It sounds as though SEOs might not have to avidly watch the various Google weather reports for signs of Penguin after all… John Mueller said today that they will announce when the long awaited real time Penguin starts rolling out. First, he didn’t announce a date to go along with these comments, which is hardly […]
Implementing Hreflang? Google Recommends Hreflang Sitemaps
Is there one type of hreflang implementation that is more successful than others? Maile Ohye from Google was asked this question during the SEJ Summit on Wednesday. And she had some interesting comments about it, especially for first-time implmenetations. So does one hreflang implementation have greater success? I would say yes. And then there’s like […]
Google: Do Not Replace Mobile / Responsive Sites With AMP
At the SEJ Summit Wednesday, Maile Ohye spoke quite a bit about AMP and the benefits of using it. But should webmasters consider an AMP only approach for their mobile users? During the Q&A, Ohye was asked whether webmasters should start making a desktop version and an AMP version, rather than using responsive design, and […]
Using Rel Canonical / Alternate? Ensure it is Above Head Close Tag
Maile Ohye from Google was at SEJ Summit in Santa Monica on Wednesday and she said she recommended the hreflang implementation using sitemaps over the rel alternate version. But she also made some interesting comments about using it as well as a mistake that is made by webmasters using it. Ohye says that they cut […]
Test: Google Will Rank Keywords in Image Title Attribute Tag
The topic of ‘Does Googlebot still see and use img=”title” for ranking of images in Google Images?”, recently came up in discussion in a post on SERoundtable, based on a Twitter conversation between Google’s John Mueller and myself. To add context, I had been auditing a project and came across the use of ‘onmouseover’ for […]
Using New JavaScript Frameworks? Google’s Advice for Crawling
At SEJ Summit on Wednesday, Maile Ohye from Google was asked about sites that are created using new JavaScript frameworks and progressive design elements… they can create fantastic looking websites, but when it comes from a search perspective, they can definitely cause crawling and ranking issues with not just Google but all search engines. Ohye […]
Google & Bing Add Gas Pricing to Local Search Results
Both Google and Bing are now displaying pricing information for has stations directly in their search results. Here is Google displaying gas prices both for a generic gas search and for one with a specific gas company name. Google is also showing them in the desktop results too, also in the local pack. Bing also […]
Bing Adds “First Post” Dates to Forum Threads in Search Results
Bing has made their search results much more useful for those who searching for information. For forum posts, Bing has now added a line that says when the first post in the forum thread was made. It also includes the number of posts, which Bing has shown in the search results for some time. Here […]
Don’t NoFollow All Links for Outbound Link Manual Action Recovery
If you were on the receiving end of a manual action warning for unnatural outbound links this weekend, if your strategy to fix the problem was to nofollow every link on the site, you may want to rethink that strategy for a number of reasons. This is also something I brought up in my initial […]
Outbound Link Manual Actions Related to Links in Paid Reviews
It seems that my speculation that the unnatural outbound link manual actions sent over the weekend were related to Google’s recent warning to bloggers about using followed links for paid reviews is accurate. Many, if not all, of the targeted sites are blogs and it is becoming apparent that they seem to have compensated reviews […]