Archive of December, 2015

December, 31 2015

Google: We Don't Forward Retroactively Your Reconsideration Requests We know that some old messages may show up in the Google Search Console around manual actions and [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
John Mueller: Fetch As Google Renders AngularJS But Cache Doesn't Currently John Mueller of Google answered two questions around AngularJS this week... - Search Engine Roundtable

December, 30 2015

Google: Links Activated By On Hover Action Are Invisibile To GoogleBot Google's John Mueller said in a Google Hangout yesterday that if you deploy an on-hover event that [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Become a Google Small Business Expert Advisor Google is looking those interested in becoming a Google Small Business Advisor to assist [...] - The SEM Post
Google: You Can Remove Mass Links From Your Disavow File Earlier this month, we reported a case of someone removing all their links from their disavow file [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google: You Can Cloaking Your XML Sitemap Files Google's John Mueller in a long Google Hangout yesterday said that it is not problematic to cloak [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
GoogleBot Treats 307 Redirects As 301s? Over a year ago, we covered a topic that is rare, 307 redirects when it goes over HSTS, HTTP Strict [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

December, 29 2015

Google Confirms No Loss in Link Authority on HTTPS Implementation Google’s John Mueller has confirmed via a comment on Google+ there’s no loss in link [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Advertises Official iOS and Android Apps on its Home Page You’ll notice an addition to Google’s normally clean and simple home page — links [...] - Search Engine Journal
Former Yandex Employee Allegedly Tries to Sell Source Code on Black Market Former Yandex employe reportedly steals and attempts to sell source code information to fund his [...] - Search Engine Journal
Bing Predicts goes 10-6 in Week 16, now 152-88 for the year Headed into the final weekend, 10 of the 12 playoff spots have been determined while much of the [...] - Bing Search

December, 28 2015

Google: Capital Letters In URLs Doesn't Impact Rankings We discussed the benefits of capital letters before and how sometimes searching in upper case vs [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

December, 24 2015

Happy Holidays! See you in January As Search Engine Watch sets its out of office reply to ‘can’t talk, too busy crying [...] - Search Engine Watch
Google Photos App Install Interstitials Are Google Penalty Worthy As you know, Google warned and then launched the Google App Install Interstitial penalty in early [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

December, 23 2015

Report: Top Domains In Google With Winners & Losers For 2015 Moz has published the top domains ranking in Google in 2015, including winners, losers and most [...] - Search Engine Land
Black Hat SEO Advice After Google Rankings Penalty: Don't Panic I always find it interesting to read how black hat SEOs deal with penalties. A Black Hat Forum [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Yahoo Updates Mobile Search, Tweaks Mobile Search Algorithm Yahoo announces changes to its mobile search experience. - Search Engine Journal
Google Search Console Now Showing AMP Related Errors The Google Search Console is now showing errors for web pages built using AMP, accelerated mobile [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Yahoo Updates Mobile Search, Tweaks Mobile Search Algorithm Yahoo announces changes to its mobile search experience. - Search Engine Journal

December, 22 2015

Bait & Switch Hacking Is Gaining Top Rankings In Google Hackers are injecting content into websites to get Google visitors, then redirecting them elsewhere. - Search Engine Land
Google: 404 Pages Can Have Sneezing Pandas, Dancing Cats & Whatever You Want Google's John Mueller said you can do whatever you want on your 404, page not found pages. He said [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
See Which Search Queries Trigger the “Install App” Button With Google Search Console A filter has been added to Search Console for tracking impressions of "Install App" [...] - Search Engine Journal
How Google Might Make Better Synonym Substitutions Using Knowledge Base Categories A couple of months ago, I wrote about a Google patent that involved rewriting queries, titled [...] - SEO by the Sea
DuckDuckGo Grew by 70% Throughout the Year of 2015 Privacy-focused search engine, DuckDuckGo, grew by a considerable amount in 2015 - Search Engine Journal
DuckDuckGo Grew by 70% Throughout the Year of 2015 Privacy-focused search engine, DuckDuckGo, grew by a considerable amount in 2015 - Search Engine Journal
New HTTP Status Code 451 for Legal Takedowns For the first time in a while, we have a brand new status code. The new status code is meant to [...] - The SEM Post
See Which Search Queries Trigger the “Install App” Button With Google Search Console A filter has been added to Search Console for tracking impressions of "Install App" [...] - Search Engine Journal
Bing Predicts goes 11-5 in Week 15, now 142-82 for the year This week, our models predict Carolina to get one step closer to an unbeaten season, improving to [...] - Bing Search

