When a site has a manual action placed upon it by Google, those manual actions don’t last forever. There is an expiry date placed when those manual actions go out, something that not all site owners seem to be aware of. At SMX earlier this month, Juan Felipe Rincón confirmed that “there is no forever […]
Google Increasing Mobile Friendly Ranking Boost in May
If you still haven’t made your site mobile friendly yet, you might want to get busy on that. Google is increasing the mobile friendly ranking boost associated with pages that are mobile friendly. As a next step in our ongoing efforts to help users find more mobile-friendly content, beginning in May, we’ll start rolling out […]
Google Adds New HTTPS Transparency Report
Google has added a new section to their Transparency Report to cover how much traffic and how many sites are serving their sites via HTTPS and the results are pretty interesting. Today we are launching a new section of our Transparency Report to track the progress of encryption efforts—both at Google and on some of […]
Why Some Google Spam Reports Are Not Acted On
Have you ever filed a Google spam report on a site yet never seen any impact on their search rankings after that, and wondered why? There are a few different reasons why Google may not act on a spam report. Not Enough Information If you are submitting a spam report, include as much information as […]
Google Working on Consolidating WWW, Non-WWW, HTTPS Properties in Search Console
One of the major pain points for webmasters with Google Search Console is the rather clunky way site owners need to verify – and check – www and non-www versions of their websites in Search Console. Many site owners can get along fine with simply verifying a single property in Google Search Console. In fact, […]
Googlebot’s Smartphone User-Agent Getting a New Name
On April 18, 2016 Googlebot will be debuting a brand new user-agent for the smartphone Googlebot. This means in your log reporting, you will see a different user-agent name for this bot after April 18th. Google’s new user agent reflects that it is evolving towards being more similar to Chrome, rather than Safari. The updated […]
Google Warns Bloggers on Promo Links But No New Manual Action Coming
On Friday the Google Webmaster blog warned bloggers who are engaging of the practice of trading free products for reviews with links. While this isn’t new – trading links in this kind of situation has always been against Google’s webmaster guidelines, since they aren’t natural links – Google is reminding bloggers who aren’t following this […]
You Can Now Bookmark Date Range Reports in Google Search Analytics
If you have ever tried to bookmark reports in Google Search Analytics with a date range, you have probably discovered when you go back to that URL that instead of seeing the date range relative to the current date, such as “last 7 days”, the bookmarked link actually saved the date range based on the […]
Google Reconsideration Requests Processed in Order Received
If you have ever submitted a reconsideration request, you have probably wondered how Google processes them. Are they batched together by manual action type, so that hacked sites could get their reconsideration requests processed quicker? Or simply first come, first served? It turns out it is the latter. At SMX West earlier this month, Juan […]
Google Working on Making AMP Compatible With Older Devices
If you have one of the latest mobile phones, you likely have seen AMP results when news results are displayed. But for those with older smart phones, AMP results might not be displayed… and arguably, it is those older – and often slower – phones could benefit from AMP even more than those with the […]