Google: SEO
One of the most frustrating experiences for any publisher is discovering that someone not only has copied your content but outranks you on Google for searches related to that content. Now, Google seems to have heard the complaints and has launched a tool to help. Called the Google Scraper Report, it was announced by the […]
Content
In a recent video published by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts talks about are blog comments with links spam? In short, most of the time, commenting and leaving links to your site or resources is not directly spam but like anything, it can be abused. Matt offers some tips on how to make […]
This morning, the head of Google’s webspam team Matt Cutts gave a keynote speech at Pubcon in Las Vegas. The keynote comes on the heels of a scathing day — 1 keynote from Jason Calacanis, who said that Google rules everything, that they were essentially evil. On Twitter yesterday, Matt asked if Jason wanted the […]
Google: SEO
If you attended the Structured Data Superstars session at SMX East earlier this month, you probably witnessed a very brief interchange between myself and Googler Pierre Far at the end of the session. Pierre woke everyone up by stating that some of the semantic markup recommendations I’d presented would be considered “spam” by Google. It was […]
Amazon
Google has significantly penalized another underground link network over the weekend and we believe that one of the link networks targeted by Google is named Ghost Rank 2.0. A few weeks ago, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, tweeted “Thinking of ghost-related puns for a spam network. “They try to look super natural, but […]
Google: SEO
In a recent video answer by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, Google said that spammers rarely use multiple or mass number of ccTLDs in an effort to spam. This comment came from Matt Cutts when he answered a question on if it is duplicate content to have the same content on an IPv4 […]
If you’re not seeing the “Manual Actions” feature in Google Webmaster Tools, you’re not alone. Many webmasters have taken to Twitter and other social networks to say that the link has been removed from their accounts, and Google has updated its original announcement to say that a “snag” will delay full launch for a couple […]
Earlier today, Google launched manual spam actions to Google Webmaster Tools where you can see if your site currently has a manual spam action. To help those who have received some of these manual action notifications, Google created seven videos for the most common manual action notifications. The videos include user-generated spam, hidden text and/or […]
Google is adding a new feature in Webmaster Tools that will leave no doubt when a site’s search rankings are affected by a manual webspam action. It’s called the Manual Actions viewer, and it’s available today under the “Search Traffic” tab. The new tool complements the email notifications that Google already sends when it takes […]
Google Algorithm Updates
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced in a video that Google fights search spam at an international level but does tend to have a stronger spam fighting sense in the Google.com, English search results. Matt Cutts explained that with most of Google’s spam fighting algorithms, such as the Panda and Penguin algorithms, Google […]
Google made a clear stance late Friday on the Google Webmaster blog that they will not tolerate webmasters pushing deceptive search results to searchers through the use of browser history spamming techniques. The technique uses a method of detecting a click on the browser’s back button. When clicked, a user is not sent back to […]
Google has officially launched a new search update to target “spammy queries” such as [payday loan], pornographic and other heavily spammed queries. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, announced this on Twitter saying “We just started a new ranking update today for some spammy queries.” He pointed to the video he published where he […]
Google’s fourth Penguin update — what the company is calling Penguin 2.0 — hit last night, and less than 24 hours later we’re already getting a first chance to look at what sites might be considered “losers” in terms of search visibility. In a nutshell, the list includes: porn sites, game sites and big brands […]
The latest large brand to be hit with a user-generated content spam penalty notification is Sprint, the large US wireless communications company. Similar to Mozilla’s penalty and BBC’s penalty, Sprint was penalized for user-generated content spam on a portion of their site that was open to anyone to post links and content. Also similar to […]
Content
What a week it’s been where Google and SEO are concerned. The company, via Matt Cutts, has issued several warnings about things to come — and, late Tuesday night, also revealed that it’s just acted against another link network. In a pair of tweets, Cutts — the head of Google’s webspam team — said that […]
Google’s head of search spam, has decided to publish a bunch of blog posts that were sitting in draft mode on his personal blog. He said his blog needs to cough up a hairball – hence the animated GIF used here. But, we can learn a few things when Matt Cutts coughs up hairballs. A […]
Google: SEO
We reported yesterday that Google penalized Mozilla over user generated content. Today, we learn that it was a really, really small penalty that only impacted a single page out of Mozilla’s ~22 million webpages. Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, added more to the Google thread explaining that this manual penalty was applied in […]
Google: SEO
Have user generated content on your site? Pay attention to what those users are doing. That’s the takeaway from Google hitting Mozilla with a spam penalty this week, along with another takeaway. Despite Google’s saying it’s being more transparent about spam actions, people clearly find it hard to know what they’re in trouble for. Mozilla […]
SEO
Yandex has taken exception to a recent study that reported it has more malware in its search results than other major search engines like Google and Bing. The company shared its concerns with Search Engine Land via email, saying that it also sent the same response to AV-TEST, the German IT security firm that published […]
Google: SEO
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted a video answer to the question “Can I buy a domain that used to have spam on it and still rank?” Matt explains that there can be two penalties here, one on the manual side and one on the algorithmic side. If this was a manual penalty, […]