Tag Archive for: Google

Quick News of the Week – April 25, 2014

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With the constant stream of news coming out of the online marketing industry, it can be hard to keep up with all the latest updates without missing some important information. Below, we will go through all of the news from the week that we missed at the time.

Bing Tries To Predict The Winners of Your Favorite Reality Shows

Bing Predictions

Bing is using search and social signals in their attempt to predict outcomes of public events, and they are showcasing the results of their test by estimating who will be moving onto further rounds in reality shows like The Voice, American Idol, and Dancing With the Stars. Bing isn’t using magic to see the future, but they are using measures of popularity to predict the results of some of the most popular shows in the country. While this could be a fun feature for fans of reality TV, there is also potential for Bing to expand their predictions to events and elections that have a more direct on the country in the future.

Google Lets You Subscribe to Trending Search Topics

Google Subscribe

Google Trends has been a useful tool for discovering what people are searching for around the world. But, the service has always been somewhat isolated. You can consult the section to see what new artists, films, or memes are trending, but users have been left to keep up with the topics that interested them on their own. Now, Google Trends has added a new feature that lets you “Subscribe” to any search topic, Hot Searches for any country, or any U.S. monthly Top Chart. Google explains how subscribing functions in their announcement.

New Features are Headed to AdWords

AdWords Update

Last week, Search Engine Land teased that huge news was coming for AdWords by vaguely discussing what types of features you might be seeing in the future. All the features were announced on Tuesday and Larry Kim took the time to break down what each new feature does and how it can affect online advertisers. Find out what the new AdWords will be like in Kim’s article for Search Engine Journal.

More Than Half of Responsive Mobile Sites Have “Unacceptable” Load Times

Responsive design has been widely loved for its ability to unify user experience across multiple platforms and devices, and some web designers claim it even speeds up their work process by preventing them from having to design two separate sites. However, a new study suggests responsive design may have a significant weakness. Responsive design may provide a better and more cohesive user experience across platforms, but a new study says the majority of responsive sites load too slowly for mobile users who are likely to leave a page that doesn’t load within 5 seconds. Mobile web developer Trilibis evaluated 155 prominent responsive design websites, and their findings aren’t pretty.

Yahoo Tests A Google Knowledge Graph Doppelganger in Search Results

There are rumors swirling that Yahoo is considering rejuvenating their search engine to re-challenge Bing for the second most-popular search engine available. Their share of the search market suggests Yahoo will have to make some drastic changes to have any chance at their comeback in the search game, but the company has been testing some recent changes to their search engine that lend truth to the rumors. However, one of their tests also drew attention for looking questionably similar to Google’s Knowledge Graph. All Google Testing discovered the test and documented how to see the test for yourself, or you can just watch their video below.

http://youtu.be/Pc254gEZx_Q

 

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Another Guest Blog Network Gets Slapped With a Penalty

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google-red-cardYou would think most guest blog networks would be watching their steps in the wake of the widely talked about penalty levied against MyBlogGuest, but one network named PostJoint has remained steadfast, if not cocky. Unsurprisingly, that means they are the lucky recipient of the second penalty Google is giving to a guest blog network.

Last week, someone tweeted to Matt Cutts that PostJoint had been hit, and it didn’t take Matt long to confirm that action had been taken, stating that “any link or guest blog network that claims to have ‘zero footprints’ is waving a giant red flag.”

When Cutts first began to talk about guest blogging being done for, both PostJoint and MyBlogGuest were outspoken in their defense. The operators of MyBlogGuest tried to argue that they didn’t fit the definition of a guest blog network, and PostJoint tried to explain how they were different from MyBlogGuest after their penalty. Neither defense managed to protect either network.

Perhaps the most entertaining part of the penalty is the response PostJoint has given in their blog titled “Matt Cuts Us Out“. The short story is that PostJoint is confused about the warnings they received while openly admitting that at least 16% of their network received the unnatural links notification.

All of that leads them to conclude: “The fact that only 16% of our sites have been hit shows that Google can’t infact trace all of the sites using PostJoint.” Clearly, PostJoint doesn’t understand how Google’s penalty system works.

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Tearing Down SEO Myths With Matt Cutts

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For an industry that relies on as much data as the SEO market does, there is never much certainty that the popular optimization tactic being preached at the moment is a legitimate strategy. We rarely have the definitive answers from the source needed to keep all the confusion down, and new myths seem to spring up overnight.

To counter the constant flow of SEO myths, Google’s distinguished engineer Matt Cutts used one of his recent Webmaster Help videos to debunk many of the misconceptions surrounding the world’s most popular search engine.

