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 In summary they say, my manual penalty was revoked by Google after I spent the time cleaning up my mistakes but days, months, and even years later, my rankings, traffic and thus sales have not improved at all.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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Google On Original Content Related To Product Descriptions

Google On Original Content Related To Product Descriptions Original and unique content is always something Google says is a very important aspect of ranking and providing value. But what about when you sell a commodity item that everyone else sells, like pens or home appliances and so on? You and a thousand other web sites are given the same photos, product descriptions, specifications, videos and so on from the manufacturer that everyone...

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Google Penguin 2.1 Was A Big Hit

Google Penguin 2.1 Was A Big Hit Late Friday afternoon, Google's Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they unleashed Penguin 2.1. In short, Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, said it impacted about 1% of search queries. Looking at the hundreds of comments on our quick post from Friday and looking at the threads out there in the webmaster and SEO communities, it seems like many many webmasters were impacted by this update. We have threads...

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Google's Matt Cutts: No PageRank Update Before 2014

Google's Matt Cutts: No PageRank Update Before 2014 It is now over 8 months since the last Google Toolbar PageRank update, which happened on February 4, 2013. At the six month point, Google told us a "no comment" on why there has not been a PageRank update. @NielsBoschh asked Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, if there would be a PageRank update before 2014 and Matt Cutts said "I would be surprised if that happened." So for all those...

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Google Unleashes Penguin 2.1

Google Unleashes Penguin 2.1 Penguin 2.1 has officially been released today. I saw signs of this around 9am EDT this morning but didn't see enough chatter to cover it yet. I suspect over the weekend the forums will light up. Some of the early stats I saw on sites that got hit were huge. I'll have more details on this on Monday, with the impact on real webmasters. Author: Barry Schwa...

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Did Google's Hummingbird Algorithm Hurt Your Site's Rankings?

Did Google's Hummingbird Algorithm Hurt Your Site's Rankings? Last week, Google told us they pushed out a completely rewritten algorithm named Hummingbird. They said the new algorithm was released a month or so ago and no one should have noticed it. But as I said, I think we did notice something. Why do I think that? On 9/12, 9/4 and 8/24 we saw significant chatter in the forum to warrant us asking Google if there was an update. Google...

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Google's John Mueller: "We Don't Use Authorship For Ranking"

Google's John Mueller: "We Don't Use Authorship For Ranking" Yes, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts did say rel=author can help search quality but he did also say Google is currently not using it. John Mueller, a Google web trends analysts confirmed this one more time during a Google Hangout a few days ago. He said: We don’t use Authorship for rankingMark Traphagen transcribed that part of the question. Which you can see in the video at 48 minutes and 24 seconds into the video. Q: Why can't Google+ authorship prevent scraper sites from...

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Hummingbird: Google Rewrites Search Algorithm

Hummingbird: Google Rewrites Search Algorithm On Thursday, Google had a press event to announce new changes they have been working on in search, as well discuss the progression over the 15 years of their existence. Part of that was to announce that they have rewrote their search algorithm for the first time in about twelve-years. They call it Hummingbird. Hummingbird is just what they code-named the rewrite. The algorithm itself is almost...

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