16% Claim Recovery After Google’s Panda 4.0 Update
On May 20th, Google began rolling out Panda 4.0 and shortly after we asked you to take our Panda poll. Thousands of you did and I wanted to share the results.
I asked, How Did Google Panda 4…
Google AdWords Drops IE9 Support
While Bing Ads dropped IE8 support, Google AdWords is dropping Internet Explorer 9.
If you want to login and manage your Google AdWords account, you need to use the latest version of Internet Explorer or Safari, Chrome or Firefox. Basically…
…
A Strategic Approach for New SEO Clients
Starting a new SEO project, or want to check ongoing projects? Use the following approach, which includes a mix of specific keyword research, testing important assumptions, and growing traffic and rankings with link building and copywriting.
Reusable Code For MCC Scripts Will Save You Tons Of Time In AdWords
Writing reusable code is something all developers strive for. Any developer worth his/her salt is continuously building a library of reusable code snippets to use in future development. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel each time a common problem is encountered because you can use the…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Book Review: Contagious
At SES London this year in one of the content marketing/social sharing sessions which featured Matt Roberts from Lindex, he mentioned Contagious by Jonah Berger as one item on a list of resources and items that they had found useful in evaluating whether or not they were producing “shareable content”. Intrigued, I ordered a copy during […]
Post from Arianne Donoghue on State of Digital
Book Review: Contagious
How to Grow Your Google+ Fan Base to 1,000 Followers & Beyond
You’re going to have to use every bit of your community management savvy to crank up your Google+ following to 1,000 and beyond. If you don’t yet have 1,000 followers on Google+, here’s how to go back to basics and grow that fan base.
Google To Warn Searchers When A Mobile URL Redirects To The Homepage
Don’t annoy mobile searchers. That’s the message behind a new warning that Google is showing in mobile search results on smartphones. On the Webmaster Central blog, Google alerted webmasters late yesterday that it will let smartphone searchers know if it thinks a website has a…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google Adds Street View Tours Of World Cup Stadiums
With the World Cup just a week away, Google has expanded its Street View imagery to coincide with the biggest sporting event on earth. Available today is new imagery inside all 12 stadiums that will be used during the tournament. You can do a 360-degre…
5 Reasons Why Pitching International SEO is a Pain
For global corporations, the move to international SEO is inevitable. Despite these challenges, companies can’t afford to avoid international markets, regardless of the difficulty. Each of these difficulties can be overcome.
Getting to grips with mobile SEO
Responsive vs adaptive vs mobile specific sites
The case for responsive design is well beyond the tipping point now, especially with Google specifically saying that it prefers responsive design solutions to mobile specific sites. Content is easily shareable across any device, page load times are faster and there’s a single URL.
However embarking on responsive design can be a costly and lengthy overhaul, and if not done correctly can end up being slower for mobiles than other alternatives.
Google’s advice also doesn’t mean that if you have a separate mobile domain you will not rank highly, it’s just easier for Google to crawl one set of pages and index them rather than crawl two sets of pages and then figure out which one to index for which platform.
Mobile sites are easier to implement and of course offer customisable, mobile exclusive content. However the potential for duplicating content and splitting link authority is much higher.
Another solution may be adaptive web design where a server delivers different content to different devices.
This is a solution that takes elements from responsive design (single URL, no duplication of content, easily shareable) and marries them to elements from mobile specific (customisable content, fast loading times). However this is also a costly and technically complicated process.
Check out Graham Charlton’s post for more pros and cons of adaptive web design.
Verifying your mobile website
Head to Google Webmaster Tools to verify your site using its specific mobile settings. This will give you more mobile-specific information such as search queries that do not show up as ‘not provided’.
After this, be sure that when you upload your sitemap to Google, you’re uploading your specific mobile sitemap. It has an additional <mobile:mobile/> tag requirement.
