Have you read up about Google’s new algorithm update yet? Responsive web design is now more important than ever. Starting on 21 April 2015, Google will be using mobile friendly factors in the ranking algorithm for mobile search results.
Google confirmed the release of Penguin 3.0 on Friday – the first Penguin update in over a year. Penguin targets sites deemed to be spammy, especially those found in violation of Google’s guidelines about linking.
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Spain has passed a new law forcing the American giant Google to pay newspapers a fee every time it links to one of their news stories on its search engine.
The law, known as the Canon AEDE, states that sites which link to a news article alongside a meaningful description will have to pay a bill to the publisher.
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Google invests a lot in making sure that their services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google.
Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analysts wrote on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:
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Ever been flummoxed by a site’s ranking getting nailed in English on Google.co.uk but still ranking high and dry in other languages? Me too. Try telling the client “English? Naaaaah. Don’t worry about English. You’re page 1 for Latvian!”
But if Google has a problem with your site, why only in English? Whyyyyy?
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Microsoft’s search engine ‘Bing’ has introduced its right to be forgotten form allowing Europeans to ask for pages of web content to be removed from its online search results.
The form, similar to the one that we saw Google introduce last month, gives its users an opportunity to request a link to be blocked from the site, which may be detrimental to their character, which will then be evaluated by a member of the Microsoft team.
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Wondering why your Google+ profile pic and number of Google+ circles you’re in have vanished from search results? Don’t worry, it’s not that Google doesn’t like the look of your mug. Google’s John Mueller announced they are making a major change in the search results around authorship. Specifically, Google is dropping the profile photo and circle count from the search listings where authorship is assigned to a web page.
Search engine optimization — SEO — may seem like some form of obscure magic code known only to a handful of overpaid consultants. The truth is there is a science to it. Search engines reward pages with the right combination of ranking factors, or “signals.” SEO is about ensuring your content generates the right type of signals which search engines look for when determining the relevance of a site to a search query.
Google’s recently released an update to the way its search algorithm works, dubbed “Panda 4.0″ aimed at discriminating against websites that publish duplicate or spammy content. It has long been a conundrum as to the SEO value of real estate website listings which are imported from and exported to third party sites. So how will Google”s Panda 4.0 update affect real estate websites?
Pandas may look cute and cuddly, but they can be extremely hazardous to your health. The same can be said about Google’s most recent update to the way its search algorithm works, dubbed “Panda 4.0,”which is said to be wreaking havoc with some major brands on the web, according to Business Insider.
“The intent of Google’s updates is the same as all its previous updates: It is attempting to discriminate against spam webpages that publish duplicate, thin, or useless content simply for the purpose of getting search traffic from Google,” writes Jim Edwards for BI.
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Google may be forced to be more forthcoming when asked to remove information about individuals from its search results. This follows Google’s loss in a landmark court case which questioned the amount of control they were administering over data privacy in Europe.
A client of ours – we’ll call him John Smith – wrote to us with this very good question:
“I’m thinking of buying ExpatRemovals.co.uk for my removal service for expats. The chap I am buying it from says that from an SEO point of view, ‘this domain name will drive substantial targeted traffic to your website for years to come as each and every month 1000’s of people type the term ‘Expat Removals’ into Google, making this name an absolute category killer!’
“Would this be a good domain for us and to run landing page traffic? Would it receive a lot of traffic because of the keywords in the domain?”
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Google changed the search engine market in the 90s by evaluating a website’s backlinks instead of just the content, like others did. Updates like Panda and Penguin show a shift in importance towards content. Will backlinks lose their importance?
BBC News – Facebook has agreed a deal to share public data from its users with Yandex – Russia’s largest search engine. The deal will give Yandex full access to public data from users in Russia, Turkey and CIS countries including Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The data includes users’ posts and comments on them. Profiles or posts set to “private” will not be searchable.
Read MoreGoogle has released a new Webmaster Help video featuring Matt Cutts talking about duplicate and unique meta descriptions. Cutts answers this submitted question: Is it necessary for each single page within my website to have a unique metata description?
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To mark 15th Birthday at the end of September, the world’s biggest search engine Google revealed ‘Hummingbird’ a new search algorithm.
For those of you with a foot in SEO this differs from the Panda (Feb 2011, bad content) and Penguin (April 2012, bad linking) updates from the past couple of years in that it is not an update, but a completely new algorithm.
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Have you noticed when searching on Google that your competition’s search results is displayed with little thumbnail image of someone with their name written next to it?
Want to know what it is, if it’s of any benefit, and if so, how to get it?.
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Fingers and toes crossed. This week Google has launched a massive update to its Penguin web-spam algorithm, which promises to have a big impact on search results. So if you’ve now discovered that your website is no longer on page 1 of Google, you have probably been Penguined.