While Google’s new smartphone bot has been announced, it does not appear to be widely deployed yet; at least that is what I said during a recent presentation in Sydney, where I had the pleasure of meeting Alistair Lattimore (Al). Al does CRO, SEO and agency management for Mantra Group, which is the second largest […]
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, […]
There’s speculation going around that Google is using data from the comment spam filter Akismet to penalize web sites. Those rumors are untrue, Google says. “We don’t use Akismet to flag spam,” a Google spokesperson told us, after talking with Google’s spam team. One oddity in the speculation was this: She stated that Google had left a […]
I have to say, given that this is a competitive industry, and that while we’re sharing best practices on optimization we’re also competing with each other in search results, it doesn’t make me feel that bad to see the rest of the industry seems to embrace a one URL strategy, in spite of my argument […]
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 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Fires Two Marketing Execs Over Vendor Issues Microsoft has seemingly spared no expense on pushing its Bing search engine at star-studded entertainment events, such as the recent Sundance film festival. […]
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’s latest blog post provides details and a video from Maile Ohye about how they handle the pagination attributes within a page’s source code. You can use these attributes to indicate pages in a series (such as a multi-page article or set of product listings), which enables Google to cluster the pages into a single entity […]
Google has just revamped the crawl errors data available in webmaster tools. Crawl errors are issues Googlebot encountered while crawling your site, so useful stuff! I originally started this article by writing that in most cases, these changes are for the better and in only a few (really maddening) cases, useful functionality has been removed. […]
US Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum made a surprise leap ahead to practically tie Mitt Romney in yesterday’s Iowa caucus results. Now people are searching to find out more about him and discovering THAT result which makes comedy show hosts like Jon Stewart giggle. But rather than blame Google (or Bing), as Santorum has in the […]
If the answer to this question is stunned silence, your website could lose long-term search engine visibility. Archiving has always been an important part of the SEO process.
For many search marketers, SEO Book is a legend. Founded by (another legend) Aaron Wall in 2003, SEO Book now includes Aaron’s wife Giovanna Villanueva, Peter Da Vanzo, and Eric Covino. Membership works out to around $10 a day ($300 a month) and includes over 100 custom training modules, a private forum, exclusive members-only tools, and […]
Somewhere between the “precision of search and the serendipity of social media” lies Trapit. Trapit is a “personal discovery engine” based on the same underlying technology that forms the core of Apple’s Siri virtual assistant. From the outside, however, it looks something like a cross between StumbleUpon and Flipboard or Zite. Co-founders Gary Griffiths and Hank […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Facebook’s Zuckerberg To Charlie Rose: “We Just Do One Thing” Asked to reflect on the cultural differences between Google and Facebook, current Facebook COO and former Googler Sheryl Sandberg told Charlie […]
Google’s introduction yesterday of Google+ Pages for businesses will likely have a dramatic impact on +1s in AdWords. When businesses create a Page on Google+, they can link the page to their web site URLs and also to their AdWords account. When that’s done, +1s for any of the linked URLs — on web sites […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Will Google See $6.25 Billion In Mobile Ad Revenue Next Year? During the earnings call last week after Google announced massive quarterly revenues ($9.72 billion), CEO Larry Page casually dropped the […]
Bitly currently is the leader in shortned URLs, minimizing 80 million URLs each day. Not only is Bitly shrinking URLs, but they are now “crawling & classifying” each shortened URL thanks to a a new social search platform. An index has since been created that will allow searchers to view the most distributed, viral and highest clicked links […]
Far too much has been written about Quality Score already and I’m loathe to add to the pile, but I have some ideas that might help us all. The exact recipes for Quality Score on Google and Bing are unknown, and it is that uncertainty that creates so much room for mischief and blather. Uncertainty […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Twitter Announces Analytics For Tweets, Traffic & Buttons This week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Twitter announced Web Analytics to webmasters (and Tweeters) see how their content is being shared and how their […]
At SMX Advanced earlier this year, a hot topic was the use of the rel=”canonical” attribute in conjunction with pagination. Maile Ohye of Google noted that the rel=”canonical” attribute was not intended to cluster multiple pages (articles, product lists, etc.) to page one of that series (although it can be used to cluster multiple pages […]
