Google’s Matt Cutts has just issued a “weather report” about upcoming changes to be expected from Google’s Panda algorithm. If you’re not familiar with algorithmic weather reports, sit back and learn. Because they’re back, and that’s a good thing. Before There Was Panda, There Was Florida At the end of 2003, Google released what became […]
Saying that it wants to help website owners prioritize their work, Google has added a new “site health” view to the Webmaster Tools home page. The next time you visit Webmaster Tools, Google will show the sites in your account sorted with those in need of work at the top. Here’s a screenshot of Google’s […]
Google announced they have stepped up their webmaster communication for notifying webmasters of both manual and automated penalties. In the past, Google let you submit reconsideration requests and then added that they received those requests. Now, Google may reply if your site was affected by a manual spam action and that you are no longer […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Microsoft Tightens Relevancy And Quality Requirements In AdCenter Microsoft has announced changes that tighten up its adCenter Relevancy and Quality policy for ads served to the U.S. and Canada. Changes are […]
Google has been quietly hosting Google + Hangouts for webmasters to ask Google Webmaster analysts and engineers questions. The next Google hangout, named Google Webmaster Office Hours, was announced by Jenny Murphy and will take place tomorrow on her profile. Again, it will take place Wednesday, August 31st at 11:30am PDT / 2:30 EDT on […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Blind Social Sharing & Its Effect On Personal Credibility Social media may seem like ‘information overload’ for some, especially since there are now thousands of tweets sent per second and millions […]
Kaspar Szymanski from Google’s search quality team announced on the Google Webmaster blog that his office is hiring Search Quality Associates to work in the Dublin, Ireland office. Search Quality Associates are basically Google web spam fighters. They are responsible for digging deep into site code, investigating site issues, looking for search quality issues and […]
SEOmoz announced they have published the Google Algorithm Change document detailing all “major updates” that happened since the Boston update in 2003. SEOmoz did it with style in this graphical document: While I agree with a lot of the updates listed here, I had worked up a list of my own a few months ago. […]
The Google Webmaster Blog announced a new format for Google’s Matt Cutts video tutorials. Instead of the short minute or so videos, Matt will also be offering more detailed videos that are longer and more flushed out. Google explained, “instead of only focusing on quick answers to specific questions, we’ve created some longer videos which […]
About two weeks ago, I started a new chapter in my professional life as the VP and “Conductor” of Marketing at BlueTrain Mobile, an award-winning technology start up company in Cambridge, MA. This is an exciting career move for me in so many ways, and will push me to ramp up on my “mobile SEO” […]
Bas van den Beld received a new notification from Google Webmaster Tools that has never been seen before. The notification informs those who are running outdated WordPress installations to update them to the latest version. Here is a screen shot: Matt Cutts of Google confirmed the new notifications via Twitter saying, “we’re kicking off a […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Where To Use Twitter’s New Follow Button This week, Twitter launched the instant follow button for websites to make it even easier to connect visitors to Twitter accounts. This button joins […]
It’s often said that paid links have created a false economy. As someone who has admittedly purchased links and contributed to that, I would definitely have to agree. I’ve caught loads of heck for buying links and there have been recent high-profile slaps for sites caught buying links, but what isn’t often discussed is the […]
Google announced on the Webmaster blog that they have removed a requirement for removing URLs via Google Webmaster Tools. Google no longer requires you to block access to the URL you want to remove from Google prior to submitted the URL removal request. Google said they have eliminated “the requirement that the webpage’s URL must […]
Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search, published a blog post on the Google Webmaster Central blog named More guidance on building high-quality sites. Amit’s goal with this post is to have those webmasters impacted by this Panda Update, which rolled out internationally about a month ago, with some direction and guidance to help explain what […]
A Quora thread noticed that Google Real Time Search is now including more sources beyond Twitter, Google News, Buzz and other sources. The new additions appear to be from Quora.com, Gowolla, Plixi, Me2day, Twitgoo and some others. Public Facebook profiles and fan pages have been included for a while. So to update our Google Real […]
Just that quickly, Google has disabled the +1 button that was spotted online earlier today. The button was pieced together and seemed to work for a couple hours, though, as the comments on our story show, its integration into Google’s search results wasn’t real good due to the limited rollout of +1 so far. A […]
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 Touts Conversion Boost With Call Tracking Solution Call tracking pre-dates the internet. At times it has been the subject of intense debate about its use in online (local) marketing (see […]
Google acquired BeatThatQuote.com on March 7th, then the day after, Google penalized BeatThatQuote for violating the Google Webmaster guidelines. Guess what? BeatThatQuote has apparently been un-penalized by Google just two weeks after first being penalized. A search for their name in Google once again returns them at the top result: Is two weeks long enough? […]
There is a company that I once bought something from, something that did not at all live up to my expectations, something that was just cheap and tacky and not at all what I wanted. However, it was quite inexpensive and I wasn’t feeling particularly outraged, so I just grinned and bore it. Fast forward […]
