Bing is running another test in their search results which highlights what they view as important links – such as Login, Contact Us & Menu pages. They appear to the right of the site links for the organic search listing, with a shaded box surrounding each one. When you click on the page, it takes […]
Map Maker Temporarily Closed as Person Behind Android Hack of Google Maps Continues to Spam
After the multiple recent spam attacks hitting Google Maps, courtesy of Map Maker, a tool that allows users to edit and add to Google Maps, Map Maker will no longer be accepting any user edits. This is unfortunate, as it is certainly a case of a few rogue users ruining it for everyone else. The […]
Bing Search Adds Customer Service Phone Numbers to Search Results
Bing Search is testing the addition of a customer service phone number that appears in grey – similar to other annotations – and is displayed beneath the title and URL, but above the page description. These are appearing on the organic (non-paid) search results. This should make it much easier for people searching for a […]
Google Begins Showing Answer Boxes with Two Sources
While writing my article earlier this week on Panda and Penguin, I noticed that Google is showing an answer box for Panda. But the interesting thing is it is showing two sources. You can see it has its usual answer box text and source. But instead of choosing an image from the source they are […]
How to Make Google Rank Current Year’s Event or Product Higher Than Last Year’s One
We have all seen it happen. We search for an event, such as a conference or a festival, only to discover the top listing is for the previous year’s event. And if you are doing a quick search to see dates just from the search results alone, it can be very easy to confuse the […]
Google’s Doorway Algorithm is Live & Updates Regularly
Yes, Google’s doorway algorithm has gone live. Some webmasters were questioning whether Google had pushed out the doorway algorithm or not because many did not notice much of a change in the Google search results. And there had been no official word from Google that it had gone live, just their announcement that it would. […]
Order Food Directly From Google’s Search Results
Google is getting into the food ordering service by allowing US searchers to order food… and order it directly from the search results. Google is working with six different companies with this new feature – Seamless, Grubhub, Eat24, Delivery.com, BeyondMenu, and MyPizza.com. You will now see an option to “Please an order” for all restaurant […]
Why SEOs Should Focus on Google’s Other Algo Signals, Not Just Panda & Penguin
If you have ever been hit by a flying Panda or Penguin, it can have a pretty devastating effect. And by far, the most Google algo attention is given to Panda and Penguin, with the only possible exception of the month leading up to the mobile friendly algo launch date in April… although the terror-inspiring […]
Apple Officially Acknowledges Their Applebot Web Crawler
Apple seems to have finally officially acknowledged their “Applebot” webcrawler with a new webpage added to their support site this week. Apple is using this crawler for both Siri and Spotlight Suggestions, among other products. User-agent strings will contain “Applebot” together with additional agent information. For example: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 […]
How Affiliate Merchants Can Opt Out of the Bit.ly & Viglink Cookie Dropping
Yesterday we reported that Bit.ly and Viglink were adding their own affiliate cookies to links that are shortened through the URL shortener Bit.ly. And understandably, people are pretty upset about it, not just for the cookie dropping on unsuspecting users, but also because of the high likelihood that affiliate commissions could be hijacked when anyone […]