To Survive You Must Give Google Your Structure Content & Data?

To Survive You Must Give Google Your Structure Content & Data? Greg Niland, aka GoodROI, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld arguing that if you do not hand over your data and content to Google in a structure format, then you will die a slow death. Greg said: Some of you are probably thinking that using schema or HTML 5 simply makes it easier for the all-evil Google to steal your content. I'll be honest you do have a valid concern but if you...

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Google: It's Hard To Recognize Your Large Photos Because Of Your JavaScript Links

Google: It's Hard To Recognize Your Large Photos Because Of Your JavaScript Links A webmaster is upset that his images aren't being indexed from his site. He posted a complaint in the Google Webmaster Help forums, in which we learn two things: (1) This webmaster was blocking Google from indexing those images with robots.txt file. This actually happens way too often. (2) Sometimes using JavaScript for the "View Larger Image" link can make it ...

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When You Have Bad Links Impacting Your Google Rankings, Which Do You Remove?

When You Have Bad Links Impacting Your Google Rankings, Which Do You Remove? I see this all the time, a forum thread, where a webmaster knows his rankings are suffering in Google because he was hit by Penguin because he has a lot of really bad, manipulative links. A WebmasterWorld thread sums up the issues a webmaster in this predicament is in. (1) They hired an SEO company (2) That SEO company ranked them well for years (3) Then Penguin smashed...

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Matt Cutts: Google's Hummingbird Algorithm Affects 90% Of Searches

Matt Cutts: Google's Hummingbird Algorithm Affects 90% Of Searches I keep coming back to this episode 227 from TWiG and in the video, Matt Cutts talked about the Hummingbird algorithm at exactly one hour and twenty minutes into the video. He spent maybe a minute or so talking about it. Matt Cutts said that the Hummingbird algorithm actually effects 90% of all searches but he said only to a small degree. So while Panda may have impacted 10%...

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Google Fetch As Googlebot Won't Crawl When Site Is Too Slow

Google Fetch As Googlebot Won't Crawl When Site Is Too Slow A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster complaining his site isn't being crawled by Google and isn't showing up in the search results. The reason, his site can't handle Googlebot crawling it. The site is pretty static and basic but the server is a cheap or free host that can't handle much activity. So Googlebot can't crawl it without taking down the site and thus stays...

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Google's URL/Content Removal Tool Now A Wizard

Google has updated their URL removal tool to make it easier and smarter to remove content specifically from third-party web sites. Google told us at Search Engine Land specifically that the tool is smarter by analyzing the content of the URL you submitted and letting you know what options you have based on the details of the cache result, search results and the actual live page. You can remove complete pages if the page is actually not live...

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Matt Cutts: Google Tries To Minimize Search Updates Before Holidays

I am not sure if you noticed but all the Google search results tracking tools flared up yesterday reporting major changes in the Google search results. You can see for yourself at MozCast, SERPs.com, SERP Metrics and Algoroo. But I personally saw very little chatter about any changes in the search results outside of major authorship reduction and even that is somewhat questionable. Matt Cutts, Google's lead guy here, responded to an angry...

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Google: We Don't Control Content On The Web

Google: We Don't Control Content On The Web I spotted a thread that is a common question in the Google Webmaster Help forums about removing content from showing up in Google. The response was even more interesting. Google's Eric Kuan, from the search quality team said that Google does not control the content on the web. He wrote: Google doesn't control the contents of the web, so before you submit a URL removal request, the content on the page...

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Google's Matt Cutts: Our Algorithms Try To Break Black Hat SEOs Spirits

Google's Matt Cutts: Our Algorithms Try To Break Black Hat SEOs Spirits  A couple weeks ago, Google's Matt Cutts was on This Week in Google (TWiG) and on episode 227 Matt had some interesting things to say. He said that Google specifically tries to break the spirits of black hat SEOs. At about an hour and 25 minutes into the video, Matt said: If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because...

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Google: Duplicate Content Pollutes 25-30% Of The Web

Google: Duplicate Content Pollutes 25-30% Of The Web We all know Google's take on duplicate content, it is not spammy, it is not something they have penalties for unless you are being completely evil. We also know that if you have exactly the same content as someone else, it might be hard for your content to rank in Google because Google shows only one of the duplicative pages. The new news is that Matt Cutts of Google said that somewhere...

