According to Gary Illyes, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, the Google search engine has no duplicate content penalty. In a Tweet on February 13, 2017, Gary said the following: [Read more…]

Have Chinese hackers stolen Google’s search engine secrets? Have they infiltrated the super-secret Google algorithm, allowing them to manipulate Google’s search results? According to a new book by Bill Gertz titled War and Peace in the Information Age, “Chinese cyber-intelligence services had developed technology and network penetration skills allowing them to control the results of Internet searches conducted on Google’s world-famous search engine. [Read more…]

Apparently, Google Answer boxes can appear in the search results when performing a site:domain.com type of search in Google. I find this kind of odd, as typically someone isn’t looking for an answer per se when they use the site: search operator at Google.

What is a Google Answer Box?
A Google Answer box is Google’s attempt to give you information in their search results about search query (keyword) so you don’t have to click through to a website to get the answer. Google predicts the answer to your question, scrapes the data from a website, and makes it show up at the top of the search results. This is often referred to ranking 0 (zero) position, before the first result. In most cases, Google will show Google AdWords ads before the answer box.

Here is an example: [Read more…]

In the past week, you probably have noticed that there is referral traffic from Lifehacker.com that is showing up in Google Analytics. You could also be seeing traffic from one particular Reddit.com URL. This is, in fact, fake, spam, or “ghost” traffic that you should ignore. The only purpose of it is to get you to visit one of those sites, typically trying to get you to copy/paste the URL and visit the website. [Read more…]

A bug in the Google’s search engine is causing false, old dates to appear in front of websites listed in their search results. This, in turn, is causing drops in traffic. Some are also reporting ranking drops, as well. [Read more…]

Back in February 2016, I wrote about Google’s new project, called Accelerated Mobile Pages, and how you can install a WordPress Plugin called the Google AMP plugin. The whole idea is to provide a new web format so that mobile users can view content that loads really quickly, even with a slow internet (mobile) connection. Initially targeted towards news publishers like Practical Ecommerce, we’re seeing a lot more public adoption of this new web standard. Google AMP is not just for news publishers anymore. [Read more…]

Google just launched a new smart messaging app called Allo. This app is certainly interesting–but do we really need yet another messaging app? After all, Apple just introduced a whole lot of new features of their built-in iOS messaging (imessage) when they launched iOS 10 just last week. [Read more…]

I applaud Google for launching a Google Analytics demo account, which anyone (with a Google Account) can access. Now we can use a real, live, Google Analytics account to play around with and look at the data. Quite often, it’s difficult to learn all of the Google Analytics features because some websites (in your Google Analytics account) may not have that feature. So this is all good. But there’s only one problem: even Google’s own demo account includes referral spam. [Read more…]

In a long dispute between Google and the State of Mississippi’s Attorney General Jim Hood, Google’s most recent request for a rehearing has been denied. The Times Standard reported back in April that the appeals court had overturned a ruling against the Stage of Mississippi. Google has appealed that ruling, which has now been denied. [Read more…]

Google Search Console’s Search Analytics feature, the feature that allows you to see the keywords, impressions, clicks, and average position of your website’s pages, has not been updated since May 3, 2016. Usually, Google allows verified website owners to see their search query data up to the past two days (the data is delayed two days). However, this week, the Google Search Console Search Analytics data has not been updated since May 3, 2016. [Read more…]

Google is showing multiple domain names in its search results when the site: command is used if domains pointing to the main domain include the canonical tag. Let me explain by giving you an example. [Read more…]

In the Google search results, I’m still seeing some alternative characters show up at the beginning of the title tags in some results. Looks like the cases I have come across are all search engine spam results, but the fact that these characters are even being allowed is a mystery to me. Let’s look at an example: [Read more…]

Google has added a share button to knowledge graph entries to encourage us to search more at Google. Whenever you search using a desktop (not mobile) device, and you see a knowledge graph entry on the right side of the search results, Google is displaying a share button, like this: [Read more…]

Google’s organic search engine algorithm is made up of a lot of different search engine ranking factors. When it comes to certain search queries, not all of those search engine ranking factors are applied. In other words, Google may apply certain parts of their algorithm to certain keyword queries and might disregard other parts for other keywords. In a recent post at the SEM Post, one Google employee indirectly verified that this is the case. [Read more…]

A while back I wrote about my utter frustration with Google and their Change of Address Tool. I wrote about how their Change of Address Tool is broken. Well, honestly, I’m still frustrated. After 3 months, it’s still broken. [Read more…]

I don’t recall anytime recently when Google showed such a horrible, misguided, completely wrong search result lately. I am stunned that Google would even possibly show a result such as this. Or, perhaps this is a sign of yet another change to Google’s search engine algorithm? [Read more…]

Uh oh, Google just announced that a new mobile-friendly update is coming in May 2016. And, as such, I’m going to personally be the first one to call this Mobilegeddon II. Not because of the fact that the first mobile friendly update back in April 2015 was catastrophic–just because this is the second mobile friendly update for Google that they’ve announced ahead of time, and, well, the first one was called Mobilegeddon. [Read more…]

Adding Google AdSense to your website hurts the mobile user experience on your website and violates Google’s own suggested guidelines.

I have been working on my own site, this site, to optimize it for page load speed. Using Google’s own Pagespeed Insights tool, I found that there is one particular section of the results, under User Experience, that gave me a score of 99 out of 100. That problem is Google AdSense. [Read more…]