The Best Link Building For Local SEO — None!

Since Google rolled out the Panda and Penguin algorithm updates, numerous sites have been impacted or penalized. Often, companies that incur penalties or experience a drop in rankings don’t have a clue as to what they’ve done wrong — especially small, local businesses. This leads…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google’s Mobile “Quick View” Trial Appears To Be Over

Google appears to have quietly put an end to a long-running trial that added a “quick view” option next to mobile (smartphone only) search results from select websites. The feature offered searchers a fast way to see a lightweight version of a web page without having to fully click…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Verify your site in Webmaster Tools using Google Tag Manager

Webmaster level: Intermediate

If you use Google Tag Manager to add and update your site tags, now you can quickly and easily verify ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools using the container snippet code.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click Manage site for the site you’d like to verify, then select Verify this site. If you haven’t added the site yet, you can click the Add a site button in the top right corner.

To do this, you must have “View, Edit, and Manage” account level permissions in Google Tag Manager.

2. On the Verification page, select Google Tag Manager as the verification method and follow the steps on your screen.

3. Click Verify.

And you’re done!

If you’ve got any questions about this verification method, drop by the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by , Webmaster Trends Analyst

Spurred By PRISM Scandal, StartPage & Ixquick Surpass 3 Million Daily Searches

Alternative search engines are having a good week, likely thanks to public awareness and concern over data and privacy issues being raised by the PRISM scandal. StartPage and Ixquick, two small search engines from the same company, announced this week …

Search In Pics: Bing Glasses, Google Shoes & #ThroughGlass Cop

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google Bus Seats: Source: Google+ Bing Glasses: Source: Twitter Google…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

More New Tools From Bing Ads: Change History Graph In The Works

Following up on the new Bing Ads keyword performance visualization tool, Keyword Distribution Graph, Microsoft will soon be rolling out a visualization tool for change history. The Change History Graph will be available in the web interface and is meant to offer quick visual insight into the…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google Authorship Beyond Webpages

In last month’s post about authorship, I shared that Google has been experimenting with inferring authorship for PDF documents in addition to webpages. This piqued my curiosity to see if any other indexable filetypes could also have inferred authorship. Microsoft Office Files PowerPoint files…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.