There’s a Good Chance Google Is Rejecting Some of Your Products Right Now
A simple guide for how to prevent your products from getting rejected on Google.
Lessons From Google@Manchester: You Don’t Need To Be Big To Be Best
Two talks at the annual Google@Manchester conference in the UK this week revealed the light at the end of the tunnel for SMEs everywhere.
The post Lessons From Google@Manchester: You Don’t Need To Be Big To Be Best appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Moz: Google’s New Quick Answer Box Now Showing 98% More Often
According to a Moz tracking study the new formatted quick answers box you find in Google for queries like [what is seo] is showing up 98% more often than a week ago. Overall, general answer boxes, including stock quotes, weather forecasts, box scores a…
Google Expands Dynamic Remarketing Ads
Google is expanding their dynamic remarketing ads to more verticals including hotels, flights, real estate, classifieds, jobs, auto…
Connection Time & HTTP Status Codes Used By GoogleBot For Crawl Efficiency
There is nothing worse than knowing Google is having a tough time accessing your content unintentionally. Well, truth is, if you robots.txt or nofollow your site out of Google by accident, I don’t feel bad for you. But if your server flakes out on you…
Was I Hit By Google Panda 4.1? Looks Like I Was…
Last Thursday, September 25th, Google announced that they began rolling out Panda 4.1 – a revised algorithm to improve their detection of Panda like signals and ultimately aim at helping smaller sites do better with the algorithm…
8 Weeks After Migrating To HTTPS: Google Webmaster Tools Analytics
The day or so after Google announced there was a ranking benefit from HTTPS (tiny signal they said), I migrated my corporate site over from HTTP to HTTPS. I did so…
The “Content-Driven” Sales Funnel
Though the “integrated” approach to content marketing will mean that your content is discovered through many varied channels, including search, it’s always best to take a keyword-centric approach to begin with.
Comment Spam 2.0
A new post from www.davidnaylor.co.uk. BAZINGA!
The post Comment Spam 2.0 appeared first on UK SEO Blog by Dave Naylor – SEO Tools, Tips & News.
Top Tips for Developing Personalised User Experience
In the current age of digital the success of any online business depends on satisfying its website visitors. Competition in most sectors is fierce and business owners should go the extra mile to improve the user experience and engage with customers. Interacting with a website should be like having a one to one conversation between […]
Post from Polly Pospelova on State of Digital
Top Tips for Developing Personalised User Experience
To Avoid Liability, Google Limits German News Content To Headlines
German news and magazine publishers are determined, one way or another, to get Google to pay them for their content. They’re not upset about the content appearing in Google News or search. They want it to appear – they just want Google to pay for it. Google doesn’t want to pay….
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
More Google Answer Boxes, with Bonus Experiment!
Posted by Dr-Pete
Last week, drowned out by the Panda 4.1 rollout, the
MozCast Feature Graph detected a significant jump in the presence of answer boxes (+42% day-over-day, up to +44% on September 30th):

This measurement includes all types of “answer” boxes – direct answers, stock quotes, weather forecasts, box scores, and even the new, attributed answer boxes. Digging into the data, it appears that almost the entirety of the jump is in the new style of answer boxes. These are the answers that are extracted from 3rd-party websites, and they look something like this:

The key distinction is that you’ll see a search-result-style title and link below the answer. Separating just this data, the same two-week graph looks like this:

The day-over-day increase from September 25-26 in new answer boxes was +98%, almost doubling the total number in our data set. This clearly represents a significant expansion in Google’s ability to extract and display answers.
The “Winning” Queries
Over 100 queries picked up the new answer boxes in our data set. Below are 10 examples. Keep in mind that any given query may gain or lose its answer box for any given search, depending on factors such as search history, localization, and personalization:
- global warming
- mba
- steampunk
- dsl
- triathlon
- pollution
- firewall
- activex
- vegan
- project management
Many of these are general, informational answers, and quite a few of the new answer boxes in our data set seem to be coming directly from Wikipedia. With this update, Google also may have added a new capability – here’s the answer box for #3 above (“steampunk”):

The image on the right is being extracted directly from the article. While we’ve seen some examples of brand boxes with logos, the ability to directly add general images seems to be new. Other new answer boxes are more traditional, such as “mba”:

