Bing Rocks Out With New Dynamic Carousel on Music Video Searches
Bing has fine-tuned their music discovery functionality. Bing will display a “dynamic carousel” on searches for an artist, band, album, or song. You can then browse the artist’s other music videos from within the carousel.
Matt Cutts on How Google Ranks Pages That Don’t Get Many Links
How does Google determine that content is quality, when there aren’t many links pointing to it? Or how is it determined that the content is spammy or thin, when there are a lot of links pointing to it? Google’s Matt Cutts explains.
New Kenshoo Technology Integrates Paid Search, Facebook Ad Targeting
Kenshoo has announced “Intent-Driven Audiences,” which gives advertisers the ability to create custom audiences made up of people who have clicked search ads, and are then are targeted to receive ads across Facebook’s ad inventory, including mobile.
WordPress SEO Premium 1.2
As I announced yesterday on the Dradcast, we released a new version of WordPress SEO premium. This is another feature packed update with a lot of things people had been asking us for. Let me go through the list of new features: Import redirects from your .htaccess file If you have a lot of redirects…
This post first appeared on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!
Report: Google Losing Share Of Mobile Search Ad Market
Data aggregator and prognosticator eMarketer is out with a new mobile advertising forecast that shows Google losing share of the mobile search ad market. The company says that apps are taking their toll on Google’s mobile ad dominance. The firm says that US mobile advertising in total will be…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
58% Say Google’s Penalties Are Immoral
In May, we wrote twice about the ethics of Google penalties and covered the debate around that, asking you to vote and let us know if you think Google penalties are unethical or immoral…
IE8 No Longer Supported For Bing Ads
It seems that advertisers within the Bing Ads network are no longer able to use Internet Explorer 8 to manage their ads in the Bing Ad console.
A WebmasterWorld has some advertisers noticing the new requirement. Bing Ads write:
Bing Ads no longer su…
SEOs: Negative SEO On Google Much Easier Now
As you all know, negative SEO is not new, in fact, Google has said it is rare but possible since 2007. Sites as large as Expedia may have suffered from it and Google had to reword their documentation on the topic…
16% Claim Recovery After Google’s Panda 4.0 Update
On May 20th, Google began rolling out Panda 4.0 and shortly after we asked you to take our Panda poll. Thousands of you did and I wanted to share the results.
I asked, How Did Google Panda 4…
Google AdWords Drops IE9 Support
While Bing Ads dropped IE8 support, Google AdWords is dropping Internet Explorer 9.
If you want to login and manage your Google AdWords account, you need to use the latest version of Internet Explorer or Safari, Chrome or Firefox. Basically…
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A Strategic Approach for New SEO Clients
Starting a new SEO project, or want to check ongoing projects? Use the following approach, which includes a mix of specific keyword research, testing important assumptions, and growing traffic and rankings with link building and copywriting.
Reusable Code For MCC Scripts Will Save You Tons Of Time In AdWords
Writing reusable code is something all developers strive for. Any developer worth his/her salt is continuously building a library of reusable code snippets to use in future development. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel each time a common problem is encountered because you can use the…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Book Review: Contagious
At SES London this year in one of the content marketing/social sharing sessions which featured Matt Roberts from Lindex, he mentioned Contagious by Jonah Berger as one item on a list of resources and items that they had found useful in evaluating whether or not they were producing “shareable content”. Intrigued, I ordered a copy during […]
Post from Arianne Donoghue on State of Digital
Book Review: Contagious
How to Grow Your Google+ Fan Base to 1,000 Followers & Beyond
You’re going to have to use every bit of your community management savvy to crank up your Google+ following to 1,000 and beyond. If you don’t yet have 1,000 followers on Google+, here’s how to go back to basics and grow that fan base.
Google To Warn Searchers When A Mobile URL Redirects To The Homepage
Don’t annoy mobile searchers. That’s the message behind a new warning that Google is showing in mobile search results on smartphones. On the Webmaster Central blog, Google alerted webmasters late yesterday that it will let smartphone searchers know if it thinks a website has a…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google Adds Street View Tours Of World Cup Stadiums
With the World Cup just a week away, Google has expanded its Street View imagery to coincide with the biggest sporting event on earth. Available today is new imagery inside all 12 stadiums that will be used during the tournament. You can do a 360-degre…
5 Reasons Why Pitching International SEO is a Pain
For global corporations, the move to international SEO is inevitable. Despite these challenges, companies can’t afford to avoid international markets, regardless of the difficulty. Each of these difficulties can be overcome.
Getting to grips with mobile SEO
Responsive vs adaptive vs mobile specific sites
The case for responsive design is well beyond the tipping point now, especially with Google specifically saying that it prefers responsive design solutions to mobile specific sites. Content is easily shareable across any device, page load times are faster and there’s a single URL.
