Google Penguin is the codename for a Google algorithm update that was first announced back in 2012 and was aimed at decreasing the search engine rankings of websites that have violated the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines through the use of black-hat SEO tactics and back-link manipulation. In 2013 we say version 2.0 of Google Penguin […]
Tag Archives: seo
Yelp & TripAdvisor Attempts to Rework Google Local Search Results
There’s always been a lot of people arguing against the Google algorithm – however for the first time a group of them got together and created a brand new Google Chrome app called “Focus on the User” …
Stop Checking Your Google Toolbar PageRank – It’s Not Going To Change
In the past Google PageRank was everywhere. People would look for advertising slots based on a websites PageRank and everyone within the SEO community was actively working …
Google Begins Slowly Rolling Out New Panda Update
Google had first released Panda 4.0 back in May of this year, and yesterday Google has announced that the latest version of its Panda Update has began rolling out. Through a post on Google+ Google said that a slow rollout has began this week and will continue through to next week. Depending on location the new […]
Google Introduces Structured Snippets
This week, the Google Research team introduced a new addition to Google Web Search called structured snippets, which provide an additional way for Google to pull data from your website and display it among their search results. From the blog post: “Google Web Search has evolved in recent years with a host of features powered by the Knowledge […]
Bing Introduces Dynamic Site Links to Bing Ads
Following an internal report by the Bing team which has determined that providing annotations on ads can improve click through rates – Bing has introduced a feature called Dynamic Sitelinks. I would re-write to you what they do however the Bing blog post describes it best: Dynamic Sitelinks is another way to help your potential […]
More Penguins from Google
In a Google+ hangout earlier in the week Googles John Mueller had mentioned that the 3rd version of Penguin will launch “in the reasonable future” and he expects it will happen within the 2014 year. So webmasters and SEO’s – get ready. He answers this at 54 minutes and 45 seconds into the following video:
Bing Explains How They Deal With Keyword Stuffing URLs
In a post on the Bing Webmaster Blog Bing has dug into how exactly they deal with keyword stuffing URLs. There are a few main signals that Bing looks out for when determining whether URL keyword stuffing tactics are in-use on a site: Site size Number of hosts Number of words in host/ domain names […]
Google Changes Site Search Placement In Search Results
Surely most of you by now have made use of the site search box that Google shows you when you run a search for a company name. Go ahead and try it, run a search for “Youtube” on Google and you’ll see a search box appear within the first search result from which you can […]
Bing Explains Their Stance on Web Spam
Bing has published a new blog post that I believe is a must-read for any webmaster or SEO’r. Titled Web Spam Filtering the post goes into detail about what web spam is, how it works, and what Bing is doing about it. Bing actually takes a very interesting methodology to understanding and fighting web spam […]
Goodbye Google Authorship
Just a few months ago we bid farewell to Google’s Authorship Images from the search results, and with the new month of September we now bid adieu to Google displaying any Authorship data within their search results. Google’s authorship support page, says simply, “Authorship markup is no longer supported in Web search,” and encourages webmasters to […]
Invalid SSL Certificates Will Still Provide Google Ranking Boost
Earlier on this month Google announced that SSL-secured websites will receive a small ranking boost. Since then I have even converted the majority of Rapid Purple to run over an HTTPS connection. If you’ve been going through the conversion process yourself lately here’s a bit of news that Barry Schwartz found out which might make your […]
Google Updates Webmaster Guidelines to Include Guest Blogging
Google’s Matt Cutts announced back in January of this year the death of guest blogging – and since then Google has been sure to push the stake in deeper and deeper into the heart …
HTTPS Will Now Give You Ranking Benefits in Google
Google announced late last week that they are now using SSL/HTTPS as a small ranking signal within their Google search algorithm. Yes, a small ranking signal – or in the words of Google: “a very lightweight signal” which is shown to impact “fewer than 1% of global queries“. Google equated the SSL ranking signal with the Panda signal and […]
Google Introduces Reviews for Product Listings
Those of you who actively utilize Google Shopping probably noticed that some of your search results look a bit different today. Those of you browsing Google within the United States will see product ratings appear in the form of stars and review counts on Product Listing Ads. This 5-star rating system represents aggregated rating and review data […]
New Study Shows Fake Googlebots Used for DDOS Attacks
Googlebots are an essential part of the Google search engine. Constantly crawling the world wide web looking for new links and websites to ensure that you get the latest …
Google Updates Local Search Algorithm
Google has released yet another new algorithm, this one attempts to provide more useful, relevant, and accurate local search results. The new algorithm changes will be visible within the Google Maps search results and Google Web search results. The main set of changes are primarily behind the scenes, but it does impact local search results rankings and […]
Forums & Google Search Results
A forum administrator, Basak Kayik, posted a few questions in the Google Webmaster Help forum wondering how to improve his forum in the eyes of Google. Luckily the topic was picked up by Google’s John Mueller who responded to it in great detail. Now I have touched upon managing forums before in a slew of articles such […]
Google Lets You Know When Pages May Not Work On Your Device
Earlier this week Google announced a change to their mobile search results bringing in notifications to let a user know when results include pages that may not work on their devices. For …
Yandex Joins The “Not Provided” Club
Joining in with Google, Yahoo & recently Bing, Yandex has decided to also strip search query data from the referrer meaning that Yandex is now 100% not provided. The announcement roughly translated from Russian reads as follows: In December last year we started an experiment to encrypt text query in the Referrer , which gradually […]