Whenever I meet someone who finds out that I work on the directions team for Google Maps, the first question I’m asked is often “So when’s Google Maps going to add biking directions?” We’re big biking fans too, so we’ve been itching to give you a concrete answer. I don’t want to keep the good news a secret any longer, so the answer is: right now!Today we’ve added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U…
The Oscars®: glitz, glamor, gossip, gold statuettes, much fanfare — and for many fans, Google search is increasingly a part of watching this live TV experience. Before and during the Academy Awards® broadcast in the U.S., we saw related queries on Google dominating the Hot Trends list. People searched for the TV schedule, printable ballots for voting on favorites, streaming video sites, nominee and film information, celebrity chatter and whatever else caught your attention…
Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information…
At SphinnCon 2010 yesterday in Jerusalem, I presented on guest post based link building. The main advantage, in addition to the high quality of links it builds relative to other sorts, is repeatability. View the preso to see what I mean.
Goldenberg Gab SphinnCon The Difference Is Repeatability
View more presentations from guestf7474b.
If you’ve been wondering why I’m not posting regularly lately, it’s because I’ve moved to Jerusalem since mid-January and am currently studying at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem…
We work as outsource link building partners for quite a few big companies who have a good level of SEO knowledge in house but don’t have the resources to do high level link building.
Normally we just charge by the day (£750) but recently we’ve launched a new offer for in-house teams whereby we don’t charge anything for our time, we just charge for the links we get…
A misconception about web pages that lingered for a long time on the Web was that most people who visit your web site will enter your site on your home page. Another one is that the meta description you choose for a page will usually be what a search engines shows as the snippet, [...]…
It’s not often that a premium .co.uk domain with mass market appeal gets auctioned but mobilephones.co.uk is currently being auctioned on Sedo, the current bid is £25k and the reserve has been met with only one bid so far.
Apparently phones.co.uk was sold for £175k a couple of years ago so it will be interesting to see if this reaches the £1m mark. What do you guys think, how much will this domain get sold for? Could you use the exact match domain to rank for “mobile phones” as a keyword or is the brand algorithm too strong in this sector?
Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisationMobile Phones …
There is obviously no shortage of information on SEO.
But thanks for turning up here 
The sheer avalanche of SEO information can be overwhelming, for beginners and experts alike. Who do you know who to listen to? What information do you need to know, and what information is filler?
Why should you even listen to SEOBook?
1. Most Information Published On SEO Is Filler
You can learn 80% of what you need to know about SEO pretty quickly…
For those of you into paid links and blog/guestbook spamming this is probably going to be bad news – Google has apparently got a new linkspam algorithm and they are actively seeking reports to test it with.
Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e…
In a previous post I covered how to link to a specific timestamp in a YouTube video. The short version looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s
The “#t=31m08s” takes you to 31 minutes and 8 seconds in a video. I just found out that you can also start embedded videos at a certain timestamp.
To do it on an embedded video, use the “start” parameter…
Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here’s how to send us more info. Go to
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport
and tell us about the site that appears to be employing link spam…
Branded3 is enjoying a bit of a boom this year with a new SEO client pretty much every week since mid-January. Because of this we’re on a recruitment drive to build the best team of on-site and off-site SEO specialists in the UK.
If you have experience in the industry and want to work with some of the UK’s biggest online brands then please get in touch with us and we can arrange an interview…
This is great news for agencies – Google Webmaster Tools now has an easy way for clients to give access to their data without having to upload a meta tag or an html file.
All you need to do is enter the email address you want to give access to and as long as they have a Google account they can get access straight away.
Small changes that make our life a lot easier…
During the past two weeks, athletes from around the world competed at the Games in Vancouver. While these thousands strove for gold, millions around the world searched for 2010 Winter Olympics, 밴쿠버 동계올림픽 (Korean for “Vancouver Winter Olympics”), and Juegos Olimpicos de Invierno 2010 (Spanish for “2010 Olympic Winter Games”) using Google search. Now that the medals have been handed out, we thought we’d take a moment to share how some people from around the world searched for information about the Games…
For the last couple of years we have been badgering Google to start emailing webmasters to tell them that their site has been hacked and now the feature is finally live – no more having to use Google Alerts!
The system reports on hacking and abused user generated content as well as comment spam amongst other things. The only drawback is that you have to set up the email forwarding feature otherwise you won’t get a notification – why can’t Google just use your registered email address?
