There has been a significant backlash against comments in the past couple of years, with many sites dispensing with comments completely, and trying to push those conversations to social media instead. But is this a smart move? Google has often referred to user generated content as a valuable quality signal, something that can be irreplaceable […]
Search Results for: featured snippets
Understanding Google Panda: Definitive Algo Guide for SEOs
Note: We have many brand new quotes about Panda from Google attributed to a “Google Spokesperson.” These are all quotes given directly to the author and The SEM Post by Google. All other Google quotes are cited to their sources. Google Panda is one of Google’s ranking filters that seeks to downrank pages that are […]
Latest Google Search Quality Rater’s Guide: Mobile Rewrite
We have another Google Quality Rater’s Guidelines & Handbook, and this one is mere weeks old – October 2015. And like the last time we covered the Quality Rater’s Handbook, Google has completely written major parts of their guidelines. Last year we saw Google put the emphasis on pages that had a high level of […]
How Google Chooses Content for Knowledge Panel in Sidebar
Ever wonder how Google chooses which companies show a knowledge panel on the right hand side of the search results while others don’t? This question came up in the last Google Webmaster Hangout from someone who has done all the “right steps” in order to have a knowledge panel show up, but hasn’t had any […]
Google Adds Rich Lists for Calories in Restaurant Chain Menus
Google has added a new rich list to the Google search results when searching for “<restaurant name> calories.” The rich list appears above the search results and lists popular menu items at the restaurant with calorie contents for each item. Some rich lists for restaurants also feature a drop down menu that can be used […]
Google’s Knowledge Graphs are Actually Called Knowledge Panels
Google’s Gary Illyes is continuing to teach webmasters about what some of the “official names” are for various parts of the Google search results, rather than the name we all use for it. This time we learned that what we all commonly call knowledge graphs are called knowledge panels by Google. After I tweeted about […]
Why Google Won’t Give Specific Meta Description Lengths
Ever since Google dropped the length of the descriptions in the search results last week, many SEOs have been freaking out about the fact they rewrote meta description tags to 300+ characters and now, Google has dropped that back down to about 160 characters in length. The important thing to note is that Google has […]
Google Testing Larger Recipe Descriptions in Search Results
Google is testing an enlarged version of their recipe results, such as this one including 5 lines of description, plus additional lines for site links. These are regular recipe results, using the recipe schema markup, but Google is displaying a much longer description than the usual two lines we see in most recipe results. They […]
Bing Adds Reading Level & Word Count to Book Knowledge Panels
Bing has added some new detail to their book knowledge panels in the search results detailing both word count and reading level. The one drawback to the reading level is that Bing offers no link or reference for searchers to know what AR points or ATOS reading level means. Unless you are an educator, you […]
Bing Putting Entire Wikipedia Pages in Search Results Answer Box Test
Google tends to get flack from webmasters about the usage of snippets in their answer boxes. Bing is definitely taking this a step further by putting the contents of entire Wikipedia sections and pages right on their Bing search result pages. Here is a Bing search for SEO, and the resulting answer box in animated […]