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Google: It's Not About How Much Or How Many...

Google's John Mueller gave the typical Google line at this Google Webmaster Help there - quality over quantity. He wrote:I wouldn't worry about the technicalities - how much you can write about how many topics - and instead just make sure that the content which you're creating is really of the highest quality possible. This isn't something you should do for search engines, it's really something you're probably already doing. You almost certainly know yourself where the content that you're creating is thin, and where it's really significant,...

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Google's Matt Cutts Agrees, Guest Blogging Is Getting Out Of Hand

Google's Matt Cutts Agrees, Guest Blogging Is Getting Out Of Hand So Matt Cutts released another video yesterday and this is at least the fourth video on the topic of guest blogging. The deal is, Google is saying Guest Blogging as a whole is getting spammier by the day. As good things get abused, over time, those good things turn into bad things. Matt said, the guest blogging spam is "growing" in terms of spam and abuse. So he laid out...

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Google Panda Impacting Your Mega Site? Use Sitemaps To Recover?

Google Panda Impacting Your Mega Site? Use Sitemaps To Recover? A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around how to determine which sections or categories of your web site are impacted by Google's Panda algorithm. Panda has not gone away and sites are still suffering from not ranking in Google after the Panda algorithm. New sites are hit monthly, some sites are released in some way from its grips as well. The thread talks about one technique...

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Google On How To Make Better Mobile Web Sites

Google On How To Make Better Mobile Web Sites Maile Ohye, a Google developer lead who has worked on mobile and webmaster topics for a long time, shared on Google+ that she was fed up. Well, fed up with seeing "so many bad mobile websites" that she decided to do something about it. What did she do? She published documentation in the form of videos and a check list named Checklist for mobile website improvement. Maile said, "A girl can only...

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Google's Matt Cutts: Disavow Links Aggressively

Google's Matt Cutts: Disavow Links Aggressively Google's Matt Cutts released another video this one tries to answer how to remove a penalty for bad link building over a period of time. Specifically, if you know you hired a bad SEO who built bad links between a specific date range - how do you reverse the actions taken on your site for those bad link? In short, Matt said, just disavow them or maybe even all the links built between the date...

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Google Shocks Webmasters By Updating Toolbar PageRank Before Year End

Google Shocks Webmasters By Updating Toolbar PageRank Before Year End Early this morning, Google pushed out a Google Toolbar PageRank update. This update shocked webmasters because no one expected it, at least not in 2013. As you may remember, the last Toolbar PageRank update was over 10 months ago on February 4th. As I said at the six-month point, it was unusually for Google not to push out a PageRank update quarterly. Then Matt Cutts,...

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Google's Matt Cutts: We Don't Like Content Stitching

Google's Matt Cutts: We Don't Like Content Stitching Google's Matt Cutts posted a video yesterday explaining that "stitching content" is a bad idea. In short, stitching content is when you take snippets from various articles across the web and place it on a single page, even with linking to it. Matt explains there is a difference between writing a summary on a topic by using sources. But you aren't simply copying and pasting those sources, you are summarizing them and explaining them in more detail. He cites Wikipedia as a good example...

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Google: ccTLD & Wildcard Subdomain Strategies Won't Give You An "Unnatural Advantage"

Google: ccTLD & Wildcard Subdomain Strategies Won't Give You An "Unnatural Advantage" Google's John Mueller responded to a detailed technical question regarding ccTLDs, wildcard subdomains and the likelihood of it being seen as doorway pages in a Stack Exchange thread. In short, the webmaster wants to create websites that would target city names around the world, whereby TLD for each countries will be used. Here is the mapping they were...

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Google: Our Algorithms Don't Stand Still, Neither Should You

Google: Our Algorithms Don't Stand Still, Neither Should You I see these threads all the time, a webmaster complaining their rankings suddenly dropped and for no reason. Well, Google's John Mueller responded to one of these, potentially with good news but also Google-like advice. In a Google Webmaster Help thread John said: Fluctuations like this can be normal - the algorithms don't stand still and use many signals to review & determine the...

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Blocking GoogleBot By Accident? No Long Term Damage, Google Said.

Did you accidentally block Google from accessing your web site? Google says you don't have to worry, while there may be short term damage caused by it, you should recover.Google's John Mueller said it should not result in "long term damage." Here is how John put it: From our point of view, once we're able to recrawl and reprocess your URLs, they'll re-appear in our search results. There's generally no long-term damage caused by an outage like...