Page speed
Google has announced on multiple occasions that site speed has a big impact on mobile search engine results pages (SERPs). Your website needs to be as fast as it possibly can be to rank highly and provide an optimal user experience.
HTTP redirects are a common way to slow down page loads, and therefore perhaps a good reason not to offer a separate mobile site.
Google+ Local
According to most SEO experts, Google+ has a huge influence on personalised search results. On a mobile screen, the presence of a Google Local listing will be more even more prominent than on a desktop due to the screen size.
Having a Google Local profile will also put your website on Google Maps and on the Maps app. I talk extensively about the benefits of local SEO in relation to Google Places for Business and Google+ Local in Why you need local SEO.
PageSpeed Insights
This tool has been updated to include additional recommendations on mobile usability.
Measured on a score from 1-100, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will quickly diagnose some problems holding a website back from being 100% mobile optimised from a speed point of view.
The tool not only identifies the weaknesses for mobile in a website, but offers some generic information on how to fix them and highlights examples of problem pages.
Some of the key pieces of advice include…
- Sizing your content so it scrolls vertically, never horizontally.
- Use legible font sizes without the user zooming in.
- Tappable buttons that are large and separate enough from each other not to be accidentally pressed.
- Avoiding plugins of any kind, particularly Flash.
For more on SEO, download our latest SEO Best Practice Guide.
Directing smartphone users to the page they actually wanted
Webmaster level: all
Have you ever used Google Search on your smartphone and clicked on a promising-looking result, only to end up on the mobile site’s homepage, with no idea why the page you were hoping to see vanished? This is such a common annoyance that we’ve even seen comics about it. Usually this happens because the website is not properly set up to handle requests from smartphones and sends you to its smartphone homepage—we call this a “faulty redirect”.
We’d like to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting today in our English search results in the US, whenever we detect that smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the the page they asked for, we may note it below the result. If you still wish to proceed to the page, you can click “Try anyway”:
And we’re providing advice and resources to help you direct your audience to the pages they want. Here’s a quick rundown:
1. Do a few searches on your own phone (or with a browser set up to act like a smartphone) and see how your site behaves. Simple but effective. :)
2. Check out Webmaster Tools—we’ll send you a message if we detect that any of your site’s pages are redirecting smartphone users to the homepage. We’ll also show you any faulty redirects we detect in the Smartphone Crawl Errors section of Webmaster Tools:
3. Investigate any faulty redirects and fix them. Here’s what you can do:
- Use the example URLs we provide in Webmaster Tools as a starting point to debug exactly where the problem is with your server configuration.
- Set up your server so that it redirects smartphone users to the equivalent URL on your smartphone site.
- If a page on your site doesn’t have a smartphone equivalent, keep users on the desktop page, rather than redirecting them to the smartphone site’s homepage. Doing nothing is better than doing something wrong in this case.
- Try using responsive web design, which serves the same content for desktop and smartphone users.
If you’d like to know more about building smartphone-friendly sites, read our full recommendations. And, as always, if you need more help you can ask a question in our webmaster forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
How Google Might Identify Synonyms for Entities Using Anchor Text
When Google indexes the Web, it’s often been convenient to think about the search engine running two different methods or approaches that seem to run in parallel. One of those involves the crawling and indexing and ranking of pages on the web (and images, videos, news, podcasts, and other documents). The other approach doesn’t look […]
The post How Google Might Identify Synonyms for Entities Using Anchor Text appeared first on SEO by the Sea.
The Best of MozCons Past: 7 Future-Facing Videos
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
The countdown to
MozCon—July 14-16 in Seattle—is on! We’ve finalized the agenda and our speaker selection, put in our swag orders, and choreographed happy dances for Roger. We’re also counting down as ticket sales speed up and are getting closer to selling out. That means:
For the best MozCon deal, make sure you
take a 30-day free trial and register as a Moz Subscriber. If our software’s not for you, cancel at anytime, and we’ll still look forward to seeing you at MozCon.