December, 21 2015

Google Tests Markup For Managing Local Business Data For Knowledge Panel Check out the new schema to markup your local business data so Google can update their local [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Search Console Analytics Report Now Shows App Install Button Data Google launched a new report for those who verified their apps with the Google Search Console. - Search Engine Land
Google: We Are Logging Data Differently & It May Impact Search Analytics Reports Google added a note to the data anomalies page noting the Search Analytics data in the Google [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
New Google Search Appearance Filter In Search Analytics Report For App Install Buttons Google's Zineb Ait Bahajji announced on Google+ that they added a new filter to the Google Search [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Search Analytics Update: May Increase Total Clicks & Impressions Google has added a new note to their Data Anomalies page in Google Search Console. This note [...] - The SEM Post
Google Adds App Install Button Data to Search Analytics Zineb Ait Bahajji has announced they have added a new filter to Google Search Console for the [...] - The SEM Post
Google Releases Knowledge Graph Search API Google has finally released the long-awaited Knowledge Graph Search API. Freebase made the [...] - The SEM Post

December, 18 2015

Google to Prioritize the Indexing of HTTPS Pages Google will now index a site’s HTTPS pages by default, even if an HTTP equivalent exists. - Search Engine Journal
Google Indexing HTTPS By Default Forget mobile first, now it's HTTPS first. Google announced last night that they will be indexing [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Five of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the - Search Engine Watch
Google Updates Rich Snippets For Articles Documentation For AMP We know Google recently updated their documentation for the rich snippets for articles page by [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Video: Google Hangout On Google Mobile, AMP & App-Indexing There was an excellent Google+ hangout with Google's John Mueller on the topics of mobile... - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Working On Fix For OK Google With 'Personal Results' Or 'Trusted Voice' On In September we reported issues with OK Google working with trusted voice setting on. Google has [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Now Prioritizing Secure HTTPS URLs Over Non-Secure HTTP URLs By Default Google has announced that they will now be giving preference to secure HTTPS URLs on websites over [...] - The SEM Post

December, 17 2015

Google To Begin To Index HTTPS Pages First, Before HTTP Pages When Possible If your pages work on HTTPS, Google will likely show the HTTPS version over the HTTP version [...] - Search Engine Land
Indexing HTTPS pages by default At Google, user security has always been a top priority. Over the years, we’ve worked hard to [...] - Google Webmaster Central
Four years of Schema.org - Recent Progress and Looking Forward Posted by Ramanathan Guha, Google Fellow In 2011, we announced schema.org , a new initiative [...] - Google Research
How Retailers Get Featured Snippets for Non-Brand Commercial Keyword Searches Earlier this year, when I first started noticing commercial sites – such as Amazon and other [...] - The SEM Post

December, 16 2015

SEO Tips For 2016 By Google's John Mueller In a Google+ hangout yesterday, John Mueller of Google was asked for his SEO tips for 2016. The [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Track Santa, And Learn How to Code, With Google’s Latest Santa Tracking App In addition to games and videos, Google’s 11th annual Santa Tracker can even teach you a bit [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Updated Their App Indexing Documentation Google has announced on Google+ that they have updated their documentation for their App Indexing [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Updated Search Engine Roundtable App & App Indexing Stats A month and a half ago I released the first Search Engine Roundtable app for both iOS and Android. [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Bing shares insights from response to the GOP debates Last week we released a new Bing Elections experience that provides a simple but powerful view of [...] - Bing Search
Google Revamps App Indexing Docs If you are looking for some more Google related reading after the recent Google Search Quality [...] - The SEM Post

