Google Operating System reports on a potentially new feature for Google Now (Android 4.1 and higher). None of us here could duplicate it. As described, it clusters users’ search histories into topics that can easily be searched again (see image below “explore more”). I’ve noticed versions of this on my Android devices in the past. […]
As part of today’s big “How Search Works” reveal, Google also took the big step of sharing its Search Quality Rating Guidelines for the first time. This is the document that Google’s human search quality raters use when grading Google’s search results. But the new, public document is actually an edited version of the old […]
As part of the How Search Works interactive infographic Google released today, they have decided to publish their search quality rating guidelines publicly to the world. You can access the 43-page PDF document over here. It was most recently updated November 2, 2012. As you may remember, the document has been leaked back in 2008, […]
There’s a strange bug on Google where search queries that should return no matches are instead turning Google into a porn search engine, almost as if an “anti-SafeSearch” feature is being enabled. Impossible Queries = Porn! The Verge highlighted a Quora post about the bug, where doing some searches for “contradictory” or impossible to solve […]
Google has confirmed the reports of the removal of the “not selected” filter within Google Webmaster Tool’s Index Status report. Google’s John Mueller said it was removed because it “was causing more confusion than actually helping webmasters with their sites.” That may be true, but many webmasters found the data useful. In fact, there were […]
If you happened to do certain abortion-related searches in the past few days, you might’ve been surprised to see the late Truman Capote getting Google+ Authorship credit for an article from The New York Times. What makes it odd, of course, is that Capote died in 1984. He wrote numerous classics that showed up on […]
Google is awaiting a judge’s decision on damages before it decides what to do after losing a defamation case over its search results in Australia. A jury in the supreme court of the Australian state Victoria, ruled Tuesday that Google is liable for defamation because its search results connected the plaintiff, 62-year-old Milorad Trkulja, to […]
It’s not a Google Bomb, but that doesn’t make it less embarrassing for US presidential candidate Mitt Romney or Google, that a search on Google Images for “completely wrong” brings up results that are dominated by Romney’s picture. Completely Wrong & Google Images Here’s an example of what you currently see in a search for “completely […]
Twitter recently updated its robots.txt file and, though the change opens up millions of pages to being crawled, there’s no guarantee that the main search engines want what Twitter is offering. The Sociable seems to have been the first to notice Twitter’s robots.txt changes, which now specifically allow Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and other bots […]
When search engine optimization (SEO) professionals talk about the searcher experience, they often cast their personal mental models onto the minds of searchers. What is your role in understanding and delivering a successful searcher experience?
The SEO community has been buzzing about a newly discovered Google Patent document named Ranking documents. The patent describes how Google may detect certain “rank modifying” techniques and then adjust the ranking of those documents using those techniques in a manner that will confuse the webmaster into thinking that technique did not work. The purpose […]
For some time (since at least March), Google webmaster tools has been sending messages to site owners about substantial traffic changes (increases or decreases) to pages of a site. Some site owners found these messages perplexing as they weren’t sure exactly what was actionable about the messages. Were the messages just informational, intended to help […]
Fasten your seat belt, if you’ve been spamming Google. The anti-spam “Penguin Update” will have more jolts in the coming months, as Google continues to adjust it. In contrast, updates to the Panda algorithm aimed at low-quality pages are now so minor as not to be noticed, when they roll out monthly. Speaking yesterday at […]
Confused by the latest link warnings that Google has been sending out? As we covered before, it’s all been pretty confusing. That’s why Google has posted more information meant to calm some worries, though it’s still likely that even after this, some are going to panic. The “Old” Link Warnings: Entire Site Impacted Google’s post […]
Yesterday, Google webmaster tools launched Index Status (available under Health) that charts the number of indexed pages for your site over the last year. Total Indexed Count Google says that this count is accurate (unlike the site: search operator) and is post-canonicalization. In other words, if your site includes a lot of duplicate URLs (due […]
Shopping site Kogan imposes an “Internet Explorer 7” tax. Kogan then mysteriously disappears from Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Revenge? No, just a technical goof, says Microsoft, one that it is correcting. Kogan grabbed headlines last month when it began adding an additional 6.8% charge to purchases for those using Internet Explorer 7. Calling it the “Internet […]
Back in March, Bing began sharing regular updates about changes that it’s made to search quality and the user search experience, much like Google has been doing since late last year. The latest Bing update was published earlier today and, rather than sharing surface-level information about dozens of changes like Google does, Bing has chosen […]
Google has confirmed the rumors of a Panda refresh happening over the weekend. Google said this refresh started rolling out on Friday, June 8th and has an impact of less than 1% of search queries in the U.S. and about 1% worldwide. As I said, the search forums took notice to major changes in the […]
For ages, Google has encouraged people to build links in order to rank well. But in the wake of the Google Penguin Update, it’s become painfully clear to me how many people have failed to understand the inherent quality links part of that link building message. Consider this a wake-up call. Yes, you want links, […]
Yesterday I covered a WebmasterWorld thread where SEOs were complaining that Google has been removing tons of free web directories from their index. I conducted some random tests and did notice some of these free web directories not coming up in Google. Later in the day, Terry Van Horne began running larger tests on 500+ […]
