Google Answer Boxes has jumped up significantly in the Google search results, starting with a 60% jump on September 26th. Answer boxes now appear for 3.5% of all search queries. Unfortunately for marketers though, more answer boxes means that it is more likely that searchers will find their information directly on the search results page, […]
7 Things Your Didn’t Know You Could Do with Google Plus Settings
Google Plus seems to be hiding their options well enough (Or is that just me?). Whether it’s their lack of usability concerns or the way they prefer to control which settings you ever get to use is an open-ended question.. Let’s see if that’s just me or not: Have you ever tried tweaking the below […]
Switching to HTTPS Will Not Increase Your Search Rankings
After webmasters were scrambling to make their sites secure with Google’s announcement that using https would give those sites a ranking boost, John Mueller states that using https will not visibly increase your rankings. In a Google Webmaster Help Office Hours, the question about https as a ranking boost came up. I wouldn’t expect any […]
Large Popups on Websites Could Trigger Page Layout Algorithm Penalty
This will be good news for surfers but bad news for marketers employing this tactic – sites that display large popups as soon as a visitor loads a site could trigger the above the fold layout algorithm penalty. “When we look at the page layout, we look at what we crawl with Googlebot,” says John […]
New Google Panda Algorithm Rolling Out, Ranks Small & Medium Sites Higher
Google has confirmed that they are slowly rolling out a new Panda algorithm update, the first one since the 4.0 update that happened back on May 20, 2014. The latest Panda algo began slowly rolling out this week with plans for it to continue rolling out until sometime next week. Pierre Far from Google states […]
In-Depth Articles Significantly Increased in Google Search Results
Mozcast has noticed a pretty significant jump in the number of in-depth articles being displayed in the Google Search results. Looking at Mozcast data, there was a dip on September 9th before it increased to 12.7% the following day. However, the September 25, 2014 jump went up by 30%, with in-depth articles now being shown […]
Google Tracking Number of Phone Calls Made via Google My Business
A great addition to Google My Business is a feature that shows the number of times a business is phoned from a Google My Business (GMB) listing. Owen Kane was the first to spot the addition. Google is getting the data by tracking clicks made on the phone number, so businesses that tend to be […]
How did Google Discover the Private Blog Networks?
Google is in the process of a massive penalty sweep targeting many Private Blog Networks (PBNs) where they have been applying penalties and deindexing sites that are utilizing PBNs. Private blog networks (PBN) get their name because they are generally controlled by a single person or company and are supposedly harder to trace. But with the […]
Shared Business Data: Data Feeds Come to Adwords Ads
Spotted in the AdWords shared library of some accounts today is a new feature called “Business Data”, sure to roll out to all accounts over the next few days. The vague naming actually contains a pretty hefty shift to the ad creation landscape. Click into this feature and you’ll see the explanatory text: Upload or […]
Google’s Structured Snippets in Search Results Will Reduce CTR
Google searchers have become accustomed to seeing knowledge graph information mixed into their Google search results. Google is now taking this a step further and introducing structured snippets to some results within the Google search results. For some queries, Google will extract specific information from the results page and include it as part of the […]