I spend an inordinate amount of time deleting spam emails from my Gmail inbox. If my email is public and scraped, Gmail should still block the spam people send me. Since they’ve been horrible at stopping this for at least a year, and probably more like three years, I’m going to start posting these emails here and hopefully Google will improve its spam filters as a result…
In a Google Inside Search blog post, Introducing the Knowledge Graph: Things, not strings we’re told of a new initiative from Google to show us more information within search results themselves about the things we search for. This is a potentially paradigm shifting view of what a search engine does. The post tells us:
[...]…
Google has rolled out what it describes as ‘the next frontier in search’, the Google Knowledge Graph. Already in use in the US, this new search engine upgrade from the advertising giant will be made available to most English speaking countries within the next few days and, as usual, to the rest of the world in the weeks and months to come.
Google claims that this upgrade is a much more intelligent version of its existing engine, because it is able to read the words in web content on a semantic level as opposed to a lexical one, as has always been the case…
A common issue that arises in the forums is the business owner that is unable to change or enhance their listing because they no longer have access to the account that it is in, perhaps because they lost the password , the employee that had claimed the listing is no longer employed or they had a falling out with their SEO company.
It is possible to reclaim the listing and last year I provided instructions on how to do so…
Jon Cooper writes about an interesting negative SEO tactic: fake link removal requests. I have particular interest since I think I got one of these, recently.
As I emailed Jon:
“I recently got an email from someone supposedly asking for me to take down links to their company site. The weird thing is that the address was actually a company one. I wonder if it’s not some former angry employee? When I wrote back asking why, I got no response…
Off the back of a recent site launch, I wanted to talk about how we combine some of the industry standard, award-winning software that we use – and some of the issues we face at a technical level.
We’re constantly finding new and innovative ways of tackling issues raised by clients, but it’s important to remember that there’s no point contstantly re-inventing the wheel, when combining the powers of such software can achieve so much…
This is a cautionary tale to 29Prime’s remaining 8000 clients. If this company abuses their own Google Places listing imagine what they might be doing in your name.
Let me be upfront with my bias.. 29Prime is not one of my favorite companies. And I have in the past commented on their abuse of Google Place’s reviews to hide the reality of who they really are. But reader Dave Middleton pointed out that in addition to abusing Google Places’s review policy they are also abusing the Google Places Guidelines as well by adding a tagline to their business name in their Places listing:
Their claim of having served 20,000 clients, while an abuse of Google’s guideline against tag lines in the business name, is an interesting one…
Following on from our blog post recently about cleaning up unnatural links we’ve been doing some research to understand which tools are best to use for finding bad links to your site.
The primary tools that most of us know and love for link analysis are Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz and Majestic SEO but we have recently found that these tools (even if their results are merged together) are not able to find the same level of unnatural links that Google is aware of…
We’re getting quite a few site review requests and SEO consultancy requests recently for people that have been hit by a sudden drop in traffic. Because there has been quite some news about Google’s Penguin and before that its Panda update, people are blaming those. In our perspective, whether you’re blaming Penguin, Panda or another update from Google isn’t really that interesting if you’re not an SEO…
You’ve probably all heard of the ‘EU Cookie Law’ by now, but you might not know what it actually specifies and what’s going to happen when it comes into place on 26th May 2012.
Named the ‘EU e-Privacy Directive Compliance’ (it doesn’t solely apply to cookies); the law actually came into play last May, but the Information Commissioner’s Office has given web masters 12 months to prepare for the enforcement of the law this year…
Google continues having technical issues with losing reviews (here is my first report of them being lost from August 2008 so the issue goes back quite a ways) particularly when the CID of a listing changes due to a merge. Also they seem to be tightening down what appears to be a relatively unsophisticated spam algo (first confirmed in November 2010) that is catching a number of good reviews with the bad…
Would love to see you at our next Getlisted Local University!
