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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Ray Kurzweil’s Job At Google: Beat IBM’s Watson At Natural Language Search
If Ray Kurzweil is right, computers will be smarter than humans 15 years from now. It’s called “technological singularity” and a big part of his job at Google is making sure that vision becomes reality. Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist that became Google’s Director of…
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Googling The Weather: From 20% Project To Sophisticated Query Analysis
Millions of us have asked Google to play weatherperson. In order to get an answer to one of our oldest and most basic questions, we type a variety of words and numbers — city names, neighborhoods and ZIP codes, plus words like “weather,” “forecast” or maybe…
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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 Showing Restaurant Menus In Card-Style Search Result
Google has started showing complete restaurant menus in its search results when a query specifically looks for menu information. We think Allie Brown was the first to spot this when she shared the results of a search for “jones brunch menu” on Twitter. For that query, Google begins the…
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Google Showing Large Video Embeds In Some Search Results
Now, if you search Google for video related content, Google may return a large, playable, video directly at the top of the search results. For example, searching for [sing it loud come around] shows a large YouTube video that you can play directly in t…
Google Search Redesigns Stock Quotes, Drops Competitor Links For First Time Since 2000
Google has launched a new stock card result that is a lot larger, is more interactive and has dropped the links to competing financial sites. Here is the new stock card you get when you search Google for [yhoo]: Compare that to the old one: As you can see, the links to the competing stock […]
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Google Showing Date Selector In Knowledge Graph Carousel For Hotels
Google has added a new feature to the Knowledge Graph Carousel, where for some search queries, it will show a date selector box. For example, a search on [hotel in new york] returns the local hotel listings at the top carousel but now adds this date se…
Google Search OneBox Answers Are Getting More Detailed
There are several reports throughout the search community that Google’s OneBox answers or a form of the knowledge graph, are now more aggressive about answering even more complex questions with more detailed responses or answers. When we asked Google about this, a Google spokesperson told us,…
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Google’s Latest Search Trick: “As The Crow Flies” Distance Calculation
Move over, pandas. Fly away, hummingbirds. Waddle away, penguins. Google has a new animal friend: crows. But unlike its past associations with the animal world, this one isn’t about SEO or algorithms — it’s a new search trick that adds distance calculation to Google’s OneBox…
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Days-Old Error In Google Search Causes Gmail User To Get Thousands Of Emails
Earlier this week, we reported a glitch in Google Search, where clicking on on a link after a search for Gmail listed the email address of a Gmail user, complete in a window ready to send them email. With today’s Gmail outage, that error — never fixed — has resulted in at least…
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Study: 34% Of Google Search Results Have Rich Media, 9 Organic Links & 9 Search Ads
Conductor released a study that analyzed the ten blue links at Google showing 34% show rich media, nine organic listings and nine search ads. 34% Of Search Snippets Have Rich Media The Conductor study showed that there was rich media on the search resu…
An Easy Way To Check What Referrer Data Google, Bing Or Yahoo Pass To Your Secure Site
With the three major search engines migrating their default searches to secure search, over SSL/HTTPS, marketers and webmasters want to know what referrer and analytics data will be passed to them and what won’t. The majority of Google is secure search, Yahoo yesterday defaulted all searches…
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Google Adds A Knowledge Graph Popup To Search Results, But Is It Good For Site Owners?
Google has announced the formal rollout of a test that some searchers have been seeing for a few days now — a test that associates a Knowledge Graph popup with certain web pages in desktop search results. The popup adds more information about certain search results, which sounds like it…
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Google Now Changing The Top Search Filters Based On Query
Google is now dynamically changing the top search menu/filters based on the search query entered by the searcher. So now, what options you see at the top might differ or be in a different order based on the query you enter into Google’s search box. A Google spokesperson told us this based on…
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Searching For Gmail In Google Links You To Compose A Message To A Google Apps User
If you search for [gmail] in Google and if you click on the sitelink that reads “Google mail” – Google may push you to a page that composes an email to a Google Apps user. Here is the search result you may see when you search for [gmail]: Clicking on that sitelink below the main…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: We Don’t Have Different Algorithms For Different Web Position Slots
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video answering another webmaster question. The question was, “Are results in different positions ranked by different algorithms?” The answer is no, Google does not have reserve web search results slots or positions for ranking…
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Infographic: The Biggest Changes To Google Search In 2013
What were some of the biggest changes to Google Search in 2013, in terms of how its search algorithms ranked and displayed information? How about an infographic rundown, as we close out the year? Produced by the folks at E2M Solutions, the infographic …
How SEO Greed Can Ruin A Perfectly Good Linking Strategy
By now, you are likely aware of the Rap Genius “Tweet In Exchange For Anchor Text” link scheme, hencefore to be known as TieFating. Barry Schwartz reported last week on John Marbach’s exposé of the popular music site, Rap Genius, which had started an “affiliate”…
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Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes
Google has penalized Rap Genius for link schemes this morning. If you go to Google and search for [rap genius], rapgenius.com will not be found on the first page. Instead you will find links to their Twitter account, Facebook page, Wikipedia profile an…