December, 15 2015

Make your holidays a little easier with Now on Tap Between gift shopping, traveling, and party-going and party-hosting, there’s a lot to do this [...] - Inside Search
Text-to-Speech for low resource languages (episode 2): Building a parametric voice Posted by Alexander Gutkin, Google Speech Team This is the second episode in the series of posts [...] - Google Research
Google Rich Snippets For Articles Now Requires Author Name? Is It New? Cyrus Shepard posted on Twitter that Google recently changed the developer docs for rich snippet [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Facebook Eases Up on its Real-Name Policy Amidst Criticism Facebook makes some significant changes to its real-name policy. - Search Engine Journal
Google Adds Entity Disambiguation to Search Box for Many Keywords You have probably seen Google’s disambiguation box on the right hand side of the search [...] - The SEM Post
Google: No Technical Advantage To Splitting Up Sitemaps But Useful For Debugging John Mueller of Google answered a question on why you may want to split up your XML Sitemap files [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
VoiceXML (VXML) Markup Not Coming To Google Soon Joe Youngblood asked Google on Twitter if Google would "honor VoiceXML in the near future to [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Maps For iOS Upgraded with Offline Navigation, Local Gas Prices, and More Google is finally bringing some useful features from its Android app to iOS users. - Search Engine Journal
Yes, gTLDs Can Rank Just as Well as .com Domains in Google The last couple of years there are have been a ton of wild and wonderful gTLDs unleashed, and some [...] - The SEM Post
Your Bing Guide for the Holidays ‘Tis the season to be jolly and the Bing team is excited to help spread the holiday cheer! [...] - Bing Search
Bing Predicts goes 9-7 in Week 14, now 131-77 for the year Our latest predicted playoff positioning has New England still in 1st place with Denver 2nd as our [...] - Bing Search

December, 14 2015

Google: Avoid Using Special Characters In URLs Google's John Mueller said in a Google Webmaster Help thread that you should avoid using special [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Making online learning even easier with a re-envisioned Course Builder Posted by Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Pavel Simakov, Technical Lead, Course Builder Team [...] - Google Research
Google Adds “Located in” for Local Businesses in Malls, Buildings & Hotels Sometimes if you search for a business, and you know the address is by a shopping mall, it is hard [...] - The SEM Post
Google Testing New Style of Credit Card Comparison Ad Unit When doing credit card related searches, we have all seen the credit card comparison ad unit, which [...] - The SEM Post
Google Testing New Style Carousel in Google Knowledge Panel Results While looking at the new style of medical knowledge panels that trigger from brand name medicine [...] - The SEM Post
Google Testing New Brand Name Medical Knowledge Panels If you search for a brand name of a specific medicine, such as Adivil or Sudafed, Google will now [...] - The SEM Post

December, 11 2015

Google: Confident Google Penguin 4.0 Is Good Enough For A January Release As you know, Google told us Penguin 4.0 won't be released by the end of this year. But people are [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google to Roll Out Accelerated Mobile Pages to Everyone, Get Your Content Ready Now Google announced its plans to roll out accelerated mobile pages in February 2016 - Search Engine Journal
YouTube Introduces a ‘Trending’ Tab, Surfacing Viral Videos in Real Time YouTube has introduced a 'Trending' tab that will surface viral videos in real time. - Search Engine Journal
Six of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week This week: changes to structured snippets, a new feature on YouTube, online ad stats and Bing is [...] - Search Engine Watch
Automated Google AdWords Conversion Tracking Via Google Analytics Smart Goals Google announced a new way to quickly and easily add a form of "conversion tracking" [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google: When Blocking Spammers, Make Sure They Know It Keep your site clean of spammers, especially in places where spammers can add content to your site, [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google News Requires Each Language Of Your Site To Be Submitted For Inclusion Stacie Chan from the Google News team said in a Google News Help thread that if you have a [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Penguin Sounds on Track for January 2016 Real Time Update There were many mixed reactions about Penguin not launching in December like many believed it [...] - The SEM Post
Advantages to Using Multiple Sitemaps in Google Search Console Depending on the size of your site, you have probably been presented with whether you should split [...] - The SEM Post
Why Google Doesn’t Comment on Various Smaller “Phantom”-Type Updates There has been a lot of chatter over some of the fluctuations people noticed last month, [...] - The SEM Post

December, 10 2015

7 things to try by voice with the Google app on Android You can talk to more and more of your tech gadgets today, whether it’s your phone or your [...] - Inside Search
Japan Courts Order Removal Of Criminal Activity From Search As Privacy Violation Suggesting that there may soon be a European-style “Right to Be Forgotten” in Japan, [...] - Search Engine Land
Use Smart Goals, powered by Google Analytics, to optimize in AdWords To advertise smart, you have to measure smart. And a key metric for almost any business is [...] - Inside Adwords
Google: There May Be An Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Ranking Boost Just like we have an App Indexing API ranking boost, an HTTPS ranking boost, a mobile friendly [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google: Remove A 301 Redirect? You Need Patience & Convincing... John Mueller of Google responded to a complaint that after the webmaster removed a 301 redirect, [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Play Music Family Plan Google Play Music started to offer a new family plan : $14.99/month for up to 6 family members, [...] - Google Operating System
Discover Menu Favorites with Bing Excited to try a new restaurant but not sure what to order? No problem. Now you can see recommended [...] - Bing Search
AMP Project’s fast mobile pages coming to Google Search In October, we announced the launch of the Accelerated Mobile Pages project , an open [...] - Inside Search
Save Google's Image Search Results If you find beautiful images using Google Image Search's mobile site, you can save them and [...] - Google Operating System

