The head of Google's anti-spam team, Matt Cutts, has published another video on YouTube. In this video, he answers the question why Interflora's penalty was lifted after just 11 days. Has Google different penalties for different websites?
In an online discussion, a webmaster complained that the rankings of his website fluctuate much on Google's result page. Google's John Mueller said that this was normal:
"Fluctuations like this can be normal - the algorithms don't stand still and use many signals to review & determine the relevance of pages & sites.
Looking at it just now, it seems that [your rankings] may just have come back again . That said, working to improve the overall quality of a website is always a good thing. If this is currently one of your busier times, then it might make sense to do that a bit afterwards -- but I'd definitely think about what you could do to get feedback from users (customers or not) already."
Many business owners who want to get high rankings on Google overlook basic technical settings that will have a major impact on the rankings of your website (see news below). There are many things that can negatively effect the positions of your web pages on Google and it's relatively simply to avoid these errors.
Google has introduced a new spam filter that can lead to a manual action penalty of your website. If the images that visitors see on your website are not the same images that Google sees, Google might take manual action against your website.
The Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) has become an extremely dynamic environment in recent years. Gone are the ten blue links that made up a Google search results page a few short years ago having been replaced by blended results (or as Google dubbed them “universal results”). In fact at the time I listed twenty different types of results that Google was displaying on their SERPS at the time. These included:
Sometimes, your web site might contain pages that you do not want to see in Google's search results. Some people block Google without knowing it and others don't know how to exclude individual pages. This week's article shows you how to prevent Google from indexing pages of your website.
A hummingbird is a very amazing creature. Did you know that hummingbirds are the smallest of the bird family yet they are amazingly fast and quick? In some cases their wings can reach 100 beats per second. That’s pretty quick for such a little bird. So when Google decides to make a major algorithm change, what do they use for a code name? Hummingbird of course… The name was most likely associated with the fact that Google is looking to help users find their information quicker when they perform a search on Google. What’s all the fuss about hummingbirds?
Well in August 2013, Google launched their largest algorithm update in years with their Google Hummingbird algorithm update.
Technical errors on your website can have a major influence on the rankings of your web pages on Google and other search engines. If you're not actively monitoring your website, it might be that you are not aware of these errors on your site.
Users of Google Analytics may be searching for the “Traffic” tab as they look to get data on website traffic, but Google has officially removed this tab and replaced it with a new tab called “Acquisition”. This new change follows a slew of changes Google has been implementing to the data they provide webmasters with lately.
Last week, we (and everyone else in the SEO world) reported that Google had finally decided to move entirely to secure search and that Google would be no longer sharing organic keyword referral information and that (not provided) data as communicated in Google Analytics is now 100%. We have been getting a lot of questions on what this means for site owners, organic search, and online marketers. Some of the questions that you might be asking: