RetailMeNot Says On Google Ranking Drop: The Reports “Greatly Overstate” Our Organic Search Impact
On Tuesday, Google pushed out their revised Panda Algorithm code-named Panda 4.0. Panda is designed to remove low-quality content from Google’s search results. Yesterday, we published an early Winners & Losers report on which large sites were impacted the most both in a positive and…
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On MetaFilter Being Penalized By Google: An Explainer
MetaFilter is a news and discussion site dating back to the early years of the web. Founded in 1999, it’s attracting attention this week after coming forward about how a Google penalty has severely harmed its business, to the degree of having to let staff go. It serves as a poster child of…
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Is eBay A Big Loser In Google’s Panda 4.0 Update? — Winners & Losers Data
Yesterday, Google began rolling out their Panda 4.0 update designed to punch low-quality content. That’s generated both “winners” who have moved up in rankings as “losers” have dropped down — and eBay might be one of the big losers. Searchmetrics gave us their…
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Google Begins Rolling Out Panda 4.0 Now
Google’s Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they have released version 4.0 of the Google Panda algorithm. Google’s Panda algorithm is designed to prevent sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. But didn’t Google stop updating us…
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Official: Google Payday Loan Algorithm 2.0 Launched: Targets “Very Spammy Queries”
Google has confirmed they have released a new algorithm update to their Payday Loan Algorithm update over this weekend. This algorithm specifically targets “very spammy queries” and is unrelated to the Panda or Penguin algorithms. A Google spokesperson told us: Over the weekend we began…
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Google: The European Court Is Really Telling You To Be More “Relevant”
So, it finally happened. After years of people telling me that “Europe” will do nothing about Google and me saying that one day “Europe” will probably bite back, it did. “Europe” bit off a whole chewy chunk of Google and all other search engines in just one…
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Google Search Results Snippet Overlay Descriptions May Use DMOZ Description
About a year ago, Google introduced a new feature in the search results that give you quick overlays on the search result so that you can learn more about the site you are about to click on before you click on it. Early on, the results of the data in the snippet came from Wikipedia […]
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The Myths & Realities Of How Of The EU’s New “Right To Be Forgotten” In Google Works
Depending on what you read, a “Right To Be Forgotten” court ruling in the European Union this week means that now anyone can ask for anything to be removed from Google, which will soon collapse under an overwhelming number of requests. In reality, it’s far more limited than it…
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Google Readies For Flood Of Removal Requests After EU “Right To Be Forgotten” Ruling
The floodgates have opened. According to a Reuters story, following Tuesday’s European Court ruling establishing a Europe-wide “right to be forgotten” (RTF), Google is preparing for an anticipated “flood” of removal requests across the 28 country jurisdiction. The…
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Research In India Claims To Show How Search Rankings “Could” Impact Elections
Psychologist and researcher Robert Epstein has published research (embedded below) that he contends shows how search rankings “have the potential to profoundly influence voters without them noticing the impact.” He calls this capacity the “Search Engine Manipulation Effect”…
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Those Google Ranking Shifts Are Not A Google Update, Google Denies Any Algorithmic Changes
Over the past week or so, there has been a lot of various signals across the search community that Google’s algorithms and rankings were updating, so much so that people were bracing themselves for a major Penguin or Panda-like algorithm announcement from Google. Google never made the…
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Google’s Matt Cutts Regrets Not Acting Faster On Paid Links & Content Farms
In Google’s Matt Cutts latest video, he answers a question I personally asked about what he regrets, what decision he regrets making in the past related to webspam. My question specifically was: Was there a key moment in your spam fighting career where you made a mistake that you regret,…
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Official Google Advice On Internationalizing Your Home Page
Google has published their official advice on the Google Webmaster Central blog on how to handle your home page when your web site serves multiple languages and countries. Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, wrote the p…
Google’s Matt Cutts: Over Time Backlinks Will Become Less Important
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said in a video that backlinks, over time, will become a little less important. Matt did say that backlinks in the Google ranking algorithm still have many years left in them. Matt explained that Google is focusing a lot now on working on ways to…
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SEO Smackdown: Download Time – Machine Speed Vs. Human Speed
Perceived download time is more important to searchers than actual download time. So why do SEOs focus on technocentric optimization strategies?
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Actually, We Don’t Think Google Hates HARO Links
Despite the buzz going through the SEO industry today, we don’t believe that Google is specifically targeting links that are earned via the popular Help a Reporter Out service. That’s one of the claims from SEO consultant Bill Hartzer, in an article he published yesterday, Google…
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Google’s Bodiless Matt Cutts On Importance Of Body Content For Search Engines
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted a fun video where fellow Googler, Michael Wyszomierski, cropped out his body in the video to make a point. The statement Matt made was that there is importance of content in the body of a page and not just the header, such as the title tag. If…
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Coupons, Coupon Codes, Promo Codes…When Content Is NOT King
A few years ago, I did some work for a comparison shopping/coupon website. Curious about how well the site was doing in regard to their SEO, I did a few search queries for some of the terms I remembered being big traffic drivers. I didn’t see my former client on page one for the first few…
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Google Provides More Clarity Around Sneaky Redirects Against Their Guidelines
Google announced on their Webmaster blog that they have updated two of their guideline documents to improve the clarify around what are sneaky redirects that are against their webmaster guidelines. Google has expanded their guidelines to ensure webmast…
Google’s Matt Cutts: Why Google Will Ignore Your Page Title Tag & Write Its Own
Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video answer on the question about why and when Google will ignore your title tag and use something else for the snippet title in the search results. Matt explains in the video that Google really wants the title of the snippets to match on some level the query of…
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