Google Reviewing “Not Provided,” Withholding Keywords From Organic But Not Paid Search Clicks

When Google moved to secure search in October 2011, it was a blow to publishers, who began losing data about the search terms used to reach their sites. It also opened Google up to claims of hypocrisy, in that advertisers continued to receive the terms. Now, Google says it’s reexamining the…

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Live Blog: Google’s Amit Singhal At SMX West 2014

Good evening/afternoon (or early morning for our European readers!) from sunny San Jose, Calif., where day one of our SMX West conference is almost finished. We’re wrapping up the Marketing Land Digital Marketing Summit with a keynote conversation between Google’s Amit Singhal and Danny…

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How 90s HTML Coding Will Save The SEO World In 2014

A surprising blast from the coding past has been making a comeback via SEO, and is frequently making its way into the core of advanced responsive design thinking: the humble sprite.

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Google Now Targeting Italian & Spanish Link Spammers

Less than a month after Google targeted Polish link spammers and German link spammers, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced Google is targeting more countries. Google’s Matt Cutts announced warnings to Spanish and Italian webmasters and SEOs not to use unnatural links to…

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Matt Cutts Video: How Google Determines When It Is A Paid Link

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a pretty detailed video discussing the Google webspam team’s criteria for determining whether a link is considered a paid link or not. There are five basic criteria Google uses in this determination. The first is the most obvious, is…

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Tweet Showing How Google Itself Is A “Scraper Site” Goes Massively Viral

Perhaps it’s SEOs’ “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…

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Someone Outranking You With Your Own Content? Use The New Google Scraper Report

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 to…

Hiding From That Google Penalty? It May Find You At Your New Home

Did you know that even if you try to run away from your Google penalty, it might end up finding you anyway? In a recent Google Webmaster Hangout, hosted by Google’s John Mueller, John said that even if you move your penalized site to a new domain name and don’t redirect the penalized…

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Google’s Matt Cutts: While Scientific Content Is Great, Clarity & Focusing On The Searcher Is Important

In today’s video from Google’s Matt Cutts, Matt answers a question asking if Google prefers ranking content that is more scientific in nature or content that is “easier to read” with greater clarity. First off, Matt said it was a question that made him think, which implies…

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Movie Sites Ranking Better In Google, Now That “Transient Issue” Fixed

A couple days ago, we reported that Google was investigating an issue where several movie blogs lost their rankings in Google. Matt Cutts, the head of search spam, himself said “I hope to dig into this soon.” Well, he did and he restored the rankings for those movie blogs calling the…

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The Secret To Staying Relevant With Authorship

At PubCon last year, Google’s Matt Cutts discussed big changes to the search results, many of which we’ve seen played out over the past several months. In his talk, he mentioned upcoming improvements to authorship results. A couple months later in December, Google confirmed it had…

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Google Targets Two Polish Link Networks While Continuing To Target German Link Networks

Google’s lead of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted on Twitter that Google has taken action on two link networks operated in Poland this week. Matt wrote that Google is “not done with Germany yet, but we just took action on two Polish link networks.” The Google Poland Webmaster Blog…

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Google To Look Into Movie Blogs Losing Traffic

About eight different movie blog sites, including Slashfilm.com, have lost traffic in Google — and the issue is apparently big enough that Google is looking into it. On Saturday, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts responded to the owner of SlashFilm on Twitter about the issue where…

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Google’s Matt Cutts: We Reserve The Right To Use EXIF Data For Image Search Rankings

Google’s head of search spam posted a video today reconfirming that while Google may not be using EXIF, exchangeable image file format, data for ranking images today, they do reserve the right to use the data in the future within their ranking algorithm. Google does recommend you use the EXIF…

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Google’s Matt Cutts: Backlink Relevancy Is A Big Win In Terms Of Search Quality

In today’s video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam reaffirms the significance of backlinks. The video is in response to the following question: Does the big G have a version of the search engine that totally excludes any backlink relevancy? I’m wondering what search…

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Google Adds, Then Pulls, Advice Not To Block Ad Landing Pages From Its Crawler

On Wednesday/Thursday of last week, Google added a new guideline to their Webmaster Guidelines to “not block a destination URL for a Google Ad product” via your robots.txt file. 24-hours later, Google reversed that guideline and put the webmaster guidelines back to exactly how they were…

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Open Letter: Why Search Engine Land Will & Won’t Cover Someone Being Penalized By Google

It’s been big news recently about major brands and Google penalties, and the floodgates feel open on people spotting even more brands possibly hit out there. Some new crackdown by Google? No. It’s the rise of hyperactive attention in this area, and that’s turning into a problem….

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Google’s Matt Cutts On Being A Spam Fighter: Looking For Patterns & Always New Spam Efforts

Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts posted a longer video today answering what it is like to fight webspam at Google. The questions posed by Brian Harnish of Westminster, California were: What is a day in the life of a search spam team member like? What is the evolution of decisions in…

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