Bing announced, on its Bing Webmaster Blog, a new feature that helps webmasters create two types of XML Sitemaps. Bing created a server-side application that works on both IIS and Apache servers that helps you create a comprehensive Sitemap and, also, a recently updated Sitemap. The binaries can be downloaded at the Microsoft download site. […]
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 […]
Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google, posted a video on the Google Webmaster Blog about how to learn the “essential” SEO techniques for your web site. It is targeted specifically at sites with under 50 pages or so, that want to rank for their company name and related keywords, and want to be […]
Earlier this week, I wrote about my disappointment that granular data (the number of URLs reported, the specifics of the errors…) was removed from Google webmaster tools. However, as I’ve been talking with Google, I’ve discovered that much of this detail is still available via the GData API. That this detail was available through the […]
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 […]
Today, Google announced that they will no longer be crawling news sites with Googlebot-News and instead will crawl news sites with Googlebot, the same bot that crawls sites for web search. However, you can still block your content from being indexed in Google News by disallowing Googlebot-News in robots.txt or using a meta robots tag. […]
Today, Google launched a new way for site owners to request that specific web pages be crawled. How is this different from the other ways available to let Google know about your pages and when should you use this feature vs. the others? Read on for more. This new method for submitting URLs to Google […]
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 […]
Earlier this week, site owners noticed that substantial Yahoo Site Explorer link data seemed to be missing. A glitch? Gone for good? The first signs of integration into Bing webmaster tools? I talked to Yahoo and got at least some initial answers. Many site owners regularly use Site Explorer for information on external links to […]
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 […]
This is the year in which we will see video grow from a “frill” some businesses occasionally include on their websites, to an essential, competitive differentiator that drives SEO and increases brand identification. Knowledgeable companies have already embraced this shift and made video a central part of their online offerings. The most advanced have found […]
Today, Microsoft launched a revamp of their Bing Webmaster Tools. I talked to them back in June, when they previewed the tools at SMX Advanced, and they told me that they were starting from scratch and rebuilding the tool from the ground up. So how are things different? They say they are focused on three key […]
Google, founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is the most popular search engine in the world, with a commanding market share of over 80% globally and just under 80% in the U.S. While we don’t have any figures direct from the company, it’s estimated that billions of searches – or trillions per […]
Since Google launched XML Sitemaps back in 2005, they’ve added specialized formats to enable site owners to submit content other than web pages. Until now, site owners have had to create separate Sitemaps for each content type: Mobile News Video Geo Images Code Search That’s now changed. You can now create a single XML Sitemap […]
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 Looks To Improve Maps With 300 New Staffers Problems in Google Maps are well known by now. From spam to bugs to its lack of support for local businesses, we’ve […]
Are you negatively impacting your global search efforts? There are many issues ranging from lack of resources, server restrictions and egos that are hurting a company’s search exposure in local markets. This article will breakdown some of these issues and how you can eliminate them.
The Google Webmaster Central team posted a known issue report with a bug in the reporting engine within Google Webmaster Tools. The indexed URLs report is currently showing 0 pages indexed for most sites who have submitted sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools. The notice reads: The indexed URL counts for Sitemaps that you have submitted […]
More egregious mistakes that website owners, web designers/developers, landing page experts, and others make to prevent qualified search engine traffic and conversions.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 3 Ways To Use Google’s Search Results For Keyword Research Years ago, on a planet far far away, people used to optimize for keyword density. But as relevancy algorithms have improved […]
The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that you can use a Sitemaps extension to provide image data to Google. In the Sitemaps file you can specify the following properties of the images; image, location, caption, geographic location, title and license details. More technical specifications can be seen over here and here is a sample Google […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: “Inkbait”: A Case Study In Linkability In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), the tactic known as “linkbait” is one of the few link building tactics the search engines embrace, […]
Back in November 2009, Google News announced they were “in the midst of an exciting transition period” that included a change to the News Sitemap Protocol. News publishers have through April 2010 to modify their News Sitemap to accommodate the new format. What’s so exciting and transitional? I asked Google, thinking that they were changing […]
Your resolution list might look different than this one, but that’s not the point. The point here is that you actually have an SEO resolution list. Either get cracking on those projects that stalled in 2009 and find your success by managing the work smartly, or use some of these ideas to jumpstart your 2010 […]
As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and your website is no exception. To ensure that your site creates a positive impression, you need to keep it well maintained. Considering that a website is one of the most important marketing tools, marketers should be mindful that […]
Ten years ago today, I had the privilege of organizing the first ever search marketing conference. On this anniversary, a look back at how things were then and have they’ve changed in a decade. In 1999, search marketing itself was about five years old. People had been doing search engine optimization to generate traffic from […]
For years, Google’s discovery of web pages was solely based on links. If a page had no links to it, Googlebot had no way of knowing about it and therefore, would never index it. Along the way, Google provided an option for submitting individual pages, but that wasn’t really a viable option for site owners […]
In the same month that Rupert Murdoch has said he’ll charge for all his news sites because “quality journalism is not cheap,” I find it ironic to read the rubbish about search engine optimization that Murdoch-owned Fox News “reported” this week. SEO equals scamming, we’re told. If I have to pay for this type of […]
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 Adds Keyword Forecasting To Insights For Search Tool Google has announced a few new features in its Google Insights for Search keyword research tool. The most important, in my opinion, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 26 People Who Mislead You On Twitter Earlier this month, I covered various ways people are spamming Twitter in my Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem article. Since then, I’ve been diligently […]
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 Images Quietly Adds Creative Commons Filter A couple weeks after Yahoo Images added the creative commons search filter, Google quietly added their own to Google Image Search. The option is […]
In addition to the new Change of Address feature, Google has also announced that the new Webmaster Tools interface is now live for all users. Content has been re-organized inside Webmaster Tools and the interface has been changed dramatically. The dashboard, for example, now shows Top search queries, Links to your site, Crawl errors, and […]
Google announced a new feature in Google Webmaster Tools named change of address. This feature allows webmasters to notify Google when they move domain names. When used, Google will update the index to reflect your new URL. The change will stay in effect for 180 days, by which time Google would have crawled and indexed […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
The Google Webmaster Central blog notified us that Googlers have presented a new study on Sitemaps at the WWW’09 conference in Madrid. The study is absolutely interesting and I recommend printing out the ten page PDF document and reading it. For those of you who don’t have time for that, I hope to highlight the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
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 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
The Google Webmaster Central blog announced that they have just released a new Sitemap generator that works on both Linux/Apache and Microsoft IIS Windows-based servers. The Sitemap generator is different and possibly smarter than other Sitemap tools because it uses web traffic, log files and other methods to find new or modified URLs. You can […]
An SEOMoz post has documented statistics on how submitting a Sitemap to Google and Yahoo impacts the rate of crawling that web site. The results show that submitting a Sitemap to Google and Yahoo decreased the time it took Google and Yahoo to crawl the page. It is important to note that the test was […]
Today, Google relaunched several of their help forums, moving them from Google Groups to a new help-specific platform. The English and Polish Google Webmaster Help group have made the move to this new format, with the other languages soon to follow. Below, more details about how this change will benefit site owners and a bit […]