Many of these new queries seem to be broad, “head” queries, but that could be a result of our data set, which tends to be skewed toward shorter, commercial queries. One four-word query with a new answer box was “girl scout cookies types”:

It’s interesting to note that the more grammatically correct “girl scout cookie types” doesn’t seem to return an answer box. These new answers seem to be very dependent on query structure and how the query matches on-page keywords.
An Experiment in Answers
If Google is pulling more and more answers directly from the index (i.e. our sites), then it stands to reason we could update those answers. A couple of months ago, I noticed that one of my posts was producing an answer box for the search “how much does google make”:

Even as the author of this post, I had to admit that was a pretty terrible answer, especially being 3-4 years out of date. I quickly assembled a Twitter mob to deal with this problem (well, basically
Ruth Burr Reedy and David Iwanow), and we unanimously decided something must be done:

I decided to edit the top of the post, adding a user-friendly update for new visitors that gave new numbers for 2013. This went up on July 10th – I posted the update on social, and by later that day the new page was cached.
Two weeks went by, and there was no change to the answer box. Naturally, I assumed this was because the old text was still in place (I had simply added new information). So, on July 24th, I carefully removed the old content (that appears in the answer box) and edited the META description. By the next day, the new page was cached and the new snippet was showing up in Google SERPs.
So, what does that answer box look like today, almost two months later? Look up four paragraphs, because it’s exactly the same. Even though the content used in this answer box is now completely gone, Google is still using it in search results.
While this is only one example, it seems to suggest that these answers are not being extracted and created in real-time – they’re being stored in some sort of internal Google knowledge base. This may sound familiar, if you’ve read anything over the last month about Google’s theoretical
Knowledge Vault.
Unlike Freebase-based Knowledge panels and answers, this internal vault can’t be edited directly. Unlike organic results, where changes to our pages are generally reflected on the next crawl-and-cache, these answer boxes are being updated much less frequently. Since these new answers link directly to pages, they could be connecting to information that’s been mismatched for weeks or even months.
At this point, there’s very little anyone outside of Google can do but keep their eyes open. If this is truly the Knowledge Vault in action, it’s going to grow, impacting more queries and potentially drawing more traffic away from sites. At the same time, Google may be becoming more possessive of that information, and will probably try to remove any kind of direct, third-party editing (which is possible, if difficult, with the current Knowledge Graph).
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SMX East 2014 Day Two Live Blog Coverage
Day two of Search Marketing Expo East is now complete and below is some of the live blog coverage we found throughout the day. BuzzFeed Founder Jonah @Peretti Talks SEO, Social at #SMX, BruceClay.com #SMX Liveblog: 25 Examples of Structured Data You Ca…
SearchCap: Google Crawling, CTR Study & Focus On The User
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Up Close @ SMX East: How Ads Influence Organic Click-Through Rate On Google If the SERPs are a zero-sum game, where…
Up Close @ SMX East: How Ads Influence Organic Click-Through Rate On Google
If the SERPs are a zero-sum game, where drawing a click in one place takes it away from another, how are ads influencing organic click-through?
The post Up Close @ SMX East: How Ads Influence Organic Click-Through Rate On Google appeared first on Sea…
So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen Yahoo Directory
Yahoo will be shutting down Yahoo Directory as well as Yahoo Education and Qwiki. The Directory will officially shutter on December 31, 2014.
Three Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting an Agency
I was initially introduced to Dreyfus model of skill acquisition by Merlin Mann, one of my favorite go-to’s for anything around productivity and the world of work. This concept changed the way I thought about problems and about expertise. The model basically describes a stage in the learning cycle where we are “advanced beginners”, which follows the […]
The post Three Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting an Agency appeared first on Ross Hudgens.
Say Goodby to Yahoo Directory
Yahoo directory will be coming to a close this December, 2014. It’s a sad day, or at least it seems like it is.
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A New Click Through Rate Study For Google Organic Results
Advanced Web Ranking has released a study showing fresh data on the click-through-rate from Google’s organic search results. The data was taken from Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries reports from large accounts back in July 2014. On average, 71.33% of searches resulted in a page one…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google On How They Know When To Slow Or Stop Crawling Your Web Site
Today at SMX East, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, Gary Illyes shared with the audience two technical ways Google determines when GoogleBot, their crawlers, should slow down or stop crawling your web site. One of the more important factors with SEO is to ensure the search engine crawlers…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.