filed through the White House petitions site, and you’ll see something odd. The petition has no description, because the White House won’t let Google crawl the page. But it’s not a move against Snowden, as some might think. It’s part of how the petitions site has worked […]
In recent weeks, Hollywood studios NBC Universal and Warner Bros both submitted DMCA takedown requests asking Google to de-list the file storage website Mega from its search index. According to a report on TorrentFreak, NBC Universal claimed Mega’s homepage linked to the NBC-owned film Mama, while Warner Bros alleged Mega made pirated copies of its film […]
Google’s fourth Penguin update — what the company is calling Penguin 2.0 — hit last night, and less than 24 hours later we’re already getting a first chance to look at what sites might be considered “losers” in terms of search visibility. In a nutshell, the list includes: porn sites, game sites and big brands […]
Yes, it is harder to find pages to iTunes apps in Google. But no, the company says, it’s not part of some nefarious plot. Rather, Google’s having technical problems gathering iTunes Preview pages, an issue it’s working to solve. Google has confirmed the issue, saying: We’ve been having some issues fetching pages from the iTunes […]
Last month, an excerpt from Eric Schmidt’s forthcoming book came out where he discussed how identity and authorship might be used to better rank search results. Since then, I’ve seen that widely cited as proof Google is already doing “Author Rank.” It’s not, nor was Schmidt describing a Google-specific system. But that could come, and […]