It has long been known that Google paid Apple in order to remain the default search for iOS, but how much was always a question mark. But thanks to a legal case between Oracle and Google, we now know just how much. Bloomberg reports that in 2014, Google paid Apple $1 billion dollars for the […]
Archives for 2016
Getting Started with Audience Targeting in PPC
2016 has been dubbed “The Year of Audience Targeting in PPC” by Acquisio, and with good reason. Up until recently, PPC advertisers have had two weapons in their arsenal: search and social. Search is, by definition, an expression of intent: users are telling you exactly what they’re looking for. When search advertisers choose the right […]
How Google Handles Rankings for Sites That Go Offline
The question came up whether rankings or a site’s reputation would be affected by being offline for a period of time. How does site being offline affect its reputation. Does it have long term negative effects on site reputation? Aaseesh Marina from Google, one of the hosts of the English/Hindi office hours, responded, and details […]
Should You Change Dates on Evergreen Content for SEO?
In today’s Google Webmaster Hangout, the question came up regarding evergreen content and the dates used on them. This has been a hot topic recently, especially since Google sometimes displays the date in the search results. But does this affect rankings specifically? Does the date of publish on the page affect google rankings? What is […]
Google Entity Metrics: The Role of Entities in SEO
According to the recent Google patent “Ranking Search Results Based On Entity Metrics” an entity is, “a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable.” I wrote a lengthy analysis of the patent on my blog but decided to save the discussion as to what it really means for SEO for this article. […]
Google Search Console Launches AMP Error Reporting
Google has announced a new AMP error reporting feature in Google Search Console to help webmasters as they implement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) across their websites prior to the official launch and support in just weeks . The AMP error report gives an overview of the overall situation on your site, and then lets you […]
Google Penguin Weeks Away, Will Be Part of Core Algo
We have another new Google Penguin status update (and no, it isn’t rolling out now). Gary Illyes responded to a question on Twitter where he was asked about the timeline for the real time Penguin being launched. Illyes responded it is weeks away, which is much better than the other option of months away. He […]
Google Redesigns Google Search Console for Webmasters
If you go to login to Google Search Console, you will discover that the website has a brand new redesign and look, which makes it much easier to find the current information as well as some new pages, including a calendar that lists all Google webmaster related events. Google announced it on the Webmaster Central […]
Google Adds Product Listing Ads to Image Search Results
Google is definitely ramping up Product Listing Ads coverage on the search results. They have now added PLAs to image search. Here is how they appear: They display below the usual sections for narrowing down the image search. Regular image results appear below the PLA listings. All the listings show the price and the store […]
The Google “Penalty” That is Actually From a Hacked Site
Recently, there has been an increase in the number of webmasters who are reporting that they have lost all Google referral traffic. Normally, when one sees organic referrals from Google drop to zero, the natural assumption is that the site has a site-wide manual action applied. Yet when looking in Google Search Console, there is […]