Facebook has announced that Instant Articles will be available to all publishers next month, on April 12, 2016. And to increase the number of publishers getting on board with Instant Articles, they have announced their own WordPress plugin to make articles Instant Articles friendly. Instant Articles is similar to AMP in that it creates an […]
Archives for 2016
Google Home Service Ads Now Show “Send Request” in Search Results
Google has once again made changes to their Home Service Ads that appear for some services and trades in the Google search results. Most noticeably, they have now added a new “Send Request” link right in the home service ad box that appears at the top of the search results. Clicking on the send request […]
WordPress Plugin Update Sent Admin Credentials & Installed Backdoor
Do you use a semi-popular WordPress plugin called Custom Content Type Manager (CCTM)? If so, you will want to stop everything and change ALL your user passwords, roll back (or use the latest release) of CCTM, as well as patch a list of files compromised thanks to the new plugin user who installed a backdoor and […]
Google Analytics Now Removes Referral Spam from Reports Automatically
Google Analytics referral spam has long been a pain point for Google Analytics users. While Google had previously promised a solution last year, until now, users had to resort to many workarounds in an attempt to sanitize Analytics from showing all the spam. But as of this weekend, many people were reporting that Google Analytics […]
Google Adds Featured Snippets in Multiple Languages
Featured snippets have been a staple in the English search results for quite some time. But now they seem to have been rolled out across additional languages as well. Dr. Pete Meyerswas the first to notice them rolling out on non-English languages, and many others followed up with screenshots for various languages. Gary Illyes from […]
Google Search Results: Position #10 Gets More Clicks Than 8 & 9 Combined
After years of anecdotal evidence and speculation, Google has finally confirmed what many suspected… that the #10 spot in the search results isn’t actually that bad of a place to be. At SMX West yesterday, Paul Haahr was talking about the Google search results from an engineering perspective, and he dropped some interesting tidbits about […]
Google Engineers Still Working on Real Time Penguin Update
Not much of a surprise, but Gary Illyes from Google confirmed at SMX that Google Engineers are still working on the Google Penguin algo. Ilyes also said he is giving up on giving out dates for Penguin, because he doesn’t want to be wrong when he does give out a date and it isn’t made. […]
Google App Indexing Ranking Boost Won’t Counteract Algo Penalty Issue
If you have a website suffering from any kind of negative ranking signal in the search results, such as something like Panda or Penguin, a manual action or just a regular algorithmic downranking, app indexing isn’t a “get out of jail free card” for those sites hoping to get their app indexed pages ranking when […]
Google Dance 2016: Amazing Event for Webmasters
After a many years long hiatus, Google has rocked it out once again with a brand new Google Dance, hosted at the Googleplex for webmasters attending the SMX West conference. Googlers, including Gary Illyes and Nathan Johns who were the official event hosts, welcoming everyone as they arrived, handing out the latest edition of the […]
AMP Pages Do Use Site’s Crawl Budget
If you think a lot about Googlebot crawl budget, when you implemented AMP pages, the use of AMP pages has probably crossed your mind. After all, many think of AMP as a Google initiative and it is Googlebot that crawls it for Google. But what about looking at the use of Googlebot from the site […]