SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 18, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Topic: Sitemaps
Google Offers SEO Starter Guide
Google is getting into the SEO consulting business. Well, not quite. But, Google is now formally offering an “SEO Starter Guide” with practical advice for webmasters about improving search engine visibility and increasing traffic to a web site. It comes in the form of a 22-page PDF announced today on the Webmaster Central blog and […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 14, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google Answers On Image Search, Sitelinks, Reinclusions, Redirects & Communication
The Google Webmaster Central blog documented five new Google Group posts, based on the Popular Picks thread, asking webmasters for questions they want answered. So Google answered five of the most popular questions. The answers are on image search ranking, Sitelinks, reconsideration requests, redirects and communication. I am not going to go through each with […]
Live Search Webmaster Center Gains Crawl Error And Backlinks Reports
Today, the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center is launching its first major update since its initial debut last fall. The Live Search Webmaster Center is Microsoft’s hub for their communication with site owners, and the tools portion of that center now has new crawl issues reports, backlinks data, and download functionality. The Webmaster Center was […]
The Inmates Are Running The Search Engine Asylum
For search engine marketers and clients to communicate effectively, they must utilize a shared, common vocabulary. Some search engine marketing terms and concepts are easy to explain, such as query terms, commonly referred to as keywords or keyword phrases. And some concepts require a little more clarification. For example, it might take me weeks or […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 16, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google Offers Duplicate Content Tips Roundup
Struggling with duplicate content woes? Google’s done a blog post today to try and provide further advice and guidance. Among the highlights:
10 Fundamental Tips To Improve Your SEO
In my colleague Matt Lester’s recent Search Engine Land column, he discussed ten tips for a more effective paid search campaign. For this article, I’ll follow up Matt’s advice with ten tips to help you develop a more effective search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. But before we dive into the tips, let’s briefly look at […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 23, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google News: Fact & Fiction Edition
The Google News blog has an excellent post on the truths and myths of how Google News works. Here is the short version:
SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 28, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Sitemaps.org Update: You Can Now Store Your XML Sitemap Files Anywhere!
The major search engines have announced an update to the sitemaps.org protocol which enables site owners to store their XML Sitemap files in any location — even on a different domain than the one referenced in the Sitemap. This will be a welcome change for those who manage multiple domains and would like to keep […]
Google Takes Top Prize At SMX Search Bowl
Last night was the first ever SMX Search Bowl. Basically, the Search Engine Land team created fifty questions that were asked to the various teams. The teams consisted of two players from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Live Search, and the SEM All Star team. Danny displayed the questions on the screen and the first team to […]
Is The Time Ripe For Search Marketing Standards?
Over the past ten to twelve years, various SEM practitioners have brought up the need for industry standards. I started asking the question in 1998, and others have brought it up since, but the industry seems to have a laissez faire attitude. Albeit, we’ve seen some standardization steps taken by the search engines themselves. Google, […]
The Google Webmaster Tools Quick Start Guide
Google has created the Google Webmaster Tools Quick Start Guide to help webmasters learn the features and reasons to use the tool. The ten step guide displays details on the dashboard, the overview section, the diagnostics section, the top search queries screen, crawl stats page, the “What the Googlebot Sees” page, the links page, the […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 16, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google Writes Google Sitemaps FAQs
The Google Webmaster Central Blog has posted a Sitemaps FAQs blog post. In this blog post, Google responds to some of the most asked questions on the Sitemaps protocol and how Google supports it. Some of the questions include:
Nathan Stoll, Long Time Google News Product Manager, Leaves Google
Nathan Stoll, a long time Googler and the Product Manager of the Google News service, announced at his personal blog that he has left Google. His announcement came about three weeks ago, but he is now officially not a Google employee. Nathan said: I’ve decided that it is time for me to move on from […]
Google Webmaster Tools Adds Video Sitemaps
The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced Google has added a Sitemaps protocol for videos. If you have videos and want to give Google more metadata on those videos to make them more searchable via Google Video Search, you now can.
Google’s Webmaster Tools Adds More Diagnostic Features & Video Sitemaps
Today, Google’s Webmaster Tools have been updated with new diagnostic features that alert site owners to problems Google may have extracting content from pages. In addition, they’ve added Video Sitemaps. They’ve also added Hungarian and Czech to the 20 languages already supported. Below more about these features and how best to use them.