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Did Google Update On Thanksgiving Or Traffic Down Due To Holiday?

A WebmasterWorld thread plus dozens of threads at the Google Webmaster Help forums have webmasters complaining about both ranking changes and traffic drops from Google's search engine.The traffic drop would make sense being that it is a holiday and on US holidays traffic normally drops. But ranking changes cannot really be explained by an algorithm change. Maybe all the black friday deals and all those new pages trying to compete on top...

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Google Tells Webmaster: You'll Have To Earn Our Trust Again

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a story of a site that is trying to disavow and remove all the bad links pointing to his site.The interesting part is that even when he does, will it help with his site's rankings? The goal of this webmaster is simply to remove the manual action, but Google's John Mueller tells him he also has algorithmic trust issues. John said: looking at your site's history, it looks like you've done quite a bit for quite...

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Google's Matt Cutts: Why Google Use To Only Crawl 100 Links Per Page

Google's Matt Cutts posted a video answering the old question, can Google crawl more than a 100 links on a  specific page? Of course they can. They said so in 2008 and there are plenty of sites with hundreds of links on a page that are not penalized by Google. Google said they have no specific rule, but if the number of links you have on your page looks spammy, then Google reserves the right to take action. Of course, many SEOs are scratching...

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M-Dot Domains Need To Be Verified Separately In Google Webmaster Tools

In Google Webmaster Help there is a straight forward question and answer about how to handle M-dot (i.e. m.domain.com sites in Google Webmaster Tools.In short, an M-dot is a separate site and should be verified separately in Google Webmaster Tools. Zineb, a Google Webmaster support representative answered each question: (Q) Having verified domain ie.http://www.domain.com in GWT do I need to separately verify it's mobile version ie. m.domain.com?...

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Matt Cutts Asking For Google Webmaster Tools Feedback

This is your opportunity to give Google your two-cents on the features and issues you have with Google  Webmaster Tools. I blew up about it the other day where I asked in a nice way for Google to add a feature named automated actions to Google Webmaster Tools. Will it happen? I think it is more complex that I am making it out, so I doubt it. But if you agree, make sure Google and Matt Cutts know you want this feature. If you don't want...

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Google's Search Results Rocky This Week...

This week has been a mess for Google's search results, despite Google denying anything is going on to me. There were some tools that sparked up on November 14th that I didn't see from the webmaster chatter. This whole week, I've been seeing a lot of sporadic complaints in both WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help forums. Typically, these sporadic reports, at least I think, mean Google targeted a link network and some sites were majorly impacted by it. It also may be a weird Google bug. But not necessarily a Google update. Of course,...

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8 Reasons To Use The Google Disavow Tool By Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts posted a video answering the question "Should I use the disavow tool even if there's not a manual action on my site?" The short answer is yes. But when? Matt Cutts offers 8 times when to use the disavow tool. They include: (1) When you get a manual action, of course. (2) Webmasters won't remove the bad links to your site or want to charge you to remove them. (3) You are worried about negative SEO. (4) You see links pointing to your...

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Here Is Why Google Forced Me To Take Down My Site...

An old WebmasterWorld member posted in the WebmasterWorld forums that he had enough, he closed  down his site that did well in the search results because it was getting too much. What was getting too much? The requests for links to be taken off his site and removed because of all the link removal requests. He said, most of the links were nofollowed but despite telling these people who asked for the links to be removed, they simply didn't...

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Google Can Tell Us If Our Sites Are Impacted By Panda Or Penguin But They Don't

I spotted a very interested comment by Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts at Hacker News. The  obvious comment is that Matt Cutts outs thecupcakeblog.com as being impacted in a negative way by the Panda algorithm. More shocking to me, based on my conversations with Google search quality people is that Google knows clearly if a site is impacted by an algorithm or not. In August, Google launched the manual action viewer, mostly to...

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Google Bug? Increase In Webmaster Tools DNS Errors?

Since November 14th, I've been seeing a large uptick in complaints about Google Webmaster Tools reporting DNS issues with sites, leading to Google not being able to index sites fully. There is a thread at WebmasterWorld and dozens at Google Webmaster Help. In April, Google had a bug where they sent out false DNS errors to many webmasters and told everyone to ignore them. I am not sure if this is an issue with Google or something else. The strange...

