Facebook News Feed Algorithm Change Reduces Visibility of Page Updates
Facebook is making some changes to how users see updates from individuals and pages in the news feed. This change will definitely hurt businesses running branded pages on Facebook that don’t want to pay for Facebook advertising for visibility.
SPONSOR MESSAGE: Link Building in 2014 – What’s New, What’s Not Working
Digital Marketing Depot Webcast: February 20th 1:00EDT/10:PDT – Hear link building expert Jon Ball, Page One Power’s Co-Founder and CEO discuss the SEO-link building techniques and strategies that will work in 2014. 5 key takeaways to plan your successful link building strategies in…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
A New Look for Google AdWords Rolling Out Now
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Pinterest Tests Personalized Home Page & GIFs, Rolls Out New Recipe Search
Pinterest news this week includes an announcement for a new recipe search for special dietary needs like gluten-free and “paleo,” and a couple features spotted by users that are in testing: personalized home pages and functional GIF images.
Pinterest Tests Personalized Home Page, Adds GIF Support & New Recipe Search
Pinterest news this week includes an announcement for a new recipe search for special dietary needs like gluten-free and “paleo,” and a couple features spotted by users that are in testing: personalized home pages and functional GIF images.
MapQuest Transfers Local Listings Management To Yext
Last October MapQuest started outsourcing local business listings management to Yext. The “claim your MapQuest listings” page is hosted by Yext (I believe) with a co-branded look and feel. Yesterday MapQuest notified business users that its local business center and basic local listings…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Don’t Stick a Fork in Guest Blogging Yet…
Google’s Matt Cutts has issued a warning shot to low-quality guest blogs. No one would argue that spammers haven’t been abusing guest blogging, but it can be done with integrity, and quality. Here’s why guest blogging won’t go away in 2014.
Google To Replace Smartphone User-Agent To Improve Smart Phone Indexing
Google announced they are replacing the old smartphone crawler user-agent with a new one in order to make it possible for Google to index more smartphone content. Zhijian He, a smartphone search engineer at Google said that the previous user-agent “made it impossible for Google to index…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Reputation Management Mistakes, Challenges & Solutions for 2014 at ClickZ Live New York
With only a couple of months to go until the inaugural ClickZ Live New York show, we catch up with one of our forthcoming keynote speakers, Andy Beal, CEO of Trackur.com, who gives us his thoughts on reputation management for marketers.
Yahoo Search Goes SSL: Not Provided
Yahoo is now defaulting all their search results over SSL, which is secure search but also means that pesky [not provided] figure will increase.
Danny Sullivan broke the story at Search Engine Land yesterday. In short, if you do a search at Yahoo.c…
3 Surprising Benefits Of Retargeting
As retargeting becomes more widely used and better understood, its reputation is improving. Marketers are learning to avoid creeping people out through better targeting and less intrusive messaging. Early adopters now have a year or two (or more) of ex…
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content comes in many forms on the web, and each one can negatively impact your SEO efforts. Here are the most common types of duplicate content, how it can impact your site’s search rankings, and how to fix duplication issues.
An Easy Way To Check What Referrer Data Google, Bing Or Yahoo Pass To Your Secure Site
With the three major search engines migrating their default searches to secure search, over SSL/HTTPS, marketers and webmasters want to know what referrer and analytics data will be passed to them and what won’t. The majority of Google is secure search, Yahoo yesterday defaulted all searches…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Are PDFs Optimal For SEO? The Pros And Cons
I expect that most everyone working in SEO knows that PDFs are indexable by search engines. PDFs can also appear with an authorship-rich snippet in Google SERPs. But, just because a file format can be indexed doesn’t always mean that it’s the ideal approach. Today, I’d like to…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Does Google Read Content Within Strike Or Del Tag?
Here is a question I never saw asked before – which is rare. A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster asking how Google handles the content within a strike or delete tag.
The tag is not supported in HTML5 and was replaced by the tag but t…
Google’s New Knowledge Graph Snippet Overlay
Google announced something they’ve been testing to include knowledge graph information on sites that are “notable”.
The notable sites are accompanied by little hyperlink drop downs that expand an overlay of information directly on the snippets…
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Google: No Special Indexing For Facebook Or Twitter Because They Can Block Us But…
Yesterday Matt Cutts of Google released a video explaining that Google currently doesn’t do any fancy indexing or ranking for Facebook or Twitter pages. He also said that part of that is they don’t currently try to extract social data…
December 2013 U.S. Search Engine Rankings By comScore
I don’t often cover these reports but I figured it would be nice to compare year end search ranking market share from December 2013…
How to Integrate Content Marketing – Your Path to ROI
By integrating your content marketing with all the other elements of your marketing, sales, and branding processes, your content will have a much wider appeal, more visibility, and deliver greater results and benefits. Here’s how to make it work.
A new Googlebot user-agent for crawling smartphone content
Webmaster level: Advanced
Over the years, Google has used different crawlers to crawl and index content for feature phones and smartphones. These mobile-specific crawlers have all been referred to as Googlebot-Mobile. However, feature phones and smartphones have considerably different device capabilities, and we’ve seen cases where a webmaster inadvertently blocked smartphone crawling or indexing when they really meant to block just feature phone crawling or indexing. This ambiguity made it impossible for Google to index smartphone content of some sites, or for Google to recognize that these sites are smartphone-optimized.
A new Googlebot for smartphones
To clarify the situation and to give webmasters greater control, we’ll be retiring “Googlebot-Mobile” for smartphones as a user agent starting in 3-4 weeks’ time. From then on, the user-agent for smartphones will identify itself simply as “Googlebot” but will still list “mobile” elsewhere in the user-agent string. Here are the new and old user-agents:
The new Googlebot for smartphones user-agent:Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
The Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones user-agent we will be retiring soon:Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
This change affects only Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones. The user-agent of the regular Googlebot does not change, and the remaining two Googlebot-Mobile crawlers will continue to refer to feature phone devices in their user-agent strings; for reference, these are:
Regular Googlebot user-agent:Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
The two Googlebot-Mobile user-agents for feature phones:
SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)DoCoMo/2.0 N905i(c100;TB;W24H16) (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
You can test your site using the Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools, and you can see a full list of our existing crawlers in the Help Center.
Crawling and indexing
Please note this important implication of the user-agent update: The new Googlebot for smartphones crawler will follow robots.txt, robots meta tag, and HTTP header directives for Googlebot instead of Googlebot-Mobile. For example, when the new crawler is deployed, this robots.txt directive will block all crawling by the new Googlebot for smartphones user-agent, and also the regular Googlebot:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
This robots.txt directive will block crawling by Google’s feature phone crawlers:
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /
Based on our internal analyses, this update affects less than 0.001% of URLs while giving webmasters greater control over the crawling and indexing of their content. As always, if you have any questions, you can:
- Read our recommendations for building smartphone-optimized sites
- Learn more about controlling Googlebot crawling and indexing
- Ask in our Webmaster help forums or visit one of our Webmaster Central office hours hangouts.
Posted by Zhijian He, Smartphone search engineer