ACAP Launches, Robots.txt 2.0 For Blocking Search Engines?
After a year of discussions, ACAP — Automated Content Access Protocol — was released today as a sort of robots.txt 2.0 system for telling search engines what they can or can’t include in their listings. However, none of the major search engines support ACAP, and its future remains firmly one of "watch and see." Below, […]
Google: As Open As It Wants To Be (i.e., When It’s Convenient)
In two weeks, we’ve had two “open” initiatives from Google: OpenSocial, to free social networking data from behind the Facebook walled garden and the Open Handset Alliance, to free cell phones from a myriad of complicated mobile OS platforms and carriers who want to restrict features. I’ve seen some people writing about open as the new black, with Google showing its […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 30, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Consolidating Sitemap Files With Google
Mickey Kataria has posted on the Google Webmaster Central blog that if you can verify ownership of multiple sites, you can consolidate the Sitemap files for those sites and either combine the URLs from those sites into one Sitemap or create separate files for each site, but store the files in one location. Previously, any […]
Google Seattle Celebrates A Birthday And Opens A New Office
Steve Yegge, an engineer at the Google Kirkland office, recently posted to the Google blog about the Kirkland office’s third birthday. He also announced the opening of an engineering office in Fremont. Both locations are in the Seattle area — Fremont is just north of downtown and Kirkland is across the floating bridge on the […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 14, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Updated Gphone Timeline & Let A Hundred Google Phones Bloom
The Google Phone rumors continue, whipping up a frenzy that some type of announcement about the Gphone is coming within days. It’ll be a phone! It’ll be an operating system! It’ll be bundled software! And everyone is showing various photos that no one has ever confirmed are pictures of an actual Gphone. Below, an updated […]
Google Enhances Webmaster Central’s Robots.txt Analysis Tool
The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced improvements they have made to the robots.txt analysis tool. The tool now recognizes all sitemap declarations and relative URLs. So now the tool will report the validity of all sitemaps URLs plus show data for relative URLs. In addition, Google has expanded the reporting to include data for not […]
The Right Way To Think About Site Maps
If you asked one hundred search engine optimization professionals to explain a site map and show you what an effective one looks like, chances are you will get 100 different answers. To many SEO professionals, a site map is an XML site map that one submits to Google containing URLs to every web page on […]
Live Search Now Supporting Sitemaps Autodiscovery Via Robots.txt File
This morning I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Microsoft Live Search is finally now supporting sitemaps via autodiscovery. Microsoft will only use your sitemaps file if it is listed in your robots.txt file. You cannot currently ping Microsoft or upload your sitemaps file to Microsoft.
Ask.com Adds Sitemaps Autodiscovery Support
It appears that Ask.com is now implementing support for the Sitemaps protocol that they got behind back in April. One of our readers commented here notifying us that Ask.com added a pinging service for autodiscovery. Checking further, I found the details on how to ping Ask.com is its Webmaster Help documents. In addition, try this […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 17, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google AdSense Launches Site Authentication Feature
The Inside AdSense blog announced that they have launched a new feature named “Site Authentication.” The Site Authentication feature enables you to give the AdSense crawler access to your password protected pages. All you need to do is provide AdSense with a username and password. Then the AdSense crawler will gain access to those protected […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 16, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google Sitemaps Offers New Warnings Within Webmaster Central
The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced more detailed warning are now being displayed to those using Google Sitemaps, when minor problem are spotted. Previously, Google showed any problem, be it large or small, as an error. Now small issues that are “confusing or inaccurate” are considered “warnings” and large issues that make sitemaps unreadable are […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 4, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Google Helps States Surface Government Information
Google has announced an initiative with state agencies in Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia to help expose government information to web search engines. Often, government information is stored in database systems that are difficult if not impossible for search engine crawlers to access and index. Google is working with technologists from the state agencies to […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 18, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery
Last November, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo united to support sitemaps, a standardized method of submitting web pages through feeds to the search engines. Today, the three are now joined by Ask.com in supporting the system and an extension of it called autodiscovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file […]