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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Facebook announced this week that it is making some improvements to the News Feed function on its site.
There will be two updates, the first is to help reduce click-baiting headlines, and the second is to help people see links shared on Facebook in the best format.
‘Click-baiting’ is a method where publishers post vague links with a headline to encourage people to click on it to see more. Posts like these usually get lots of clicks and the more they are seen by people the higher up in your news feed they appear. In a post published in its online newsroom Facebook said it will reduce the amount of click baiting on its site so it “does not drown out the things that people really want to see…”
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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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A French judge has ruled that blogger Caroline Doudet should pay damages to a restaurant owner after her negative blog review was ranking highly in Google’s search results and damaging the restaurants reputation.
Ms Doudet was sued by the restaurant owner of II Giardino, based in a region of southwestern France, after she wrote a not so flattering blog review about the ‘poor service’ and ‘poor attitude’ that she encountered after dining there in 2013.
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