In the keynote session last night at Search Marketing Expo West, Google’s head of search, Amit Singhal tried to address the concern of publishers that their content is being scraped and used by Google’s Knowledge Graph, ending with the user not having to click on the search results to get the answer. Danny Sullivan, in […]
Perhaps it’s SEO’s “Oreo moment,” a tweet relating to search engine optimization that’s gained nearly as much attention as Oreo’s famous Super Bowl blackout tweet. But the subject was a perfect storm of goodness — a real-life example of Google doing the type of thing in search it seems to be telling others not to […]
One of the most frustrating experiences for any publisher is discovering that someone not only has copied your content but outranks you on Google for searches related to that content. Now, Google seems to have heard the complaints and has launched a tool to help. Called the Google Scraper Report, it was announced by the […]
Last week, I reported on the Search Engine Roundtable, a huge array of complaints from Google News publishers and searchers that some news outlets are showing old stories in Google News, but they are appearing as breaking new stories. The example I gave was a story from USA Today showing as being 14 minutes old […]
At SMX Advanced, I moderated a panel about technical SEO. Google’s Maile Ohye spoke about SEO best practices for technical implementation of mobile sites based on how Google crawls, indexed, and ranks mobile content and presents it to searchers on mobile devices. She also talked about Google’s recent announcement that the mobile user experience is […]
Yes, it is harder to find pages to iTunes apps in Google. But no, the company says, it’s not part of some nefarious plot. Rather, Google’s having technical problems gathering iTunes Preview pages, an issue it’s working to solve. Google has confirmed the issue, saying: We’ve been having some issues fetching pages from the iTunes […]
Bing has announced support for HTML5 pushState as a way to implement AJAX on a site in a way that enables Bing to crawl and index the URLs and content. As Google has supported this implementation since early 2012, site owners finally have an AJAX option that can be crawled and indexed by both major […]
Last week, search marketing software provider Raven decided to stop using scraped data after Google’s AdWords API team threatened to revoke the company’s token. Now, a second tools provider, Ahrefs, says it, too, will remove functionality that uses scraped data, to maintain access to the AdWords API. A third provider, SEOmoz, has said it has […]
While there has been lots of talk about a Google crackdown on developer access to the AdWords API, there have been few details about what the disputed issues may be — and why they’re coming up now, with tools-makers like Raven and SEOmoz that have had access to the API for years. Now, Raven Tools, […]
Dan Petrovic has explained how he hijacked a few pages in Google to show his copied version over the original version of the page. For example, he was able to confuse Google into thinking a page on MarketBizz should really show on dejanseo.com.au instead of on marketbizz.nl. How did he do it? He simply copied […]
The UK’s Conservative Party has a new co-chair, The Right Honourable Grant Shapps, Member of Parliament for Welwyn Hatfield. Honorable except with Google, which considers the business he apparently founded to be pushing a tool designed to spam its search engine and fill its listings with rubbish. According to The Guardian, Shapps founded HowToCorp in […]
Looking to do research based on data gathered from across the web? That’s one of the purposes of Common Crawl, and the group has just released new data, as well as a contest to encourage use of that data The 2012 data, which contains 3.8 billion web documents, shows stats such as 63% of top […]
Google announced they are now sending out Google Webmaster Tools alerts for crawl errors. Google grouped the errors in two buckets. (1) Site Error alerts for major site-wide problems (2) URL Error anomaly alerts for potentially less critical issues The Site-Wide Problems Alerts Can Include: Your DNS server is down or misconfigured. Your web server […]
Pagination & Canonicalization For The Pros Presentations from SMX Advanced, June 2012 Using the pagination tag with optional parameters, sort orders, and filters. Are there still reasons to use robots.txt or noindex? Can a canonical tag really replace a 301? How do you keep your IIS=based site from infinite redirect loops when you canonicalize default […]
Google’s latest batch of search quality updates is online, and offers some insight into a variety of search- and SEO-related topics. Though some of Google’s monthly updates have included more than 50 items, this one comes in at 39. But it looks like there’s still plenty to digest. Here’s a look at what stands out […]
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 […]
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. […]
Are you used to using Google as a way around the Wall Street Journal’s paywall? Think again. The WSJ has been holding back stories available through Google’s “First Click Free” program, a move that I suspect other newspapers might soon emulate. Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that I wasn’t able to read some […]
A week ago, we reported that Scroogle was being blocked by Google and searches on the privacy search engine were no longer working. Since then, the site continued not to work and now it is completely offline. The owner, Daniel Brandt, said he took it down “forever.” He blames both Google and DDOS attack by […]
If you try to conduct a search at Scroogle, the portal that lets you search Google in private, Scroogle will tell you that Google is blocking them. I just tested it and Scroogle returns an error message that reads, “so sorry… Google is temporarily blocking this Scroogle server.” This happened back in May 2010 as […]
Super Bowl 46 kicks off on February 5, 2012 at 6:30pm EST on NBC. Amazingly enough, I found this information by searching on Google and clicking on the second result: nfl.com. Amazing because every year, football fans flock to search engines searching for the start time, and until now, organizations like the NFL, the playing […]