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Was There A Google Update On November 14th?

Some of the automated tracking tools for detecting shifts in Google's search results and thus showing evidence of a Google update went haywire on Thursday, November 14th. Mozcast reported 102 degrees, which means a major change in the search results. SERPs.com also showed higher than normal changes, as did SERP Metrics. But Algoroo and DigitalPoints ranking (see right side bar) show very little changes in the changes. I normally see a large...

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Did Matt Cutts Just Call Himself A Link Spammer?

Yesterday I reported that Google says using keyword rich user names in comments can be considered spammy and against Google's policies, potentially being a link scheme. Of course that caused for a lot of comments from the community but is it fair? Remember GoogleGuy? GoogleGuy was the Googler who spent years helping webmasters under an unknown alias of GoogleGuy. He posted at WebmasterWorld a lot, but also a lot in comments and other areas....

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Google's Matt Cutts: Using Keyword Rich Words As Your Comment Name Can Be Spam

As someone who manages a content site with comments, there are things that bother me with some comments I get here. I dislike it when I see comments from people but they use their company name and/or keyword rich anchor text. I know the name hyperlinks to your site, but the links do not count - so it looks (1) spammy and (2) that you don't know SEO because the links don't count anyway. That being said, Matt Cutts, Google's head of search...

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Google Disavow Links Communication Confusion

Over a year ago, Google launched their disavow link tool and webmasters and SEOs have been all over it since. But every now and then, confusion arises. There are two Google Webmaster Help threads that are confused by the messaging they received after they uploaded their disavow file to Google. One webmaster said right after they submitted the file, Google returned this response: You successfully uploaded a disavow links file (www.tucsonadventruedogranch.com_google...

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Google's Matt Cutts: Show Me The Spam Or...

A Hacker News thread cites a story I wrote at Search Engine Land named Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More which I also wrote over here. In short, the webmasters at Hacker News is mocking my summary of why Jill is retiring from SEO: The tricks to beat and spam Google, Whalen said, no longer work as well.Many of these webmasters find that comical, which may be true and I've seen plenty of spam examples this...

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SEO: No Option But To Buy Links; Google's Cutts: That's A Bad Strategy

Over at Hacker News there are some complaints about the Google SEO Starter Guide (PDF). So Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts jumped in to try to understand what is wrong. That isn't the fun part, the fun part is later in on the conversation, one person said the thing that is wrong with it is that it doesn't mention how you need to buy links. The webmaster said, "Yeah, this is all good and everything. But to get to the top in a competitive...

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Reports Of A Google Update Between November 1st & 5th

I have been seeing some chatter at WebmasterWorld and other sources of a possible update that is being pushed out slowly since late October 31st through today. If you read the thread, you'll see some people complaining about declines in rankings between the dates of November 1st and today. You will also see people excited about increases in rankings. All the Google tracking tools don't show heavy fluctuations, with the exception of SERPs.com,...

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New Google Penalty For "Image Mismatch"

There is a new Google manual action that you need to be aware of named "image mismatch." This manual action is when your images on your site don't match what Google is indexing and displaying in their search results. An anonymous reader sent me a screen shot of the notification he received for this on his site: It reads: Images from this site are displayed differently on Google search results pages than they are when displayed on this...

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You Can Disable Google SSL & Pass Search Referrer Queries

I reported this at Search Engine Land on Friday and to be honest, it is not a feature most of you will benefit from, but if you want, you can force Google's SSL off and search insecurely and thus pass your query data to webmasters by using google.com/webhp?nord=1 instead of google.com. When you go to google.com/webhp?nord=1 the SSL version of Google will be dropped. The other way to remove SSL from Google is to do it at the network level. The...

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Google Cites Disavowed Links As Bad Link Examples

There are two different threads at Google Webmaster Help where sites with Google manual actions received  responses back from Google citing bad link examples including links already in the site's disavow file. As you can imagine, this can be very confusing for webmasters. The webmaster disavowed the bad links, then Google tells the webmaster his site still has a penalty because of the links he already disavowed. Another webmaster wrote,...