This isn’t the first time Cutts has used his regular video message to debunk SEO myths, but this time he focuses on a specific type of myth that has become increasingly widespread as Google seems to keep narrowing their guidelines and offering greater space to ads.

Cutts starts by tackling the myth “if you buy ads you’ll rank higher in Google” and the opposing legend that not buying ads is the key to high rankings. In Matt Cutts’ perspective, these fables are tied to the notion that Google makes all of their decisions in an effort to force webmasters to buy more ads.

The problem with that idea is that it doesn’t actually reflect how Google thinks about their operations. The fact is, webmasters are rarely the main priority for the search engine to begin with. Instead, according to Cutts, Google’s rationale behind all changes is simply that they want to return the best search results possible to keep users happy and keep them coming back.

Of course, no one is denying that Google would like users to see ads and generate revenue, but that is never the prime motivation for changes like algorithm updates.

On a similar note, Matt uses the second half of the video to discuss the offers he sees for software packages that clam to help users make money and magically fix their SEO – for a small fee, of course.

Just as you can’t buy your way to high rankings with ads the chances of a random purchased software package making you money is almost zero. Matt lays out another scenario: “If someone had a foolproof way to make money online, they would probably use that way to make money rather than packaging it up in an ebook and selling it to people.”

In the end, most of the myths are born out of a misunderstanding of Google’s goals. Too many SEO professionals think of their job strictly in terms of increasing visibility and rankings, or upping their ROI. But the search engines are just looking for the best content possible. You can spend your time trying to game and cheat to get to the top, or you can align yourself with the search engine and try to provide users something of value. According to Cutts, that should be enough to fix many of the problems less honest SEOs tend to run into.

You can watch the full video below:

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Is Google Going to Favor Secure Sites in Search Results?

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Source: The Search Guru

Source: The Search Guru

Matt Cutts has been urging webmasters to use strong encryption measures on their sites for quite a while, and he has hinted that one day Google may start rewarding those sites in their search results. Google has remained mum on the issue entirely, but there are rumors swirling that Cutts is doubling down and pushing for an algorithm update that would favor secure sites within the company.

At the SMX West conference, Cutts explained why the search engine would benefit from favoring encrypted sites by saying that it would save Google a large amount of time when new security panics occur. According to Time magazine, Cutts is quoted saying, “We don’t have the time to maybe hold your hand and walk you through and show you exactly where it happened.”

It is unclear if these types of changes are likely to be made any time soon, as most sources seem very skeptical. But, in the wake of Heartbleed, one of the most widespread security exploits in history, now would be a reasonable time to increase security guidelines and protocols.

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Quick News of the Week – April 4th 2014

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It was difficult to trust most tech news early this week, as April Fools’ Day pranks went live across the web, and all sorts of joke announcements were published. But, now the laughter has died down and the employees at Google and Bing have returned to work. We’ve gathered up their latest changes and (real) announcements, so you can be caught up going into the weekend.

Bing Testing New SERPs Layout

Bing is ending the week by following Google’s most talked about recent change. Barry Schwartz and other prominent members of the SEO community began reporting that Bing is showing a new search results layout earlier today, but it currently appears to just be a test.

Bing Test Design

The new design changes the color of the logo from gray to the more familiar golden yellow, and the search button has been colored to match. Bing has also removed the gray background from the right side column. The interface is notably cleaned up, but overall the design won’t feel like as drastic of an update when it goes live as Google’s did.

Google Gets Another Privacy Fine From Europe

Not long ago, Google was forced to pay a 145,000 EUR (approximately $189,000) to Germany for privacy violations associated with their Street View program, a Reuters story reports the search engine has now been issued a fine in Italy. The roughly $1.4 million (1 million EUR) fine also related to Street View, though this time it appears to deal with a failure to clearly mark cars used for Italian street photography in 2010.

When announcing the fine, Italian authorities acknowledged that Google has already remedied the problem and is no longer in violation.

Google Adds More Apps To Its Index

Late last year, Google announced that they would begin allowing Android users to click on a Google result and open the page directly within an app, if it is already installed on the users smartphone. The first wave of apps being indexed by Google went live in December, and it would appear the test has been a success so far.

The search engine has now announced that they would be including 24 more apps in their indexing program. You can see which apps have been added in the image below.

app-indexing-google-apps-1396614385

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The Effect of Google’s Redesign of Title Tags

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Source: Search Engine Roundtable

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

Chances are you are just beginning to get adjusted to Google’s widely-talked about search engine result pages (SERPs), but you may not have noticed the smaller details that have been tweaked to make the page look clean and coherent. For example, several eagle-eyed members of the SEO community have noticed that the redesign appears to have affected the visible title tag length for results.

