Good news for those who have been eagerly awaiting a Google Panda update – we will see the next one within the next two to four weeks. Gary Illyes from Google made the announcement at SMX Advanced this week, and while he wouldn’t be more specific than 2-4 weeks, it does mean that we will […]
Google Planning to Devalue Content Behind Interstitials
We have known for a couple of months that Google was planning to add interstitials as a negative ranking factor in an upcoming mobile friendly algo, but it appears that the same will be coming to the regular search results too. Maile Ohye from Google warned webmasters at SMX Advanced that they will also be […]
Google Compares Content on Mobile Versus Desktop But Ranks Desktop Content
At SMX Advanced this week, Gary Illyes from Google, during his AMA session with Danny Sullivan, commented that Google does not rank mobile content based on what is on the page served for mobile users, as the page is still ranked according to the content on the desktop page. From one perspective, this does make […]
Google Answer Boxes Officially Called Featured Snippets
Those Google answer boxes at the top of the search results have an official name. According to Gary Illyes, they are officially called “Featured Snippets”. The name makes a lot of sense, since they are snippets of text taken from the linked page and they are featured at the top of the search results. So […]
Bing Now Includes Software Download Numbers and Size of Program
While we have seen both Google and Bing add schema information for apps in the search results, such as the price or mobile OS, Bing is taking this a step further. Bing is now including the file size of downloads, as well as the number of downloads, in their search results. Here is an example […]
The Penguin Algorithm: An Issue of Ethics
On April 24th, 2012 Matt Cutts, the head of Webspam at Google, announced they would be releasing the first “Penguin Algorithm”. Although the focus these days is mostly about links many people forget Penguin was not released to only target link spam, it was also created to target “…sites that we believe are violating Google’s […]
Bing Testing Single Line Sitelinks in Organic Search Results
Most are used to seeing sitelinks in the organic search results in the usual two column format, either with descriptions or without. Bing seems to be testing a single line version of it instead. This test also shows the sitelinks with 6 links in the single line, different from the usual 4 we have become […]
Does Google Associate Unlinked Brand Mentions with Brand Sites for Ranking?
John Mueller made an interesting comment in a Google+ hangout a couple of weeks ago regarding whether or not Google is giving any weight to unlinked brand mentions when it comes to ranking those brand’s websites. In other words, if one site is talking about a brand but the site in question never happens to […]
Bing Including Entire WikiHow Pages in Search Results Too
Bing recently started testing placing the contents of entire Wikipedia pages in the Bing search results, in a tabbed format. Now they have added WikiHow as a source of these tabbed boxes in the search results. Here is how the WikiHow ones appear, again they are very similar to the Wikipedia one with a pretty […]
Google Has Over 1 Billion Knowledge Graph Entities in Search Results
Just how prevalent are Google’s knowledge graphs in their Google search results? According to Google, it is a lot that many might have suspected. They currently have over one billion knowledge graph entities… yes, one billion. During Google’s I/O keynote on Thursday, Aparna Chennapragada, Director of Product Management from Google Now took the stage to […]