However embarking on responsive design can be a costly and lengthy overhaul, and if not done correctly can end up being slower for mobiles than other alternatives.
Google’s advice also doesn’t mean that if you have a separate mobile domain you will not rank highly, it’s just easier for Google to crawl one set of pages and index them rather than crawl two sets of pages and then figure out which one to index for which platform.
Mobile sites are easier to implement and of course offer customisable, mobile exclusive content. However the potential for duplicating content and splitting link authority is much higher.
Another solution may be adaptive web design where a server delivers different content to different devices.
This is a solution that takes elements from responsive design (single URL, no duplication of content, easily shareable) and marries them to elements from mobile specific (customisable content, fast loading times). However this is also a costly and technically complicated process.
Check out Graham Charlton’s post for more pros and cons of adaptive web design.
Verifying your mobile website
Head to Google Webmaster Tools to verify your site using its specific mobile settings. This will give you more mobile-specific information such as search queries that do not show up as ‘not provided’.
After this, be sure that when you upload your sitemap to Google, you’re uploading your specific mobile sitemap. It has an additional <mobile:mobile/> tag requirement.
Page speed
Google has announced on multiple occasions that site speed has a big impact on mobile search engine results pages (SERPs). Your website needs to be as fast as it possibly can be to rank highly and provide an optimal user experience.
HTTP redirects are a common way to slow down page loads, and therefore perhaps a good reason not to offer a separate mobile site.
Google+ Local
According to most SEO experts, Google+ has a huge influence on personalised search results. On a mobile screen, the presence of a Google Local listing will be more even more prominent than on a desktop due to the screen size.
Having a Google Local profile will also put your website on Google Maps and on the Maps app. I talk extensively about the benefits of local SEO in relation to Google Places for Business and Google+ Local in Why you need local SEO.
PageSpeed Insights
This tool has been updated to include additional recommendations on mobile usability.
Measured on a score from 1-100, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will quickly diagnose some problems holding a website back from being 100% mobile optimised from a speed point of view.
The tool not only identifies the weaknesses for mobile in a website, but offers some generic information on how to fix them and highlights examples of problem pages.
Some of the key pieces of advice include…
- Sizing your content so it scrolls vertically, never horizontally.
- Use legible font sizes without the user zooming in.
- Tappable buttons that are large and separate enough from each other not to be accidentally pressed.
- Avoiding plugins of any kind, particularly Flash.
For more on SEO, download our latest SEO Best Practice Guide.
Directing smartphone users to the page they actually wanted
Webmaster level: all
Have you ever used Google Search on your smartphone and clicked on a promising-looking result, only to end up on the mobile site’s homepage, with no idea why the page you were hoping to see vanished? This is such a common annoyance that we’ve even seen comics about it. Usually this happens because the website is not properly set up to handle requests from smartphones and sends you to its smartphone homepage—we call this a “faulty redirect”.
We’d like to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting today in our English search results in the US, whenever we detect that smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the the page they asked for, we may note it below the result. If you still wish to proceed to the page, you can click “Try anyway”:
And we’re providing advice and resources to help you direct your audience to the pages they want. Here’s a quick rundown:
1. Do a few searches on your own phone (or with a browser set up to act like a smartphone) and see how your site behaves. Simple but effective. :)
2. Check out Webmaster Tools—we’ll send you a message if we detect that any of your site’s pages are redirecting smartphone users to the homepage. We’ll also show you any faulty redirects we detect in the Smartphone Crawl Errors section of Webmaster Tools:
3. Investigate any faulty redirects and fix them. Here’s what you can do:
- Use the example URLs we provide in Webmaster Tools as a starting point to debug exactly where the problem is with your server configuration.
- Set up your server so that it redirects smartphone users to the equivalent URL on your smartphone site.
- If a page on your site doesn’t have a smartphone equivalent, keep users on the desktop page, rather than redirecting them to the smartphone site’s homepage. Doing nothing is better than doing something wrong in this case.
- Try using responsive web design, which serves the same content for desktop and smartphone users.
If you’d like to know more about building smartphone-friendly sites, read our full recommendations. And, as always, if you need more help you can ask a question in our webmaster forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
How Google Might Identify Synonyms for Entities Using Anchor Text
When Google indexes the Web, it’s often been convenient to think about the search engine running two different methods or approaches that seem to run in parallel. One of those involves the crawling and indexing and ranking of pages on the web (and images, videos, news, podcasts, and other documents). The other approach doesn’t look […]
The post How Google Might Identify Synonyms for Entities Using Anchor Text appeared first on SEO by the Sea.