December, 9 2015

Google “Play Dreidel” Search Returns Digital Version Of Hanukkah Spinning Toy Skipping usual holiday-related search decorations this year, Google created a digital dreidel and [...] - Search Engine Land
WordPress 4.4 Now Available, With Responsive Images & New Default Theme WordPress has released version 4.4 of its content management system - Search Engine Journal
Spamming Google, Don't Put All Your Sites In One Search Console Account! This may seem obvious and incredibly logical to anyone who reads it. But a tip for you all. If you [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
New Facebook Tools for Better Communication Between People and Pages Facebook has released a new set of tools designed for better communication with Pages - Search Engine Journal
Large Influx This Week Of Google Manual Actions? There seems to be an unusually large number of manual actions being sent out by Google this week. I [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

December, 8 2015

When can Quantum Annealing win? Posted by Hartmut Neven, Director of Engineering During the last two years, the Google Quantum [...] - Google Research
12 good, bad and ugly web design trends for 2016 So what have we got going on in 2016? More of the same, some innovative new techniques, and one or [...] - Search Engine Watch
Bing 2016 election experience: How do the candidates measure up? The 2016 elections cycle has already been quite a ride. If you’ve tuned in to the twists and [...] - Bing Search
Google Rewords Many Of Their Reconsideration Request Responses Seems Google has changed up their language for the reconsideration requests. Is the language more [...] - Search Engine Land
Get deeper insight into your automated bidding performance Understanding how your automated bid strategies are performing is easy if you know where to look. [...] - Inside Adwords
Google AdWords Doubles Amount of Structured Information Shown on Text Ads Google has doubled the amount of structured information that can be shown with text ads. - Search Engine Journal
Do Search Click-Throughs Help Determine Whether a Page Appears in Google Search Results? In a recent article at Search Engine Land we were told that Google Posts That Local Results Are [...] - SEO by the Sea
Google Patents On Clicks Influencing Rankings Last week, Google was caught removing the statement that they posted around clicks impacting local [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
New Google Reconsideration Requests Language More Confusing? Google has begun using revised language for some of their reconsideration requests and the question [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Reminders in Google Calendar Google Calendar's apps for Android and iOS now let you add reminders, just like you can do using [...] - Google Operating System
All Tab in Google Search Google has a new name for the "web" tab from search results pages. It's now called [...] - Google Operating System

December, 7 2015

How to Classify Images with TensorFlow Posted by Pete Warden, Software Engineer Prior to joining Google, I spent a lot of time trying to [...] - Google Research
The power of nothing: three lessons from Cards Against Humanity and the killing of Black Friday One business took a pretty interesting approach to this year’s Black Friday shopping [...] - Search Engine Watch
Google Place Actions Rich Snippet Markup Documentation Posted & Then Removed From Developer Portal Google's book an appointment, place an order or make a reservation rich snippet markup was [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Traffic Soars After SEO Drops Links From Disavow File There is a WebmasterWorld thread which has an SEO who accidentally removed all the links from their [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
How Machine Learning Impacts the Google Search Ranking Algo Another Penguin question was raised in Friday’s webmaster hangout with John Mueller, this [...] - The SEM Post
Google Place Actions Documentation Removed & 404ed Friday we reported that Google now is showing the Google Place Action rich snippet documentation to [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Bing Testing Larger News Story Thumbnails in Search Results Bing is drawing more attention to news stories in the search results my including much larger image [...] - The SEM Post
Bing Adds How Many Days Countdown Feature to Knowledge Box Bing has added a new feature to their knowledge box results at the top of the search results. [...] - The SEM Post

December, 6 2015

NIPS 2015 and Machine Learning Research at Google Posted by Sanjiv Kumar, Research Scientist This week, Montreal hosts the 29 th Annual [...] - Google Research