May 22 - Local University: Syracuse will take place on May 22, 2012 from 8am – 12pm OR 1pm – 5pm at Driver’s Village in Cicero. Your choice of identical 4 hours sessions. Besides the regular speakers (David Mihm, Mary Bowling, Will Scott and myself) the event also includes John Carcutt, the Director of SEO for Advance Digital and co-host of SEO 101 on WebmasterRadio…
Author Ranking in social media is more than just a popularity contest, and can include things like how frequently an author surfaces content that subsequently becomes popular, topical authority on different subjects, and popularity and influence signals.
Author Authority to Distinguish Signal From Noise?
Social media contains a lot of signal, and a lot [...]…
Google Places is now rolling out a new Offers creation program in the Places Dashboard to accompany the new Google Maps for Android. The product is significantly more robust than the current product and offers a range of creation options.
It is now live in my Places Dashboard. Click this image to view a slide show of the creation options:
Features:
When you enter the Offers area of the Dashboard old offers are visible but not editable…
Manipulative repetitive anchor text, blog comments filled with spam, Google bombs, and obscene content could be the targets of a system described in a patent granted to Google today that provides arbiters (human and possibly automated), with ways to disassociate some content found on the Web, such as web pages, with other content, such [...]…
The snafu with the Places index that caused an inordinate number of accounts to suffer the dreaded “We Currently Do Not Support This Location” report for a listing should be fixed by now. But some users may find that they have moved from purgatory into Dante’s circles of hell.
Vanessa noted in the forums that the engineers should have had the immediate problem repaired by today and the influx of new messages has nearly stopped…
Google is cutting the ROI on ecommerce SEO and has been for 8+ years. If ecommerce merchants don’t understand the changes below, they’re going to lose market share to savvier competitors.
Read on for what you need to do to survive and thrive.
Google has reduced the traffic and ROI available to SEO-ed sites by:
Nyagoslav Zhekov pointed out to me that Google has recently added the following to their Google Places Guidelines:
Marketing, promotions, or other contests
Any promotion, marketing, contests, or other giveaways should clearly link to the terms of the activity and provide clear guidelines and qualifications. All such promises, given or implied, should be adhered to.
This is an odd Guideline in a number of respects…
Manish Pandey, an SEO expert I’m familiar with, recently published a large article listing and describing all the phases of Google Panda. Check it out!.
Downloads For RSS Subscribers:
Linda Buquet notes that in some situations (where you have not received the start over email) Google is still apparently resuscitating some suspended accounts.
From the post:
Your account’s been suspended. See my response on this other related thread:
Listing not live on Maps anymore, or, it is live and it’s not owner-verified? Use this contact form and …
Select: I have verified > Yes > My listing no longer appears on Google Maps…
Apparently there is a new bug (or is it an old one that has resurfaced) causing a number of listings to be erroneously noted as ”We Currently Do Not Support This Location” .
Google’s Places Forum Community Manager Vanessa has noted in the forums:
A bunch of you have reported seeing “We currently do not support this location” on your listing. We’re working on a fix right now and will keep you posted on progress…
…
Whilst I’ve only been working ‘properly’ in the SEO field at Branded3 for eight months or so, it’s clear from our very own Patrick Altoft that the last few months have caused the biggest upheaval in the search world for a long time.
“…SEO has never been harder to do than it is right now.”
There’s much talk about the various Google wildlife that’s currently been unleashed on the WWW but this isn’t going to be another post about Penguins and Pandas, or how certain sites are more at risk of penalty, how bad the SERPs are or how Google is destroying small businesses…
There are some changes coming to paid search at Google that sound exciting on the surface, but may leave many guessing how exactly those changes might manifest themselves. Over at the Inside Google Adwords blog, we were greeted with a blog post titled New matching behavior for phrase and exact match keywords on April [...]…
Dave Oremland of Professional Bartending School in DC, alerted me to the fact that Google Places is now apparently going so far as to request a business license from some businesses to verify their authenticity. In this Google Places forum post the Commonwealth Sunoco of Boston asked:
I received an email from local-help@google.com. They are requesting a scanned copy of my business lisence…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