Duplication, Aggregation, Syndication, Affiliates, Scraping, and Information Architecture Presentations from SMX East – NYC, NY, September 2011 We’ll sort through the bewildering world of near duplication due to issues such as manufacturer feeds into your site, syndication to other sites, international sites, and aggregation of data sources. How can a well-planned information architecture mimimize the […]
In what’s now to be a monthly update on search changes, a new Google “Inside Search” blog post today tells us that life is getting tougher for those with parked domains, life may get better for those plagued by scraper sites and those hoping to “push down” negative listings may have a tougher challenge. New […]
Today, Google webmaster tools has launched a new message alert to let site owners know when a particular URL doesn’t appear because Google sees it as duplicate of a URL on a different domain. In the blog post announcing the feature and in an in-depth help topic, they provide details on how they identify duplicate […]
OK, it’s round two. And I can tell you no, don’t expect much. How do you clear the press table when Google competitors are about to testify at a Senate hearing? Have Eric Schmidt do a post-game recap in the hearing room hallway. He’s done, I’m back, will catch up as best I can. NOTE: […]
Google is calling for help in identifying a long-running problem: scraper sites in its search results — and particularly scraper sites that are ranking higher than the original page. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s spam fighting group, put out the call for help on Twitter this morning: Scrapers getting you down? Tell us about […]
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 […]
Last Friday, Twitter quietly shutdown its “firehose” of tweet data that was being piped to Google. Like a gas station no longer getting deliveries, Google in turn effectively had to hang a “Closed” sign on its Google Realtime Search service. What happened, and what’s next for those who depended on Google to get some of […]
One of the bigger pieces of news — certainly for webmasters and SEOs — from our SMX Advanced conference this week is that Google will soon be releasing version 2.2 of the Panda algorithm update. Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that during Tuesday’s keynote question-and-answer session with Danny Sullivan. Cutts said that the update has been […]
SearchReviews has just launched a search engine with more than 40 million reviews in its system, and plans to hit 100 million reviews by the end of 2011. Those 40 million reviews cover about four million products and come from more than a thousand sites such as TripAdvisor, Amazon, Zappos and others. Those are impressive […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Did A Google Employee Just Register Hiybbprqag.com To Help Recruit New Employees? That’s a screenshot of Google’s “Jobs” page, which can be found at https://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/index.html. But it can also be reached […]
Friends or enemies? Partners or competitors? Google’s relationship with review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp is as complicated as ever, and the disputes are likely to increase as the search giant pursues mobile and local ambitions that center around its controversial Place pages. The rancor stems from the way Google aggregates content from various review […]
Earlier this week, Google’s Matt Cutts announced the company would be releasing a new on-page spam detection technique to reduce the amount of content spam we see in Google. Cutts just confirmed the rumors that this algorithm is indeed live. Matt said the change to their algorithm to prevent low-quality scraper content in Google’s index […]
Last week it appeared that hotels reviews site TripAdvisor was blocking Google from showing its content on Places Pages. TripAdvisor never confirmed that it was doing so and Google attributed the absence of TripAdvisor reviews on Places to a technical problem. However what you might call “circumstance evidence,” as well as comments made by TripAdvisor […]
First there was the Google-Yelp dispute over reviews in Places (which was resolved). Now TripAdvisor appears to be preventing Google from showing its reviews on Place Pages. The first to report this yesterday was Tnooz. According to the article: Google is no longer able to stream in reviews from TripAdvisor to Places pages after the […]
The Google Webmaster Central blog announced Google has published a new set of documents in the Google Code section on how to control Google from crawling and indexing your site. You can read the set of documents over here. The technical documents are broken down into five section: Getting Started Robots.txt specification Robots meta tag […]
With the amount of content published online seeming to expand dramatically every year, Google says it’s experimenting with two new meta tags that it hopes will help it identify the original sources of online content. They’re called syndication-source and original-source and here’s a look at what they do and how publishers can use them. What […]
The days of search engines merely being a middle man are over. Search isn’t about sending users to the right web page, it’s about getting them the information they want as soon as possible — sometimes it’s a web page, but it might also be a sports score, movie showtimes, election information, or some other […]
Scroogle, a site designed for those who don’t want Google tracking their searches back to them, had some hiccups since the new Google design went live on May 5th. Scroogle worked by “scraping” the Google search results from https://www.google.com/ie, a service for Internet Explorer 6 users. Google has decided to discontinue that service redirect it […]
Today at SMX West, Maile Ohye from Google confirmed that Google is indeed now crawling AJAX pages that use the standard proposed last Fall. The documentation is live on Google Code and you can also take a look at my recent article about how to implement the standard and its pros and cons. Maile mentioned […]