Google Authorship May Be Dead, But Author Rank Is Not

Google ended its three-year experiment with Google Authorship yesterday, but the use of Author Rank to improve search results will continue. Wait — you can have Author Rank without Google Authorship? And just what is Google Authorship versus Author Rank? Come along, because they are different…

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It’s Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results

Anyone who follows Google knows that nothing it creates is immune from elimination. Like so many efforts before it, Authorship is fading into the sunset.

The post It’s Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Google DMCA Notices Reach Record High With 7.8 Million Link Removal Requests Filed In One Week

Going on Google’s recent takedown notice numbers, it looks as if the site may be spending as much time on link removal requests as it is algorithm updates. According to TorrentFreak, Google is now processing an average of more than a million takedown requests a day, an enormous increase from…

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Google Knowledge Graph Proves To Be (Brief) PR Nightmare For Major UK Brand Greggs Bakery

The UK’s Greggs Bakery took a hit recently when its logo was hi-jacked via Google’s knowledge graph, causing a short-lived PR nightmare for the brand. Anyone searching “Greggs” on Google UK would have seen a knowledge graph box that included what appeared to be the…

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Google Targets Two European Link Networks Yesterday Morning

Over the weekend, Google has sent out mass link penalty notifications throughout Europe for those sites partaking in specific link networks with the goal of manipulating their rankings in Google. Google’s Johannes Mehlem posted on Twitter that Google has “taken action on one European…

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HubPages Acquires Squidoo: Content Migration To Begin Within A Few Weeks

Seth Godin, the founder and owner of Squidoo, announced the social content platform, has been acquired by HubPages. Squidoo was founded back in 2005, where users can create “lenses” of topics and content. Back in 2007, we did a Q&A with the founder and then in 2011 Panda hit, which…

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Google Responds To Mass Negative SEO Extortion Emails

There are widespread reports within the industry of negative SEO extortion emails being sent to website owners, webmasters, SEOs and others. The emails are claiming that an evil SEO will ruin the site’s ranking in Google and other search engines if they do not come up and wire $1,500 to the…

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Google Webmaster Guidelines Update Calls “Low Quality Guest Blog Posts” Spam

Google has updated their webmaster guidelines, specifically in the little or no original content guideline, to add “low-quality guest blog posts” as an example of “scraped content.” Brian Ussery first spotted this change, noting how Google has been fighting the use of guest…

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Google: No Comment On Possible Google Algorithm Update Over The Weekend

On Friday, August 8th, there appears to have been a Google algorithm update that Google said they will not comment on. It may likely be a monthly Google Panda refresh but we cannot confirm if there was an update and if so, if it was Panda or not. I reported the details at the Search […]

The…

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SEO Industry Tweets Its Reactions To Google’s SSL Ranking Boost

The SEO industry is abuzz today with the news of Google’s latest ranking signal: Using SSL certificates will provide a boost in Google’s search rankings. (The web hosting industry is all abuzz, too, if you’re curious.) Google says it’s a “very lightweight signal”…

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Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL Sites

Google To Give Secure Sites A Ranking Boost Google has announced (the blog post hasn’t gone live yet, actually) that going HTTPS — adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site — will give you a minor ranking boost. Google says this gives websites a small ranking benefit,…

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What’s Tops For “Offers” On Google? Google Offers – Which No Longer Exists

If you search in Google for [offers] Google will return the shuttered Google Offers page as the first search listing. But if you look carefully, you will see that Google has blocked the page from spiders within their robots.txt file and the page itself says “This site is no longer being…

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Google’s Pigeon Update Solves Yelp Problem, Boosts Local Directories

As the analysis continues on yesterday’s Google local search algorithm changes — that we’re calling the Pigeon update — one thing appears to be clear: Local directory sites are getting better visibility in Google’s search results. More specifically, it looks like…

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