Google To Begin To Index HTTPS Pages First, Before HTTP Pages When Possible
If your pages work on HTTPS, Google will likely show the HTTPS version over the HTTP version, starting today.
Topic: Web indexing
SearchCap: Google Ranks App Only Content, Bing App Refresh & Yandex Chews JavaScript
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 Expands App Indexing To Find & Stream App-Only ContentNov 18, 2015 by Barry Schwartz Google is now experimenting with nine Android apps to surface their app only content in the […]
Google Working On Fixing Problem With Wix Websites Not Showing Up In Search Results
Recently, Wix Web pages have been dropping out of the Google index. Google said they are working on resolving the issue.
Google News Editors’ Picks To Get App Links
The Google News Publisher Center added a way for publishers to add links to their apps. This will be used to show apps in the Editors' Pick section in Google News.
Google Image Search Test Now Shows Images Within PDFs
Google is digging deeper to find more images across the Web, now experimenting with new discovery methods, including looking within PDF documents.
SearchCap: Google Sitemaps Bug, Baidu Digital Ads & Search Volumes
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 Importance Of Monthly Versus Rolling Average Search Volume Columnist Jim Yu explores two different ways of looking at keyword data, arguing that a holistic look at search volume over time […]
Technically, You Can Have Completely Different Content On Mobile Says Google
Gary Illyes from Google confirms Google really only looks at the desktop content for mobile ranking purposes.
Majestic SEO Now Categorizing The Web For Marketers
Majestic SEO, a popular link research tool, announced a new feature where they are now categorizing their index, which is made up of over 700 billion web pages, into about 1,000 different categories. Majestic is then using the categorization to add a new metric, they are calling “Topical Trust Flow.” This new score is their […]
Google’s Matt Cutts: How To Avoid Buying A Domain Name Previously Ruined By Spammers
In his latest video, Google head of web spam (and, today, Boston Marathon runner) Matt Cutts offers a few quick tips to avoid purchasing a domain name that may have been previously destroyed by a spammer. The video is in response to the following question from a site owner who purchased a bad domain: How […]
Google Webmaster Tools Index Status Showing Data For HTTPS Protocol
Google has announced they’ve added “more precise” data for the Index Status reports in Google Webmaster Tools. Specifically, Google is now reporting each indexed URLs for each protocol, specifically both for HTTP and HTTPS, as well as for verified subdirectories. Google said this change “makes it easy for you to monitor different sections of your […]
Google Misattributing Content From Major News Publishers
A reader has sent us examples of Google misattributing content from dozens of large online news publications, with hundreds thousands of examples of Google indexing URLs and pages, but that content being pulled from a different source. For example, if you search for [hometownlocator site:post-gazette.com], the first result is local.post-gazette.com/boardman+florist.9.125954212p.home.html: If you look at the […]
Google Bug Turned Entire Web Into “Lorem Ipsum”
Lorem Ipsum is boilerplate text commonly used by the design community to illustrate how the text on a website or print design will look within the visual graphical creatives. It turned out that the boilerplate text of Lorem Ipsum was used on every webpage, according to Google. On Friday, Gabriela Vatu picked up on the […]
Google’s Matt Cutts: More Pages Does Not Equal Higher Rankings
In a new video released today by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, we learn that the more pages a web site has, does not necessarily mean you will have better rankings. Matt Cutts said, “I wouldn’t assume that just because you have a large number of indexed pages that you automatically get a […]
Google Authorship Beyond Webpages
In last month’s post about authorship, I shared that Google has been experimenting with inferring authorship for PDF documents in addition to webpages. This piqued my curiosity to see if any other indexable filetypes could also have inferred authorship. Microsoft Office Files PowerPoint files appear to infer authorship similar to PDFs and webpages, looking for […]
Google Explains Why Your New Page’s Number One Ranking May Drop
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts posted a video explaining why it is not uncommon to see a new page rank very well in Google early on, and then, that ranking declines over time. Matt explains that sometimes, Google has a hard time figuring out the original source of a new piece of content. […]
Searching for The Super Bowl Start Time: 2013 Edition
Surely every organization managing an event site knows at this point that people want to know what time things start. And that those potential viewers are likely to turn to Google to find out. This year, Google just provides the answer right at the top of the page: February 3rd at 3:30 pacific. Just as […]
Google’s August & September Updates: Panda, Knowledge Graph, Page Quality & SafeSearch
Google has announced details on the search algorithm and quality changes made over the past two months – August and September. In total, Google lists 65 changes over the past two months. The previous announcement covered two months as well, and was for June and July. This time the key changes include Panda updates, improved […]
A Proposal For Social Network Détente
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 […]
Seven Mobile SEO Myths Exposed
Not too long ago, the article Mobile SEO is a Myth got a lot of people fired up about the foolish notion that mobile SEO is a construct developed by salesmen to sell more SEO services. I responded in the comments to the author’s points, and have addressed this point in multiple articles over the years, so […]
Google Search Algorithm Change For Freshness To Impact 35% Of Searches; Twitter Firehose Remains Off
Google announced they are rolling out a new search algorithm change that helps make the search results “fresher.” The big news here is that besides for the results being fresher, the results will change for about 35% of all searches. Caffeine Was Infrastructure, This Is Algorithmic Fresher results can make for more relevant results, which […]
Google Provides New Options for Paginated Content
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 […]
Google Can Index “Almost Any Text” In A Flash (SWF) File
The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted an update on their Flash indexing capabilities. Google said, as of today, they are able to index and understand “almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site.” Typically, Flash has been one of those big No-Nos in the SEO space. […]
Blekko’s SEO Tools: What Information Do They Provide?
