Google made a clear stance late Friday on the Google Webmaster blog that they will not tolerate webmasters pushing deceptive search results to searchers through the use of browser history spamming techniques. The technique uses a method of detecting a click on the browser’s back button. When clicked, a user is not sent back to […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video explaining the consequences of a site going offline and how that can negatively impact that site’s ranking in the Google’s search results. In short, a site that temporarily goes offline for a short period of time, such as less than 24 hours, should be fine. […]
Google announced they’ve updated the navigation within Google Webmaster Tools and have also added a new “search appearance” pop up that should help novice webmasters. New Webmaster Tools Navigation The new navigation was redesigned and structured to be in the order of “the stages of search,” said Mariya Moeva, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst. The structure […]
Last night at SMX Advanced, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts was on stage to answer questions about Google search and webmaster topics with Danny Sullivan. We covered the session in live blog format and pulled out several key points. Of all my years watching Matt Cutts talk, I believe it has been over […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced at SMX Advanced that starting in the next day or so, Google Webmaster Tools notifications will now include example URLs of problem areas. For example, if you receive a manual penalty for unnatural links, Google will provide a few sample URLS. If you have other manual penalties, […]
After releasing a preview of the Bing sitemap plugin a few months ago, Bing is ready to officially launch the Bing XML Sitemap Plugin 1.0 to the public. This sitemap plugin allows webmasters to easily create XML sitemap files for their websites that can be submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools or other search engines. It […]
The latest large brand to be hit with a user-generated content spam penalty notification is Sprint, the large US wireless communications company. Similar to Mozilla’s penalty and BBC’s penalty, Sprint was penalized for user-generated content spam on a portion of their site that was open to anyone to post links and content. Also similar to […]
Yandex has presented what it claims is a new concept in search engine results pages to a Russian audience at an online industry conference in Moscow. They’ve nicknamed the new concept “Islands,” but are describing it functionally as “Interactive Snippets” and the next step on from rich snippets. To be launched in a few weeks […]
Over the past few days, the Webmaster and SEO community have been discussing significant shifts, fluctuations and updates in both the Google rankings and traffic patterns they have seen from Google’s organic search. I’ve asked Google if there was, indeed, an update, and Google would not confirm. Instead, they gave me the boilerplate response, “We […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a YouTube video talking about a recent SEO misconception that he would like the SEO and webmaster world to “put to rest.” Matt said, just because Google has a search quality or ranking patent it does not mean that the patent was or is currently part of […]
In a recently published video, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, listed off the top five SEO mistakes webmasters make. Matt said these are not the most devastating mistakes, but rather, the most common mistakes. (1) Not having a website or having a website that is not crawlable is the biggest mistake he sees. […]
Google’s Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog a new annotation designed to help communicate redirects and languages to Google for multilingual and multinational web sites. The annotation is designed to work with homepages of multinational and multilingual sites that are configured to point users to localized pages, either via […]
Google announced they have added three improvements to the Google Webmaster Tools verification system. View Verification Methods Now, you can not only see who the verified users on your sites are, but the verification method they used to achieve that status. Where appropriate, the verification details will have links to the correct URL on your […]
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 Snag A Sale From A Simple ‘Contact Us’ Page Getting website sales isn’t all about product pages and shopping carts. Many business owners forget there is a whole conversion […]
Google has published over 500 videos on the Webmaster Help YouTube Channel, most of those videos features Matt Cutts answering quick SEO related questions. Sometimes you want the quick answer from Matt Cutts and sorting through hundreds of videos with the average length of two to five minutes can take a while. That is where […]
Kaspar Szymanski a Search Quality Strategist based in Google’s Dublin office posted the official one page Google SEO cheat sheet designed to dumb down webmaster and SEO related techniques. The Google SEO cheat sheet is in three steps: (1) How to make your search results look good in the search results. Google recommends you craft […]
Google has just launched a help center for hacked sites, complete with step-by-step instructions and videos that outline each part of the process. The videos feature Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google (and her Googler colleagues), who told me “we wanted to connect our capability to detect and alert site owners of their hacked […]
Google’s Matt Cutts shared some new statistics in a recent video about the types of notifications Google sends out via Google Webmaster Tools. Google sends approximately “hundreds of thousands” of messages each month to webmasters. The categories of those messages break down as follows: 90% of those messages are black hat related 4% are notifications […]
Google has confirmed the reports of the removal of the “not selected” filter within Google Webmaster Tool’s Index Status report. Google’s John Mueller said it was removed because it “was causing more confusion than actually helping webmasters with their sites.” That may be true, but many webmasters found the data useful. In fact, there were […]
