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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