The new search engine Blekko just launched, and it’s making SEO-related data that it has found during its crawling and indexing of the web available for all sites. Just what does it include and how useful is it? Accessing SEO Data You can access SEO data for any domain or URL by clicking the SEO […]
Is Google Broken? Sites Big & Small Seeing Indexing Problems
No one seems to be immune from a Google indexing problem that has many site owners baffled. Blogs and websites, big and small, aren’t being indexed as quickly as they normally are — if they’re being indexed at all. CNN.com, with its PageRank score of 10, is typically crawled frequently and deeply by Googlebot. But […]
Google Search Now Indexes & Crawls SVG Files
The Google Webmaster Help blog announced they are now indexing SVG files and documents. SVG is a royalty-free graphics format typically used on the web for fancy font usage. Google said: We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML. The web is big, so it may take […]
Google Shows Webmasters More Links In Webmaster Tools
If you look at your link report in Google Webmaster Tools you may notice that Google is telling you have more links than you had the last time you looked. In fact, some are reporting they are seeing millions of additional links. At first, I thought that this may be some reporting bug. But today, […]
Google XML Sitemaps Now Supports Multiple Types: Is the Sitemaps Alliance Over?
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 […]
Live Blog: Google’s Dylan Casey On How Real Time Is Changing Search
Next up at TWTRCON, where I’m at today, an honest-to-goodness search panel! Moderator David Berkowitz of 360i will be interviewing Dylan Casey, Search Product Manager at Google, about real-time search.
SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 9, 2010
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Colbert Goes From 0-To-40 “Bing” Mentions In 2 Minutes, For Charity Bing bought a pretty funny product placement on the Colbert Report this week. Comedian Stephen Colbert was promised $2,500 for […]
Google’s New Indexing Infrastructure ‘Caffeine’ Now Live
What you need to know about Google's indexing system.
Live Blog: Matt Cutts ‘You & A’ At SMX Advanced
Welcome to our live blogging coverage from SMX Advanced in Seattle. Google’s Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team, is doing his traditional keynote that ends the first day of the conference. He’ll be sitting down with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan for a “You & A” conversation that’s due to start at 5:00 […]
Sorry, Yahoo, You DO Index The Meta Keywords Tag
Oh, that this weren’t true. Last week, Yahoo made news by disclosing that it had quietly dropped support for the meta keywords tag. As a long time hater of that tag and the insane questions it has produced, I was thrilled! But today, I see conclusively that Yahoo still supports the tag. The test was […]
All Of Your Technical SEO Questions Answered And Bonus Free Developer Summit: Technical SMX East Dream Agenda
Search engine optimization involves a lot of moving parts. Audience analysis, content optimization, rankings factors — it can be hard to pinpoint concrete, actionable data. But technical SEO is a little different. It’s certainly not any easier than the other components, but at least the data can be a bit more straightforward. You can check […]
Hidden Google Feature: Find What’s New In The Last Minute Or Second
Google provides options for anyone to easily narrow searches to find material added in the week or day. But now — if you know the right commands to enter — you can find content added to Google in the last few minutes or even seconds. The Omgili Blog discovered this hidden feature. Here’s an example […]
Yahoo Search Update : September 2009
The Yahoo Search blog just announced a “weather report” confirming earlier reports of a Yahoo update taking place. Yahoo said they are “rolling out a web index update over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.” So be on the look out for […]
Google Now Indexing Flash From External Files
The Google Webmaster Central blog finally blogged Google is now indexing the content of files that some SWF files load externally, technically from “external resource loading”. Flash often loads external files to generate what you see in the SWF, so if the SWF is calling an external HTML, XML, another SWF, etc files, Google will […]
Learning SEO From Building A Web Crawler
There is no doubt that you can learn a tremendous amount of information on search engine optimization (SEO) by reading sites like this or ones in our blogroll, but there is always a lot to be learned from getting your hands dirty. Now, you can get your hands dirty by experimenting and trying SEO techniques […]
Google Fixes Link Operator In Blog Search
A couple weeks ago, we reported that Google fixed the blogroll indexing algorithm in Google Blog Search, but has not yet fixed the link operator, which returned links found in blogrolls. Google has recently updated the link operator for Blog Search to not count links in the blogroll for the link operator command in blog […]
Google Blog Search: Now With Full-Text Post Indexing
It’s been about two months since Google Blog Search was relaunched with a new front page that summarizes stories. I talked with Google more about some of the inner workings at the end of October and finally am getting around to posting this, spurred by one of the planned changes becoming official. Google Blog Search […]
Google’s Site Search Gets Faster; Yahoo’s Goes Away
Google has upgraded its Site Search tool to give users more control over the frequency that Google spiders a site. But, if you think this is something that will help your site’s performance on Google.com search results, it won’t. Site Search is Google’s on-site tool for individual websites; you use it to add a search […]