To get you a little more excited, we’re sharing these seven future-forward videos from talks from our past two MozCons. This is the first time that these videos have been available for free! That’s right, all-new content just for you because we love you.
If each of these videos doesn’t make you a little more happy to be part of this industry, thrilled to dive into your work, and overly-eager to attend MozCon yourself, then I suggest some
cat video therapy. ;)
1. Building a Winning Video Marketing Strategy with Phil Nottingham
Want more Phil? He’ll be back on stage with “YouTube: The Most Important Search Engine You Haven’t Optimized For” this year.
2. The D-Word: Leading the Way to Great Design with Jenny Lam
You can never spend too much time thinking about your design and how to make it better.
3. Beyond 10 Blue Links: The Future of Ranking with Dr. Pete Meyers
Noted as the scariest presentation from last year, Dr. Pete takes you on a journey through the SERPs. Don’t miss his “How to Never Run Out of Great Ideas” this year.
4. 35 Ways to Get Links with Paddy Moogan
And pencils down… Paddy will be bringing his great ideas and beer challenge back this year with “Beyond SEO – Tactics for Delivering an Integrated Marketing Campaign.”
5. Next Level Local Tactics: Making Your SEO Stand Out with Dana DiTomaso
“Wow.” That’s pretty much what I thought after seeing this presentation live. Dana will be give a talk titled “Prove Your Value” this year.
6. A New Form of CRO with Joanna Lord
You’ll never look at conversion rate optimization the same way again.
7. Strings to Things: Entities and SEO with Matthew Brown
Yep, Matthew basically predicted Hummingbird before it hit Google’s Algo.
Now are you ready for MozCon?
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
How Gender is Distributed Online
We would like to think the Internet is a utopia of fairness and opportunity but the reality is, some members of society miss out more than others.
A surprising statistic has been revealed recently – there are 200 million fewer women online globally.…
The post How Gender is Distributed Online appeared first on DEJAN SEO.
Event Recap – Hook, Line & Sinker
On May 14th we held our sold-out “Hook, Line & Sinker” mini-conference event at the Search Church, a deep dive into content marketing. By bringing together Ed Tettemer, Fastspot’s Tracey Halvorsen, Simple.com’s Scott Edwards, Conversion XL’s Peep Laja and our very own Wil Reynolds, we offered a multi-perspective narrative on content and its role (and […]
SearchCap: Bing Updates Music Video Search, Bing Ads Mobile Tweaks & Hotel Search On Google Glass
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Now Accepting Entries For Its 2014 Homepage Photo Contest Bing announced on its Facebook page that it is curre…
The iOS App Business for Retailers is About To Get a Little Crazy
MacRumors reports that iOS8 features the app for nearby retailers showing up on your phone’s lock screen. For example, if you are in a Starbucks, the Starbucks app icon will appear on your lock screen: “It appears that Apple will also suggest apps that are not installed when visiting certain locations. For example, a Twitter […]
The post The iOS App Business for Retailers is About To Get a Little Crazy appeared first on Local SEO Guide.
Bing Now Accepting Entries For Its 2014 Homepage Photo Contest
Bing announced on its Facebook page that it is currently accepting entries for its 2014 homepage photo contest. Coinciding with its 5th birthday, Bing is asking for photo submissions to be uploaded via a link it has posted on Facebook: It’s been 5 years since we launched Bing. To celebrate, we’re…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Finding New Music On Bing Just Got Easier
Bing announced today it has updated the way it delivers music video search results. According to the announcement, people search for music videos differently than when they are searching for other types of videos: When we examined search session data, …
EU Regulators Meet Amid “Right To Be Forgotten” Confusion
The caution “be careful what you wish for” might be appropriate going into a meeting of 28 European privacy regulators in Brussels this week. Following the European Court of Justice’s creation of the Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) and Google’s launch of a web form to field…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.