December, 4 2015

Google Posts That Local Results Are Influenced By Clicks, Then Deletes That Does Google use click data for local rankings? A new post by a Googler said so, but it was then [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Local One Box Details Removed From Web Search Listings Was it a bug or a feature change? Google no longer shows local data in the main search results [...] - Search Engine Land
Get more details on your favorite musicians, actors, TV shows and movies Wondering if your favorite singer is playing near you? Or looking for some new music suggestions?Or [...] - Inside Search
Why Google Decided to Delay Penguin Until the New Year We learned yesterday that Google would be delaying the upcoming real time Penguin update until the [...] - The SEM Post
Real Time Penguin Changes & The Role of Links in the Algo In part of today’s Google Webmaster Hangout, an interesting question came up about why Google [...] - The SEM Post

December, 3 2015

Google: New Penguin Algorithm Update Not Happening Until Next Year Webmasters and SEOs need to have a bit more patience, as Google is not releasing the updated [...] - Search Engine Land
Introducing new interactive ads to drive app installs Developers are constantly looking for new ways to bring users to their apps. But because [...] - Inside Adwords
Google Testing 4 Top AdWords Ads Above Search Results Google is now testing four AdWords ads above the organic search results. I started getting [...] - The SEM Post
Google Changes Statement On Clicks Impact Google My Business Rankings Yesterday I reported that Google said clicks impact Google My Business rankings. Well... - Search Engine Roundtable
Facebook Releases Live Video Streaming to Limited Number of iPhone Users According to the Facebook Newsroom, this new feature will allow users to share streaming videos [...] - Search Engine Journal
How Alt Tags can Hurt Your Business, Especially When Under the Legal Magnifying Glass Some on-page SEO element may seem unimportant, but even as simple as image alt-tags can actually [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Releases ‘Trial Runs’ Streaming App Ads Today, the company confirmed a new streaming mobile ad feature. This new feature will allow users [...] - Search Engine Journal
Introducing a new type of search event: ‘Connect’ We’ve launched a brand new search event, Connect, taking place on the beach this Feb 4-5 at [...] - Search Engine Watch
Penguin Real Time Update Delayed Until New Year If you have been waiting for Penguin to be updated, you will have to wait a little bit [...] - The SEM Post
December 2015 Google Webmaster Report For the last recap of this month, we have for you the December Google webmaster report where I [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Woes For Google Search Console Crawl Errors For Apps Continues Over a month ago, we reported about issues with the Google Search Console crawl errors reports for [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

December, 2 2015

Phantom Update III: What Google’s updated Quality Guidelines could mean for page rankings Everyday countless webpages are evaluated by Google quality raters (with the goal of improving the [...] - Searchmetrics
Evidence Of An Unconfirmed Google Update Happening On November 19th While Google did not confirm an update on November 19th, there sure is plenty of evidence to show [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Admits Clicks Impact Your Google My Business Listing Rankings I believe this is common knowledge in the local SEO world but I don't think I've seen Google come [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Snapchat Now Allowing Some Publishers to ‘Deep Link’ to To Their Content Snapchat recently announced it will allow Discover Channel partners to link directly to their [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Permanently Removes “Change Location” Search Feature If you often use the "Change Location" feature to see Google search results in different [...] - Search Engine Journal
John Mueller: Vote On The Topic Of Last Google Webmaster Hangouts Of The Year John Mueller of Google who does the vast majority of the webmaster hangouts, especially the English [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Revamping App Indexing Error Reporting, Adds to Data Anomalies Report Google is revamping their app indexing error reporting that is shown to webmasters within Google [...] - The SEM Post

December, 1 2015

Google Drops Change Location Search Filter From Search Results Google seems to have dropped yet another search tool/filter, this one for location settings. - Search Engine Land
Disavowed Links Show In Google Search Console Link Report This is just an FYI, in case you did not know this, but the link report within the Google Search [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Says For AMP Mobile Development, Use Canonicals So Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages is expected to be pushed by Google big time in 2016, so much [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Removes & Changes Location Settings in Search Tools If you use the Google.com domain, or you are in the US and are defaulted to it, you have probably [...] - The SEM Post
Disavowed Links Continue to Show in Google’s Search Console Link Report If you have ever wondered about whether or not disavowed links would continue to show up in Google [...] - The SEM Post
Google Manual Actions on a Subdomain Don’t Affect Rest of the Site In a recent Google webmaster help thread on the forums, an interesting question was raised about [...] - The SEM Post
Bing Predicts goes 10-6 in Week 12, now 112-64 for the year Week 12 Results: Bing Predicts was 10-6 in Week 12, starting Thanksgiving strong with correct picks [...] - Bing Search