The title tag, or the blue clickable link in the Google search results, doesn’t really have a defined number of characters allowed. It isn’t like Twitter, where you have a hard character limit. Instead, Google uses an algorithm to determine exactly how many characters are shown.

Obviously, Google hasn’t disclosed the details of their algorithm, but Pete Meyers from Moz says the title lengths range from 42 to 68 characters allowed, with most showing 57 to 58 characters.

Most importantly, this change has no direct impact on rankings. Google still reads your entire title and uses everything to helped determine rankings. However, this could make some titles less click friendly or attractive as they used to be.

You won’t be punished directly by Google for using the same strategy you previously have for titles tags, but you might refine your technique slightly to keep future titles as appealing to readers as possible.

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A Single Guest Blog Post Gets Long-Time SEO Site Penalized

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We try to keep our readers and clients updated with all of Google’s biggest news, whether it be redesigns, guideline changes, or newsworthy penalties. It makes sense, as Google currently receives over half of all searches made every day.

But, even those of us who keep a careful eye on the best guidelines and policy trends of the biggest search engine can end up outright confused by Google occasionally. A story reported by Danny Sullivan yesterday happens to be one of those situations.

Google has been outspoken against guest blogging or guest posts being used “for SEO purposes”, and they have even warned that sites using these questionable guest posts could be subject to penalties. However, the latest story claims that Google has penalized a moderately respected website for a single guest post. Most interesting, the post was published well before the guidelines were put into place and seems to be relevant to the site it was posted on.

The penalty was placed against DocSheldon.com, which is run by Doc Sheldon, a long-time SEO professional. Recently, Sheldon was notified that a penalty was placed against his entire site. The penalty report informed Sheldon that Google determined there were “unnatural links” from his site.

So far, this is the typical penalty put against those who are attempting to run link schemes of some form. But, obviously someone who has been around as long as Sheldon knows better than that. So what were the “unnatural links”?

It took an open letter from Doc Sheldon to Google, which he then tweeted to Matt Cutts, one of Google’s most distinguished engineers, to get some answers.

Cutts mentions one blog post published to Sheldon’s site, which appears to have been written in March 2013.

The post is exactly what the title suggests it would be (“Best Practices for Hispanic Social Networking”), but it contains two links at the end, within the author’s bio. One of the links takes you to the author’s LinkedIn page. The other, however, claims to take people to a “reliable source for Hispanic data”, which leads to a page that appears to be closer to a lead-generation pitch about big data.

Source: Search Engine Land

Source: Search Engine Land

Now, there are a few issues with the link. The page it leads to is suspect, and some would say that the words “Hispanic data” in the anchor text could be potentially too keyword rich. But, Cutts seems to imply that the content of the blog post was as much an issue as the links. As Sullivan puts it, “Apparently, he fired up some tool at Google to take a close look at Sheldon’s site, found the page relating to the penalty and felt that a guest post on Hispanic social networking wasn’t appropriate for a blog post about SEO copywriting.”

That would be a fair criticism, but if you take a closer look at the top of Sheldon’s site, he doesn’t claim the site to be limited to SEO copywriting. In fact, the heading outright states that the site relates to “content strategy, SEO copywriting, tools, tips, & tutorials”. You may take note that social practices for any demographic could certainly be relevant to the topic of content strategy.

So, as the story stands, Google has levied a large penalty against an entire site for a single blog post with one questionable link, all because they decided it wasn’t on-topic. Does that mean Google is now the search police, judge, and jury? Sadly, it appears so for the moment. Little appears to have changed since the story broke yesterday. DocSheldon.com is still dealing with the penalties, and Google hasn’t backed down one bit since the penalty was sent.

It goes without saying, the events have sparked a large amount of debate in the SEO community, especially following the widely followed penalty placed against the guest blog network MyBlogGuest. The wide majority agree this penalty seems questionable, but for the moment it appears it is best to stay under the radar by following Google’s policies to the letter. Hopefully they will become a bit more consistent with their penalties in the meantime.

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Celebrate Get Your Business Online Week

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Get Your Business Online Week

Still hesitant about finally making the leap and getting your business online? There are countless business owners who find themselves still on the fence about expanding your brand’s business on the internet. Some are worried about the resources available, the skills needed to make their business shine, or whether their business will actually benefit from going online, but all of those questions can be easily addressed. You just have to be ready to really invest in expanding your brand in a new way.

Today marks the start of Get Your Business Online Week, so there is no better time to make the leap to the internet. Every year Google partners with local businesses and partners to provide free virtual workshops for business owners and anyone else with an internet connection.