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. […]
A study by PageLever, an analytics tool for Facebook, showed that search engines are major traffic drivers for Facebook pages, making up 34% of all external referrals. Google was the leading search engine sending 27.57% of all external traffic to pages. This study analyzed 1000 pages, with a minimum of 10,000 fans each. Surprisingly, Yahoo! is sending […]
It’s one of the longest-running SEO questions around, and still something many of us get asked by clients, readers, conference attendees and so forth: Should we use dashes or underscores in our URLs? Google re-opened the discussion recently with a new YouTube video that highlights how Google currently handles dashes and underscores, and also reminds […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The Power Of Facebook-Only Content And Contests Not only is it important to make sure your tabs are interactive, but you need to give users reasons to keep going back for […]
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 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Tech Celebs Most Followed On Google+ While “Real World” Rules On Twitter & Facebook How do you measure the success of a social media site? One of several ways might be […]
In 2009, Google launched the parameter handling feature of Google webmaster tools, which enabled site owners to specify the parameters on their site that were optional vs. required. A year later, they improved this feature by providing an option for a default value. Google says that they’ve seen a positive impact from the usage of those […]
After years of minimal change to the format of AdWords ads (some ad extensions are the only radical change), all paid search ads now have the +1 button right after the headline on their right side. How will this new social aspect impact paid search marketing? And what can in-house search marketers do now to […]
This morning, James Breckenridge discovered a loophole within Google’s Webmaster Tools that allowed anyone to remove any site from Google. Both James and I sent this information to Google as soon as we heard of it. After several hours, Google has told us, “we’re still investigating this report, and to be cautious we disabled all […]
In the last few days, several noticed that the Google Toolbar PageRank value for www.twitter.com had plummeted to 0 (it’s now back to its previous 9). Was Google punishing Twitter for how things went down with the feed expiration that temporarily derailed Google’s Realtime search efforts? Nah, Twitter’s website has just been suffering from technical […]
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, Twitter Flaunt Social Stats … It’s Like 2003 All Over Again Whether on purpose or not, Google and Twitter are having a little back-and-forth this week about the size 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+ Profiles Will Be Public: Google To Terminate All Private Profiles After July 31st There was speculation back in March that Google was going to launch a social network when it […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: How To Use Occupational Targeting In Facebook For B2B Leads & Sales For many B2B marketers, mainstream social channels a la Facebook (FB) and LinkedIn remain the proverbial Wild West 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: Bing’s “Honey Badger” – An Upgrade To Webmaster Tools This morning at our SMX Advanced conference, Bing’s Stefan Weitz announced “Honey Badger” — Bing’s latest upgrade to its Webmaster Tools. Weitz […]
Twitter announced a new feature allowing users to tweet easier and safer. The official t.co Twitter shortener will now automatically shorten URLs right from the Tweet box when using the web version of Twitter. The feature shortens links to 19 characters, and shows users a preview of the destination link. When a user’s link will […]
Dick Costolo will be interviewed today by Walt Mossberg at the D Conference. Having survived another drive across the nearby Portuguese Bend landslide here in Palos Verdes, I stand ready to live blog. Let’s do this thing. Walt: Asking about the Pew study today with new stats on Twitter usage (see Pew: Twitter Usage Grows […]
Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed this morning that Google has lifted J.C. Penney’s SEO penalty, that the Panda update will continue to rollout internationally and offered numerous SEO- and search-related tips in a live webchat on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. More than a thousand viewers tuned in but, for those who weren’t able to […]
Is your website’s URL structure based on the perceived logic of your boss’ teenage son? Or even worse, a software engineer? Search-engine friendly labeling systems are critical for long-term search engine visibility.
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 Chromebooks Out June 15, $349 For Consumers, $20-$28 Monthly For Educators/Business At long last, the Google Chrome OS operating system is going prime time against Windows and Mac computers. On […]
It’s only been 48 hours since Google expanded the Panda/Farmer update to all English language searches outside the US, and we’re already seeing reports about who the early winners and losers are. In some cases, the names are familiar if you followed the original reports when the algorithm change first hit in the US in […]