Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: With $14 Million More Q&A Site ChaCha Soldiers On Q&A is a great idea that really hasn’t worked. Although Yahoo Answers and a few others are still around — and Ask […]
Just over three months ago, Google launched the news keyword meta tag designed to let news publishers have a better chance of ranking for words they might not have included in their headlines. Adoption rate so far? Only about 5% of the sources within Google News use the tag, according to new data provided by […]
Over the last decade, search engine marketing has become a multi-billion dollar media channel powerhouse. It currently represents half of the $35B digital marketing budgets in the U.S., and it’s even bigger globally. The marriage between search practitioners and the engines has always been, at best, a work in progress. On one hand, search engines […]
Twitter has quietly launched a user profile directory that it hopes will bring it more search engine traffic. It’s Twitter’s second SEO play in recent weeks, coming on the heels of a change in its robots.txt file. With that change, Twitter made its content-based search results — i.e., search results for tweets and hashtags, but […]
BloomReach announced a new software product named Dynamic Duplication Reduction (DDR), that aims to eliminate duplicate content issues on web sites. Typically, software tools are known to cause duplicate content issues but this tool promises to reverse it. The tool deeply crawls your web pages and continuously interprets all content on a site. It will […]
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 […]
The Google Webmaster Central blog announced that the Site Errors report now is a lot more detailed and useful for webmasters. Now, the errors are broken down by each category into more specific errors. For example, if your site is not accessible to GoogleBot, Google will try to say it is because of a DNS […]
When you block GoogleBot, Google’s web crawler, the page that is blocked can still show up in the Google search results because of links pointing to the page. When that happens, the search listing looks awkward, because Google isn’t able to crawl the page and make a title and description. Instead, Google will make a […]
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 […]
Blekko announced they have made improvements to their crawler and indexer to provide more up to date and fresher results to SEOs looking for SEO related data. Blekko, the Slashtag Search Engine, offers a nice set of free SEO tools. In fact, they pride themselves as being different by offering all these SEO tools for […]
Breaking The Speed Limit: Faster Sites Win! Presentations from SMX Advanced, June 2012 Faster sites win in more ways than just rankings. Search engines can crawl (and index) more pages as server-side speed increases and user engagement (including most importantly, conversion!) increases as client-side speed (and perceived loading time) increases. Learn about hidden tricks you […]
Today at SMX Advanced, Bing has launched a revamped version of their webmaster tools product, with a new user interface and improved features. Much of the changes are just sprucing up existing data (showing better summaries/dashboards and the like), but of particular interest to some is the new Link Explorer, which is a partial replacement […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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. […]
As you know, there are many sites going black to protest SOPA and PIPA. Google has already offered blackout SEO advice but they decided to take it one step further by slowing down their spiders today. Pierre Far from Google posted on his Google+ that Google is slowing down GoogleBot’s crawl activity to reduce the […]
Google has announced that its mobile crawler now has a user-agent that’s specific to smartphones. The company has already had a user-agent that targets feature phones. The new Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +https://www.google.com/bot.html) […]
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 […]
Duane Forrester announced on the Bing Search blog a major upgrade to Bing Webmaster Tools. He said this is their biggest update since the Honey Badger update from June. The key updates and changes include: Expanded Crawl Details: This includes showing inbound links for any URL including 300, 400 & 500 codes. Plus URLs listed […]
Ahhh, the strangeness that is links. This week’s column will hopefully spark some questions, answer a few others, and also point out some weird linking related phenomena, beginning with two examples: If this search is correct, Google indexes a little over (Use Dr. Evil voice) 1 billion pages from the Yahoo.com family of domains. But, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In 2009, Google proposed a standard for crawlable AJAX. A few months later, that standard went live and while I thought it was great Google was providing options to content owners to ensure their sites were indexed well, I noted at the time that “this method doesn’t work for search engines other than Google. So […]
This morning at our SMX Advanced conference, Bing’s Stefan Weitz announced “Honey Badger” — Bing’s latest upgrade to its Webmaster Tools. Weitz explained that today’s upgrade primarily involves three things: Crawl setting management: users can ask Bing to crawl a website less during busy times of day and more during off-peak hours Role management: set […]
Your Toughest Technical SEO Questions Answered Presentations from SMX West, March 2011 No powerpoint here! This session is all about Q&A to solve the specific technical issues you’re having. Bring your toughest questions! Topics will likely include URL canonicalization (pagination, faceted navigation, breadcrumbs, parameters, analytics tracking, IIS URL issues, redirects, localized URLs…), aggregation and duplication […]
An amazing amount of great information came out of SMX West this week. Below is a summary of some of what I found to be the most actionable and useful. Google’s Own Words About the Farmer/Panda Update Google’s Matt Cutts said that while the change isn’t 100% perfect, searcher feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. He […]
In an interview with Wired magazine’s Steven Levy (who’s keynoting at our SMX West conference next week), Googlers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts speak more about the recent Farmer algorithm update. One of the interesting things they say is that last year’s launch of the “Caffeine” indexing infrastructure played a role in upping the visibility […]
Last year, Google published an SEO Report Card of 100 Google properties. In it, they rated themselves on how well the sites were optimized for search. Google’s Matt Cutts presented the results at SMX West 2010 in Ignite format. He noted that not every Googler is an expert in search and search engine optimization. Googlers […]
Here at Search Engine Land we regularly hear from people who have created “radical,” innovative,” “next generation” search technology, promising to “fix” the “broken” search we all allegedly pitifully struggle with today. In virtually every instance that I can remember, these promises over-hype and under-deliver, rarely offering something that becomes part of my regular search […]
Matt Cutts, a Google engineer working on search quality, wrote at the Google Blog that Google has recently released a new spam detection classifier to help prevent “spammy on-page content” from ranking highly in the Google search index. None of this comes as a surprise, Matt told us Google would be stepping up their search […]
Bing Webmaster Tools has relaunched inbound link reports for verified site owners (as announced at SMX East back in October). I dove in to check out what the new reports include. Google has recently revamped their inbound link reports, so I made note of those changes well. Read on for more details. Want a quick summary? […]
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: Now Likely Using Online Merchant Reviews As Ranking Signal Earlier this week, the New York Times spotlighted how a merchant with bad reviews nonetheless was ranked well in Google. Today, […]
Less than a month ago, we reported that Ask.com was giving up on search technology (see: Ask.com To Focus On Q&A Search, End Web Crawling, opting to return to its roots as a Question & Answer site. Now, Ask.com’s sending off the year (and their search offering) for good (maybe) by releasing the first ever […]