Bing is testing a new section in their search results with brand keyword searches, along with images from the brand’s website… all while confusingly linking to a Bing search results page. Here is how they appear on the page. These appear to be called Rich Captions when looking at the source code. They all feature […]
Sites Penalized by Google Can Still Show Knowledge Panel
When a site is penalized manually, it will not lose its knowledge panel in the Google search results. When I wrote the story on Thumbtack being penalized by Google with a manual action over links, I took a screenshot of the search results and noticed that they still had their knowledge panel to the right […]
Why All Sites Need to Go HTTPS, According to Google
When it comes to deciding whether to take a site secure or not, many webmasters with content sites argue that there is no need for them to go to the expense of making their site secure, since they do not collect any kind of personal data. Google on the other hand has been a strong […]
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 […]
Google Chrome Plans to Prevent Auto-Play Flash Content from Playing by Default
Is your website still rocking Flash content? You may want to start rethinking that Flash, as Google announced plans to prevent non-essential Flash video content from automatically playing when it loads a webpage. Chrome is billing it as a way to save battery resources, and says they worked with Adobe, the creators of Flash, to […]
Thumbtack.com Hit With Google Manual Action Penalty for Links
Thumbtack’s Manual Action If you do a search for “Thumbtack”, you will not find them anywhere in the Google search results… nor will you see them for any of the estimated 25,000 keywords they were previously ranking for. They have been hit with a manual action penalty courtesy of Google. Thumbtack does not rank for […]
Google Plans to Make HTTPS Ranking Signal Stronger
When Google first announced that HTTPS would be a ranking signal, a large number of webmasters jumped on the opportunity to get what was essentially a freebie boost in the search rankings simply by switching to HTTPS. Later, John Mueller from Google announced that it was a very small ranking signal, something that Gary Illyes […]
Emojis Now Showing as Display URLs in Google Search Results
Just when you thought emojis in search results couldn’t get any more annoying, some SEOs have discovered that they can use specific combinations of characters to display the URL in emoji format. This was actually part of an ad campaign by Norwegian Airlines. They converted a domain name into emoji format, then built their ad […]
Google Displaying Knowledge Panel for Trending News
Google is now adding knowledge panels for trending news stories – search queries that would otherwise not return many results and with results primarily on news stories. I read a news story about a missing woman, and as the article was a couple of days old, I did a Google search for her name. Along […]
Google Reveals One Reason for Slow Panda Updates
Gary Illyes from Google made an interesting comment about why we don’t see more frequent updates of the Panda Algorithm. He was speaking at SMX Advanced this week during a Google AMA. The question was about when we would see Panda and Penguin updated, as we have been waiting for them to be updated or […]