More from the Google announcement:
Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we’ve detected on their websites, including:
These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google’s search results…
The polls have closed, the votes have been tallied and the people have spoken: it’s time to announce the winners of our Street View trike suggestions contest. Last October, we gave Street View fans the opportunity to vote for the special attractions around the United States that they most want to see featured on Google Maps. In the first round, we received more than 25,000 suggestions, which we narrowed down to the 24 finalists that were put up to a public vote…
Now, don’t get me wrong. Google Local and Google Maps are extremely valuable tools that I use a few times every week. But every so often they get something wrong–so wrong, in fact, that I’m not sure where the wires got crossed.
Let’s assume I wanted to stop by a local pub on a Saturday night. Maybe I’d want to check out the website first to see what was going on, so I’d type in the name and town [molly blooms amityville] and get this result:
For those of you who might not remember, I live in New York (more specifically on Long Island)…
Sometimes when you search at one of the major search engines, you’ll see an extra set of links showing up under one of the listings in those search results. Referred to as either quicklinks or site links, most often those will show up for the listing at the top of the search results like in [...]…
Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you’re a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer’s market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. Starting today, we’ve added the ability to refine your searches with the “Nearby” tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding “Minneapolis” to your query and missing webpages that only say “St…
There’s a trend of editors in the SEO world uptight about linking out.
A friend in the industry who guest blogs recently told me that he was told by his editor he couldn’t promise links to contributors who participated in guest interviews. Others have been seeing the same, and writers I work with have seen their editors take forever about updating bios [with the attendant links] …
WTF?
The big three engines encourage you to link out to quality sites and resources…
Marty of Aimclear sent this screen shot of what, at first glance, appeared to be a spammy onebox for the Google search SEO Duluth and perhaps foreshadowed the return of SEO to the 7 Pack after their banishment:
Neither is the case. Apparently there is a Physicians Assistant in Duluth by the name of Kengo Seo. As is often the case with Medical Practioners the listing sites that Google referenced had the last name first and it was added to the index that way…
Mathew Hunt of Small Business Online Coach, recently pointed out what appears to be a new bug in Google’s clustering algo that causes one business’s citations to show up on another business’s Places Page.
It appears that Google Maps, when scraping multiple citations for different businesses that appear on a single unstructured web page, not only conflates the citations for that specific page but brings along other citations not from that page, from one business to another…
The question for today’s post comes from Meg Geddes aka NetMeg. She wants to know more about setting up caching on Wordpress.
Ok, let’s get the big question out of the way. What is caching and why do you want it? Basically, caching will store copies of pages that have already been served from your webserver so that they don’t have to be called from the database every time they are requested and don’t have to be parsed through the PHP engine…
A new patent filing from Apple may be a sign of changes to the way Apple presents music recommendations at the iTunes store. That change was hinted at last December when Apple acquired the streaming music site, Lala.
The patent application lists Ryan Dixon, Digital Album Content Manager at iTunes, as the inventor, and provides [...]…
One of the words that often appears when someone describes how search engines work is relevance. A search engine attempts to show searchers web pages and other results that might be relevant to the words that they used when they perform a search. Yet, there are a number of different ways that you can [...]…
Most news sites are reporting on the Google anti-trust allegations today after the European Commission launched an anti-trust investigation against Google after three online companies alleged that the internet giant’s search functions were penalising their businesses.
This case has a lot of background (you can read about Foundem here and here – they recently got a 10,000% search traffic increase overnight after Google apparently lifted some kind of penalty) but the interesting thing for me is that at least one of the sites wanting to take action against Google is one of the webs largest link buyers…
Hello all, just a quickie to introduce myself.
My name is Tim Grice and I am the new Search Strategist at Branded3, there is a chance you may have heard of me before or come across my blog SEO wizz, it has had the odd mention here and there
I am a real search addict, starting around 4-5 years ago when Adwords was first taking off, going through the affiliate marketing phrase, losing lots of money, losing lots of Adsense accounts (also having some success ) and well here I am…
When the internal Google remote quality rater guidelines leaked online there was a core quote inside it that defined the essence of spam:
Final Notes on Spam
When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam…
It may be possible that governmental web sites are at least as important, and in some cases more important that most of the other web sites online. They can provide information on when and where to vote, when and where laws are being made, when and where you can access elected and appointed officials, and information about possibly a large number of services that goverment may provide, from trash pickup and some utility services to police and fire and rescue information…
Last year I tried to limit my travel but still ended up making about ten (!) trips in 2009. This year I’ve resolved to travel less for work. Right now, here’s my current speaking/travel plans for 2010:
March 2-4, 2010: SMX West, Santa Clara, CA. I’m doing a “Ask the Search Engines” panel.
May 19-20, 2010: Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I’m doing a site review session…
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
