Who knew a Penguin could be so deadly? Losing your traffic and search positioning on Google is bad, real bad. Showing up on Bing or Yahoo near the top of search is just sort of cool, but it doesn't really make much difference to your business. Sure it might make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside seeing you up at the top there, but even competitive terms, year over year, don’t seem to yield much traffic. Google, on the other hand, makes or breaks your business, … [Read more...]
Archives for July 2012
Search Market Share: Rivals Struggle as Google’s Shadow Grows Bigger
Newly released figures from comScore, an Internet analytics firm, show Google's dominant position to be a granite boulder against which weaker competitors can only grind futilely. Despite vigorous attempts by Microsoft, Yahoo and others to whittle away at the commanding share of Web visitors held by Google, the search king expanded its slice of the pie to 66.8 percent in June 2012, a significant rise from 65.5 percent in June of the previous year. Yahoo's share slid to 13 … [Read more...]
Google Webmaster Tools Now Offers Email Alerts for Crawl Errors
Google Webmaster Tools has been fairly popular for some time but it’s popularity is beginning to grow even more quickly. Much of this new found fame is due to the messages being received by a wide range of webmasters (over 700,000 recently), primarily from, or what seems to be from, the changes rolled out in Google’s Penguin update. Equally significant is the significant buzz and publicity surrounding the fact that receiving these messages is generally bad news for your site … [Read more...]
‘Social Discovery’ Apps Report Hidden Patterns; Predict Human Behavior
Social discovery apps are starting to pick up where social networking software leaves off. New apps hitting the market allow users to search for other individuals based on their age, name, gender, location and interests. They also allow the storage and research on troves and troves of user generated data which can then be analyzed by groups of scientists in order to uncover hidden patterns of our lives, thoughts or political views. Sites like Pintrest.com already fit this … [Read more...]
Rich Snippets: The Absence of Star Ratings & Reviews In Google Search
Most Internet news agencies originally praised Google's decision to replace its local search business rating system with Zagat ratings. After all, the acquisition of Zagat data was a major business decision by the search engine giant who paid a hefty price for those scores, $125 million as originally reported by the Wall Street Journal (more recently reported by AP to be $151 million). However, it seems that business owners and local webmasters who run sites previously … [Read more...]
Bing Update Pleases Developers: Webmasters Can Disavow Links
Microsoft's Bing search engine is now offering web developers a tool to disavow malicious links. Bing Webmaster Tools features a small gadget that allows people to submit domains that apparently link to a legitimate page from poor quality sites. Individual pages and directories can also be submitted in the disavow links page. Web developers with SEO on their agenda often wish they could disavow links. Unnatural links and other black hat spam policies can hurt both a site's … [Read more...]
Knowledge Graph Misses Company Philosophy: Fast Better Than Slow
Google's new "Knowledge Graph" has been one of the most discussed topics out of many new releases from Google as of recent . It may also be the reason, or at least, a contributing factor, to Bing entering into a closer relationship with Encyclopedia Britannica. Ever since Google announced Knowledge Graph, the new feature has been present on countless search pages and is often based around information taken from Wikipedia. Wikipedia appears on the front of Google pages quite … [Read more...]