Last week, J.C. Penney made the news for plummeting in Google rankings for everything from “area rugs” to “grommet top curtains”. Turns out the retail site had a number of suspicious links pointing at it that could be traced back to a link network intended to manipulate Google’s ranking algorithms. Google, in order to protect […]
Google has updated the PageRank values of many sites within the Google Toolbar. This is the first toolbar PageRank update of the year, and arguably the first one in almost 9 months. There have been minor updates, where some sites have seen their PageRank change during 2010, but I believe the last huge PageRank update […]
In Matt’s second Google Webmaster Video for the new season, he picked the question, “what are some search trends on your radar?” In this video, our very own Danny Sullivan ‘stumbled’ on Matt during his video and joined him to discuss trends in search. So Matt and Danny both shared their thoughts on search trends. […]
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 Webmaster Video Reconfirms Use Of Social Signals What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? from earlier this month confirmed that Google and Bing were both using social signals […]
What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? from earlier this month confirmed that Google and Bing were both using social signals from Facebook and Twitter in their search algorithms. Today, Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, posted a new video on the Google Webmaster YouTube Channel reconfirming Google uses social signals. The key takeaways […]
The Internet sometimes doesn’t work as we hope it would, or think it should. In certain verticals, great content doesn’t create great links, and because of that, in my opinion, SEOs are often forced to resort to manipulative link practices to get their clients and websites to rank. Websites with low “content link efficacy” are […]
Google has confirmed that they are now updating the Google Image Search index of images at a more rapid rate. Earlier this week, I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that webmasters noticing this at WebmasterWorld. Webmasters were saying that Google Image Search was including their new images within a “few days” as opposed to […]
Matt Cutts, the popular Google engineer who answers your questions on Google’s YouTube Webmaster Help Channel has announced you can now submit your questions again. The way you submit your questions is via this Google Moderator page. Matt will review the questions, likely give preference to the questions with the most votes from others and […]
As our culture continues to move online, personal information about us that previously may have only been seen by our friends and family is increasingly shared in public spaces on the internet. What can you do if you search for your name on Google and find information you’d rather keep private? Or find yourself or […]
For the first time, Google will provide advice to webmasters via a US-based site clinic on Google’s Webmaster Central blog. The company’s announcement says that members of Google’s Search Quality team “will determine trends and share corresponding best practices to improve site quality and user experience.” Google may be very purposely avoiding any mention of […]
Move over PageRank and meet Webmaster Happiness Rank. That’s another metric that Google maintains, it turns out. Speaking at SES Chicago today, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google, Maile Ohye said Google has a metric to measure webmaster happiness. Every week, Google’s webmaster trends analysts team gets together to talk about how the webmaster’s are reacting […]
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 Make Paid Social Media Ads Effective And Engaging While advertising on social media makes sense for advertisers, the owners of ‘free’ sites like Twitter and Facebook still need to […]
Google has introduced a new method of verifying your web site in Google Webmaster Tools. The new method is to use the Google Analytics asynchronous code to verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools. It must be the newer asynchronous code, but if you use that code, you can quickly gain access to the 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: Hunch: Traffic Down, Registrations Way Up & We’re Smarter Even though its traffic is down, Hunch says new user registrations have risen dramatically recently. And as more users register, Hunch says […]
Webmasters build links for two reasons: to drive traffic and to influence search engine placement. Neither option is as cut and dry as I’ve stated here but when it gets down to it, that’s why webmasters deliberately build links. If you’re building links to support ongoing SEO efforts, there are a handful of key tips to […]
The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced they are stepping up their notifications within Webmaster Tools. They will now send “SiteNotices” for a “significant increase” in unreachable content, that is when GoogleBot cannot reach a number of pages on your web site. Here is a picture of what a SiteNotice may look like: Google will only […]
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 Takes On Travel Sites, Courts FTC Action With ITA Acquisition Google has signed an agreement to acquire travel reservations software company ITA. The purchase price is reportedly about $700 million. […]
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, […]
There have been several changes this week at Google that I found particularly interesting and wanted to summarize for you. Of course, yesterday’s May Day confirmation story from Vanessa Fox has details on the ranking algorithm change Google put into place earlier this month. That may be the biggest Google related webmaster story of the […]
Emails are the main method that my link builders use in order to build new links. It’s how we started doing things, and it continues to work for us. While there are other methods that we’ve tried, emails seem to work the best for us. That could be because for a lot of the industries […]