Over the past week or so, we’ve been hearing reports of the number of links being reported within Google Webmaster Tools drastically changing from what it was days before the change. Last week, we received some reports of Google increasing the number of links being reported in the tool. This week, we are seeing dozens […]
Like how Google Image Search works on a tablet? Good news, then. That simplified experience is coming to Google Images on the desktop. Out With The Old Currently, viewing an image through Google Image Search is a multistep process. You do the search, see several images and can hover to get a slightly larger thumbnail: […]
In the first post of this series, we briefly explored Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) with Sr. Program Manager Vincent Wehren. In that article, we discovered that BWT is a well-rounded suite of SEO tools that have the added benefit of the massive amount of search engine data provided by Bing. We also learned from Vincent […]
Bing has published its first set of webmaster guidelines, offering website owners general guidance on best practices related to SEO for Bing’s search engine. They’re accessible in the Help section of Bing’s Webmaster Tools as a new entry under the “Content Guidelines” section. The direct link is www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a. Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines touch on things like […]
Shaun Anderson created a tool to keep track of changes made to 50 of the top Google webmaster guidelines. The tool shows you how recently a specific Google webmaster guidelines document was updated. SEOs and webmasters must stay on top of these changes and this tool helps them do just that. The tool is run […]
Over the past week or so, I’ve been hearing reports via the forums that Google’s search results have been in a state of flux. Typically when I see such a level of discussion about fluctuations in Google, I expect Google to announce a algorithm update. This morning I saw a spike in that communication and […]
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 […]
Matt Cutts, Google’s lead of search spam, wrote a blog post named “Why did our PageRank go down?” The post is a reminder to webmasters that selling links that pass PageRank can lead to a Google penalty. Back in October 2007, Google officially came out saying selling paid links can hurt your PageRank and then […]
Google doesn’t always penalize you for bad links, they sometimes and very often, will ignore links completely that they find to be against their guidelines. Back in 2007, Google started penalizing sites for selling paid links and over the years they have penalized many sites for buying links. Recently, Google has stepped up their notifications […]
Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google, posted a video on the Google Webmaster Blog about how to learn the “essential” SEO techniques for your web site. It is targeted specifically at sites with under 50 pages or so, that want to rank for their company name and related keywords, and want to be […]
Google announced on the Webmaster Central blog that they have cleaned up Google Webmaster Tools. The three changes include: (1) Updated Dashboard (2) New Left Hand Navigation (3) Home Compact View Here is a picture of the revised dashboard: The new navigation was changed to be more representative of the content and tools within the […]
Google’s head of the webspam team, Matt Cutts, announced on Twitter that they have sent out new message notifications to 20,000 web sites that are hacked. Specifically, Google sent these messages to sites doing “weird redirects.” I’ve personally seen a spike in the number of sites redirecting from their web site to a non-authorized site […]
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 Makes Android Maps Cleaner, More Personal If Siri is the differentiating feature of iPhones, then Google Maps (and Navigation) are that for Android. It’s the most popular Android app as […]
One of the most sought after features in Google Webmaster Tools was to easily give third-party people access to your Google Webmaster Tools account without giving over your own username and password and without giving them full control of your site. Google has finally satisfied this request by adding user administration to Google Webmaster Tools. […]
At SMX West last week Tiffany Oberoi from Google shared that Google has sent over 700,000 messages to webmasters via Google Webmaster Tools in January and February 2012. That is more than the total number of messages Google sent in 2011 and almost more than what Google has sent since launching Google Webmaster Tools message […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Major Entertainment Groups Accuse Google, Bing Of Directing Users To Illegal Content Several major UK entertainment industry groups are accusing Google and Bing of directing searchers to illegal content, and have […]
Google has quietly added a feature to Google Webmaster Tools that allows you to test your sitemap files prior to submitting them to Google. Google’s Pierre Far confirmed that this is indeed a brand new feature built to help webmasters debug their sitemap files prior to submitting them. One of the most common complaints about […]
Google has confirmed reports of a Panda update with us. The company told us they have done a data refresh of the Google Panda algorithm about a week ago, and added that there were no additional signals or algorithm changes. This was only a data refresh. I saw reports over the past week or so […]
Google has released ten different videos for webmasters on how rich snippets work. Google’s rich snippets are special markups used by webmasters to enhance the Google search results. They often take a while to show up in the search results, and often lead to webmaster confusion on if there are issues with the markup used […]
Last Monday, Google announced that they had released “new markup for multilingual content”, see the webmaster tools blog post here. Even for those of us that work in the field of looking after global websites, this produced relatively unexciting headlines along the lines of “Google Launches New Multilingual Markup — Wow”. Big yawn. In fact, digging […]
If your website and/or web pages have low PageRank, it’s possible that they also suffer from poor spelling and grammar. Google’s top spam cop, Matt Cutts, made the correlation between low PageRank and poor spelling in a Google Webmaster Help video just made public today. In responding to a question about whether spelling and grammar […]