Google’s April Fools’ Day Jokes For 2014: Google Maps Pokémon Challenge, Magic Hand & More
Is it just me, or does it seem like Google starts celebrating April Fools’ Day earlier and earlier every year? No company on the web takes April 1st more seriously than Google, as we’ve been covering for years now: Google’s April Fools’ Day 2013 Joke-A-Thon: YouTube…
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Google’s Matt Cutts On How They Evaluate New Search Algorithms
Google’s Matt Cutts, the head of search spam, posted a video today answering how Google goes about evaluating which new search algorithms they use and which they throw away or adapt. The question was posed by James Foster of Sydney, Australia who asked: What are some of the metrics that…
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US Court Says Baidu Has Free Speech Right To Censor Search
Late last week Chinese search engine Baidu succeeded in gaining dismissal of a lawsuit by pro-democracy activists based in New York (Zhang et al. v. Baidu.com, Inc). Plaintiffs had sued in the US and argued that Baidu improperly blocked them from seeing content on the search engine. Specifically,…
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Google Webmaster Tools Index Status Showing Data For HTTPS Protocol
Google has announced they’ve added “more precise” data for the Index Status reports in Google Webmaster Tools. Specifically, Google is now reporting each indexed URLs for each protocol, specifically both for HTTP and HTTPS, as well as for verified subdirectories. Google said this…
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Microsoft Bing Testing Showing “Alternative” Search Engines In Search Results
We’ve seen how Google may display competitive search engines in their search results, based on an EU antitrust settlement. But how will it look for Bing if they did the same thing? Aaron Wall at SEO Book posted a screen shot of what he saw Bing testing around displaying…
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Survey: Search Engines Dominate Mobile Product Research
Last week, Local Corporation released survey results from its latest round of consumer mobile shopping research. The company is promoting a new version of its local-mobile shopping app Havvit. The survey was conducted in March and carried out by the Ch…
Google Referrer Data Is Getting Passed On Searches From IE8
IE8, still the most popular version of the Internet Explorer browser worldwide, is now passing referrer data from Google searches. The move to drop SSL is recent, and isn’t carried over to other versions of Internet Explorer. The full set of referrer data is passing through. Here’s a…
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Webmasters Getting Creative With Their Link Removal Requests & It Works
The new link building is link removal as some would say. Especially with all the craze around links and how they can get you penalized, link removal requests have become a thing all too familiar to anyone who runs a web site. The challenge, like with l…
Google Now Allows You To Rearrange The Google Navigation Bar
Google announced last night that you can now, or in the upcoming weeks as Google rolls it out, customize and rearrange the order of the products and apps within the Google navigation bar as you like. Meaning, if you want to move up the Google Maps icon…
Car Makers Drove 14.4 Million Clicks From Google Ads In 2 Months (And That Doesn’t Include Mobile)
A whopping 177 automotive manufacture sites drove 14.4 million paid search clicks from Google ads on desktops and tablets this January and February. Of those 177 advertisers, the top 20 advertisers (roughly 11 percent) accounted for 81 percent of the paid search clicks in the two month period,…
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Is Rewarder The Heir Of Google Answers?
There have been a range of “answer engines” or “help engines” (Q&A sites) that have come and gone over the years. Some of them might be considered “social search.” Yahoo Answers, Ask.com (more recently focused on Q&A), Answers.com, Askville (Amazon),…
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How A Single Guest Post May Have Gotten An Entire Site Penalized By Google
Google made it clear earlier this year that those doing guest posts “for SEO purposes” might be subject to penalties. But the latest chapter in its war on guest posts feels a bit crazy: an entire site put into Google’s penalty box because of a single guest post that Google…
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Bing Ads Launches Product Ads In U.S., Mobile Version Now In Beta
After months of testing, Product Ads are now available through Bing Ads in the U.S. Like AdWords Product Listing Ads (PLA), Bing’s version are powered by merchant product feeds. The ads display on the Yahoo Bing Network for commerce-related searches and feature a product image, title, price…
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New AdWords For Video Reporting Now Rolling Out In Google Analytics
Google is introducing a new Video Campaigns report in Google Analytics to give advertisers more insights into the performance of their YouTube TrueView ads that are managed through AdWords for Video campaigns. The new report is rolling out in Analytics…
Google Says Don’t Delete Your Disavow File Prior To Uploading A New One
Yesterday, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted an interesting tip to SEOs around disavow file submissions. He said that you should not delete or remove the original disavow file when uploading a new one. He said instead, upload the new one, which will replace the old disavow…
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Five Days Later, It Looks Like Google Has Penalized Web Design Library For Selling Links
We all saw this one coming: Web Design Library, the website that was using Twitter to renew paid links last week, appears to have earned a Google penalty. While I was researching last week’s article, I saw the site ranking at No. 8 for the term web design. Today, I’m seeing it at No. 48…
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BrandVerity Offers Feedback From Google, Bing On Paid Search Trademark Complaints
Brands aiming to protect themselves from trademark infringement in paid search are often met with white noise after they submit complaints to the search engines. They typically aren’t told if any action was taken — and even more frustrating, if no action was taken, why. To help solve…
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Apple Broadening App-Store Search With Related Keywords
Mobile app discovery continues to be a challenge for most developers. Quixey (across platforms) and Google (on Android) are trying to address that challenge by indexing deep links within apps. For its part, Apple appears to be trying to broaden App Sto…
Google Misattributing Content From Major News Publishers
A reader has sent us examples of Google misattributing content from dozens of large online news publications, with hundreds thousands of examples of Google indexing URLs and pages, but that content being pulled from a different source. For example, if …
Google Now Comes To Chrome For Desktops & Laptops
Google’s amazing predictive search tool, Google Now, is finally being made available to people on desktop and laptop computers using the regular release of its Chrome browser. Until now, it had only been available through mobile devices or to those using beta versions of Chrome. Google shared…
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