Even though Google has launched a smartphone bot to improve mobile search results and the user experience on smartphones, it doesn’t mean that everything in mobile SEO has changed. Google is still detecting what handset users are searching from, and adapting the results that they send based on the handset; some phones are set up […]
If it’s the first Friday of the month, it must be time for Google to share its latest list of search quality updates. And, like clockwork, Google didn’t disappoint today — the company has posted a list of 53 changes that affect search results. This list is particularly interesting because of all the upheaval happening […]
Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, posted a 8 minute video on how Google search works. From crawling, indexing to ranking, he gets into a brief overview of how Google’s search engine does its job. Matt explains how PageRank is used, crawling timelines, frequencies, priorities, indexing and filtering processes within the databases. Here is […]
Last week, the Bing Webmaster blog published a post about how Bing handles rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes. On the surface, it seemed as though Bing was announcing that it now supported these tags in the same way Google does. Last September, Google announced support of the rel=”prev” and rel=”next” attributes to designate paginated content, which enables […]
Microsoft has confirmed that they do discover and index URLs that they find through users surfing the Internet with the Bing Toolbar installed. This can be a concern for those who know certain URLs are only accessible if the individual knows about it and navigates to the URL with the Bing Toolbar installed. For example, […]
In previous posts in this column, I’ve covered the intricacies of multinational search from a technical SEO’s standpoint. Leveraging multinational markup while clearing up in-site duplicate content and avoiding multinational homepage calamities is no easy matter to coordinate for big site SEO. Bringing all of those strategies to bear, and then also attempting to integrate […]
Dr. Richard Qian from Bing’s core search team wrote a blog post on the Bing Search blog named Bing Search Quality Insights: Reducing Junk. This is part of Bing’s ongoing effort to provide search quality insights on how Bing works. Bing here explains how they handle removing bad links from the Bing search results, and […]
Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google is working on a search ranking penalty for sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed.” Matt announced this during a panel Search Engine Land’s Editor-In-Chief, Danny Sullivan and Microsoft’s Senior Product Marketing Manager of Bing at SXSW named Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!. The audio for […]
The good folks over at Stone Temple Consulting released an in-depth interview with Bing’s Principal Group Program Manager for Bing Social Search, Paul Yiu. The Bing social search team integrates social content and indicators into the search results to add both personalization and relevance to the search results. Bing currently ties in data from both […]
How does Google create its search algorithms, its recipes for making the listings and search results you get? For the first time, the general public gets a glimpse into the decision making process, through a video that Google has posted of one of its search quality meetings. The Video I was fortunate enough to witness […]
Bing and Google have weighed in on the amazing rise in less than a month of the Spreading Romney site to the first page of their results for a search on “romney.” That’s apparently business as usual. Prepare for further “Spreading” sites for other candidates to rank as well? Perhaps, but without some Rachel Maddow-like mentions, […]
A positive trend I have seen over the past few months is companies adopting a dedicated SEO diagnostics person or integrating SEO diagnostics into existing web diagnostics protocols. I have seen a huge missed opportunity, especially with global companies, that don’t take the action to monitor page inclusions, duplicate content and redirection issues. It is […]
Matt Cutts, international diplomat? That might be the more appropriate title for Google’s chief spam cop. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cutts is in South Korea this week and, in a presentation Monday night for about 80 government officials, webmasters, lawyers and journalists, managed to singlehandedly convince some government reps to let Googlebot crawl […]
For the past two weeks, I feel like I’ve been witnessing some type of Cuban Missile Crisis going on between Google, Twitter and Facebook. I’d like to suggest some ways that social-nuclear war might be averted. Beyond Blame, Believing In Cooperation Let’s set aside blame, because blame isn’t going to move anything forward. Let’s also […]
Alex Chitu reports Google is now showing search results for punctuation marks and other types of symbols. In the past, Google ignored most punctuation marks and didn’t show any results for them that were useful. Now Google is. For example, a search for , returns pages on the topic of usage of comma in your writing. […]
Since at least 2005, Google has been using a large, worldwide focus group to help review its search results and the quality of the web pages that rank well in its algorithm. The people in this program are called Quality Raters and, as you can imagine, the work they do is important to search marketers […]
Six months ago, Google delisted all sites on a co.cc domain name. Today, they seem to have all returned. A search for [site:co.cc] currently returns 105,000,000 results. Google originally delisted the co.cc subdomains because Google saw a “very large fraction of sites” on that subdomain to be “spammy or low-quality” and felt it was warranted, […]
I’ve seen some weird Google results in my time, but this one is pretty strange. Search for “define an english person” or some related queries, and Google brings up the Wikipedia page about the C-word in response. As spotted by Search Engine Roundtable, people were asking in Google’s help forums why various searches related to […]
Holiday deal sites that Bing banned from its search listings just before the busy shopping days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday have now been allowed to return. They include a site run by the group that created the entire Cyber Monday concept. Banned: Not Your Usual Suspects We reported previously how the sites had […]
Ask The Search Engines Presentations from SMX East – NYC, NY, September 2011 In this session, you can ask questions and get direct answers from engineers from Google, Bing and Blekko about crawling, indexing, ranking and other organic search issues. [flv:https://searchengineland.com/video_assets/east11/ppt/570.flv 364 264] Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land Speakers: Duane Forrester, BingTiffany Oberoi, GoogleRich […]