You will be able to speak with businesses that have already prospered online such as Barkbox, GoldieBlox, and Dollar Shave Club, and full tutorials and demos will be offered throughout the week to help you understand all the steps of building a website and establishing your brand.

Best of all, Google is doubling down on the direct link to speak to their experts with their Helpouts by Google.

If you still can’t decide whether now is the time for your business to take charge of their online presence, consider that Green Mountain Bee Farm in Fairfax, CT. experienced a five-fold increase in sales by simply expanding their business online. Meanwhile, Christine Fitzpatrick Hair and Makeup in Birmingham, Mich. managed to attract 50 percent more clients than they had before getting online.

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Large Guest Blog Network Disappears From Search Results After Penalty

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Well, you can’t say nobody warned them. Not long ago, Matt Cutts clearly stated that Google was planning on penalizing large guest blogging networks, and yesterday Google followed through. It was widely assumed Google would be targeting MyBlogGuest, run by Ann Smarty, brand manager of Internet Marketing Ninjas, though Ann continuously defended her site, claiming they would be safe because MyBlogGuest didn’t sell links and wasn’t a “network.”

It turns out everyone but Ann Smarty was right, as Cutts announced on Monday that the guest blog network had been taken down, and MyBlogGuest vanished from the rankings, even for branded terms. Eventually Smarty even confirmed the penalty through Twitter.

MyBlogGuest has been running since 2009, and estimates they were averaging 256 articles posted per day at their height. But, the big problem is that MyBlogGuest had a very open policy on linking and refused numerous times to make it possible for links to be nofollowed.

Jennifer Slegg refers to MyBlogGuest’s true purpose as a “well-known secret” in the industry. Numerous agencies were using MyBlogGuest to promote their clients, while supporting writers who would sell links openly. The website community embraced both, making the more questionable actions wildly obvious to anyone paying attention.

Smarty is still defending her site. Since the take-down, she has spoken to multiple news outlets. She told Search Engine Watch “There are lots of networks that openly abuse the concept and promote paid guest blogging (I won’t list any names; I am not as bad as that!) but they choose to hit the oldest, best-known brand first – does it make sense? Instead of setting a good example, they make it obvious that no one is safe even such good guys as us.”

Notably, it seems that MyBlogGuest isn’t the only entity being punished in this action. Even sites that were only benefiting from the guest blog network’s policies are being struck with manual action penalties.

When Cutts made the announcement that Google had penalized the guest blog network, many speculated that sites who had been heavily using the network would also get cut down to size. Then, many sites began to notice manual actions appearing in their Webmaster Tools, but there was no clear confirmation the two were related. That is, until Cutts cleared up the situation somewhat by tweeting that Google is acting against sites that benefited from any spammy behavior on the site, which could range from running blogs hosting guest posts or benefiting from the bad links.

I could almost feel sorry for the owners of the associated sites being penalized for these behaviors, but Google has been warning about penalties for months without taking action. There has been plenty of time to cut away from questionable guest blogging practices and platforms, but many like Ann Smarty believed they could circumvent the rules. In the future, it is better to just follow the guidelines, rather than becoming the face of a new spammy industry’s downfall.

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Google Rolls Out New Search Results Design for Everyone

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By now you’ve probably noticed your search results don’t look like they used to. Google told the public their new look was just an experiment earlier this week, but now everyone is getting to see Google’s search results pages with the new design.

Jon Wiley, Google’s lead designer for Google Search basically made the announcement the new style was rolling outto desktop when he said on Google+. “you may have noticed that Google Search on desktop looks a little different today.” He specifies desktop users because the style was showing up much more prominently on mobile before the full roll-out.

As many have noted, the new SERPs have much larger titles and the underlines have been removed. Jon also notes that Google “evened out all the line heights,” which he claims “improves readibility and creates an overall cleaner look.”

Most of those changes won’t have a huge impact on the usability of the search engine, but visitors will have to become accustomed to a different way of marking ads. Google has used smaller yellow tags to pinpoint which results were part of ads on mobile, but desktop users have still been relying on the lightly colored boxes Google has relied on for years to mark ads. Google says the change is intended to unify the mobile and desktop search experience. Jon explained:

Improving consistency in design across platforms makes it easier for people to use Google Search across devices and it makes it easier for us to develop and ship improvements across the board.

There are bound to be plenty of complaints about the redesign. I personally don’t enjoy it as much as the old style, but most will acclimate to it fairly quickly. But, it isn’t a high-profile site redesign unless people initially throw a small tantrum in the meantime.

You can compare the old and new designs below.

Google Search Results New Design

 

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