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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