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Awesome Google Webmaster Tools Security Issues

Google announced a new outstanding feature for Google Webmaster Tools named Security Issues.This new dashboard helps quickly know what security issues your site has, how to find the source of the issue and then how to repair your Google results after you fix the issue. Mariya Moeva from the Google team said in a Google Webmaster Help thread explained the tool is aiming to "help webmasters whose site has been hacked pinpoint the issues and recover...

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Google's Matt Cutts: More Pages Doesn't Directly Influence Your Search Rankings

Google's Matt Cutts: More Pages Doesn't Directly Influence Your Search Rankings Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts posted a video saying that the number of pages does not directly impact your search rankings. There may be a side affect to a site having more pages. Typically, sites with more pages have two benefits: (1) They have more opportunity to rank for a more diverse set of keyword phrases, assuming your pages are targeting more keywords. (2)...

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Google Removes Your Manual Penalty But Your Rankings Won't Improve

I see threads like this Google Webmaster Help thread all the time. In summary they say, my manual penalty was revoked by Google after I spent the time cleaning up my mistakes but days, months, and even years later, my rankings, traffic and thus sales have not improved at all. Often, I'll see people get all excited after Google removes a manual action within Google Webmaster Tools, only to see that as false hope. In early September, I talked...

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Google Closing Authorship Project?

Google Closing Authorship Project? AJ Kohn, someone who focuses more on authorship and rich snippets than most SEOs I know, wrote a story named Authorship Is Dead, Long Live Authorship. In that story, he describes why he thinks the classic Authorship Project is slowing being closed down. In short, he thinks that because classic authorship is opt in, it isn't easy to scale at the size Google needs. So Google uses other methods to extract authorship/rich snippet like data from sources to show the richer data in the search results. So what...

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SEOs Get Ready For 15% Reduction In Google Rich Snippets

SEOs Get Ready For 15% Reduction In Google Rich Snippets As many of you know, Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, announced at PubCon that you should expect a 15% reduction in the amount of rich snippets and authorship displayed in the Google search results. There are several threads, including one at WebmasterWorld where webmasters and SEOs are preparing for the reduction in the richer display in the Google search results. Many noticed increases in click through rates and thus higher sales and traffic because of the increase in CTR....

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Google: Your Disavow File May Not Be Accepted If...

Google: Your Disavow File May Not Be Accepted If... Google's Eric Kuan said in a Google Webmaster Help thread that even if you use a disavow file to remove links, Google may not process them if they don't see you making a serious manual attempt at removing those links. Other reasons why the disavow tool may not work for you include: Double check your disavow file and make sure the link you mentioned is properly disavowed. You can download...

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Google Penalty On WWW Revoked But Remains On Non-WWW

Google Penalty On WWW Revoked But Remains On Non-WWW A WebmasterWorld thread has an interesting discussion around how a webmaster said his manual penalty was revoked on his WWW but remains on his non WWW. The non WWW is 301 redirected to the WWW and the WWW is set as the preferred domain in Webmaster Tools. Have you ever seen this case, where the WWW vs the non WWW don't have timed penalties properly? by Barry Schwartz...

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Google Matt Cutts Hints At Upcoming SEO Changes At PubCon

Google Matt Cutts Hints At Upcoming SEO Changes At PubCon One of the highlights of the year for me is Matt Cutts talk at PubCon. So me not being there, being 6,000+ miles away, was unfortunate. It was the first PubCon I've missed in, well, I can't remember. Anyway, there was some excellent note taking of his presentation, plus PubCon streamed it live, so I saw a glimpse of it. I wanted to pull out the highlights and most important things...

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Rare: Google Admits A Search Result Is Wrong

Rare: Google Admits A Search Result Is Wrong It is rare for Google to admit they are wrong, at least with search quality. Part of the complaints with the Google stock price and questioning if the stock price matches Google's quality product these days... Google's Ryan Moulton admitted Google has a bug with, at least, one of their search results. Ryan Moulton has been with Google's search quality team for over seven years. He is big into ...

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SEOs Adapt To Google's Hummingbird Algorithm

SEOs Adapt To Google's Hummingbird Algorithm As you know, Google announced their Hummingbird algorithm about a month after it launched, claiming no one noticed and no one should notice. But we do think we did notice but no one can confirm that outside of Google and they won't. That being said, clearly the search results are different since the launch of Hummingbird and SEOs will likely need to adapt. Some forward thinking SEOs and webmasters...

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