If you are a local business, you will want to check your local knowledge panel – Google is now displaying social media icons and links in their local knowledge panel. These are similar to the ones Google shows in the knowledge panel for big brands. Joy Hawkins, via Ryan Scollon, posted a screenshot this morning […]
Archives for July 2016
Removing Links from Disavow to Recover Google Rankings
Doing disavows and link removals is always an interesting thing. And too often, sites are too aggressive in removing good quality links, which means that not only are sites losing rankings from the spam links artificially boosting the ranks, but they are also losing rankings due to the great quality links being caught in the […]
Using Nofollow on Navigation for Crawl Budget Reasons
Sometimes SEOs use nofollow for crawl budget reasons, particularly for sites that are very large in size or that have a structure that doesn’t tend to be crawled as optimally as it could be. So SEOs use nofollow to prevent Google from following certain links during the regular crawl, in order to direct Googlebot to […]
Expanded Text Ads Now Available in Google AdWords
Google AdWords has launched expanded text ads for advertisers. These expanded ads are mobile optimized for better performance with additional room for descriptions and the all important headline. Google is also discontinuing the use of the regular text ad format later this year. The new format adds about 50% more ad text with two headlines […]
Google AdWords Launches Device Bid Adjustments
Google AdWords announced earlier this year at the AdWords Summit that they would be launching device bid adjustments, giving advertisers more flexibility with how they bid on mobile versus desktop versus tablet. As we reimagine how ads look in a mobile-first world, it’s also important to have more flexible tools that help you optimize device-level […]
No PageRank Loss for 30x Redirects, Including 301 & 302 Redirects
There has been a lot of debate on the issue of 301 versus 302 redirects over the years, specifically regarding the loss of PageRank. Gary Illyes from Google has confirmed now that when you are using a 30x redirect – such as a 301 (permanent), 302 (temporary) or 307 (temporary) redirect – that the destination […]
Sending Visitors Off Site Via Links Won’t Hurt Site’s Google Rankings
Ever since Google sent out the manual actions for outbound links, mostly targeting bloggers linking without disclosing compensation, there has been new focus on outbound links and the possibility of it hurting the site doing the linking. Google has already said webmasters shouldn’t nofollow all their outbound links and there is no outbound link penalty […]
Google AdWords Truncating Headlines for Some Ads
SEOs are used to Google truncated their titles in the search results, most often because the title is too long for the search results. But now it seems Google is also truncating Google AdWords too. Mark Kennedy spotted the AdWords truncation and posted a screenshot of it. Because titles are actually pixel length and not […]
Google: How to Temporarily Remove Pages Varies by Length
Google has talked previously about handling pages that will be temporarily removed from the index, such as out of stock products. In the last English/Hindi Google Webmaster Office Hours, Aaseesh Marina from Google, one of the hosts of the English/Hindi office hours, was asked about pages that are expired, but could be made live again […]
Google Flights Testing Thumbnail Ads in Search
Google is testing out a new version of Google Flights ads, this time with destination images to entice clicks. Conrad O’Connell was the first to spot the new test. They are labelled as Sponsored, and it also includes a link for more destinations. It isn’t clear where Google is pulling the thumbnails from, as some […]