Press Release Sites See Huge Drop In Google Ranking After Panda 4.0

Yesterday I reported at Search Engine Land that Panda 4.0 may have hurt press release sites and showed SearchMetrics data for PRWeb, PR Newswire, BusinessWire and PRLog all losing between 60% to 85% of their SEO visibility. This drop seems to have come right after the Google Panda 4.0 update. The controversy around press release sites were mostly about links flowing from those releases, not necessarily the issue with the duplicative nature...

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Google Tag Manager: A Step-By-Step Guide

The more useful and relevant your site becomes, the worse it may actually perform. This happens because websites are continuously adding tags to enhance their tracking, optimization or other functionality; this ends up crowding pages with third party tags and may slower the website. For this reason, the Google Tag Manager, a free solution for tag management, is very welcomed, especially by Marketers. In the past, everything...

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Google Algorithm & Ranking Shifts On Fire This Month

Despite Google saying nothing is going on, we've been seeing signs of major changes and reports of major changes in the Google search results and rankings. Again, over the weekend, I've been getting private emails with tons of public chatter in the WebmasterWorld and even BlackHatWorld forums about Google making a lot of changes over the weekend. Some are suspecting a massive Penguin update is about to hit, while others think it might be a...

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Google's Matt Cutts: Anticipate The Query To Better Control Titles In Google

Google's Matt Cutts posted a video explaining why and when Google may use something other than your title tag for the search results title snippet. Matt Cutts suggested that it is best for your to try to anticipate what the user will search for when crafting your title tags. When you do that and then when it matches the query, then Google will likely show your title tag. Google uses three criteria when determining if they should use your...

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Google Preparing Large Update? Shifts On May 2nd & 7th

I mentioned there was some chatter about a Google update on May 2nd but now we are seeing even more chatter and signs of flux in the Google search results on May 7th. These signs of shifts in rankings, spikes in crawl rates, often, but not always, are early warning signs of a major Google update happening in the near future. Here are flux/volatility charts from MozCast, SERPS.com, SearchMetrics and Algoroo: Read More:http://g...

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Google Shows Ratings Snippet 8 Out Of 11?

Dan Barker spotted a fun rich snippet in Google where the ratings displayed for an IMDB movie result was 8 out of 11. Out of 11, not 10, 11. Dan posted this on Twitter and said "The only title on IMDB where the review is out of 11." Here is a screen shot: If you actually look at the markup it indeed says the bestrating property is 11, so technically this is what they are passing to Google. Other movies do not do this, such as Frozen:  Read...

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Why is so much Panic around after Penguin 2.0 Update?

Google Penguin 2.0 update officially rolled out on May 22nd, 2013, already there is been a rumor on this update from past few weeks earlier, everyone (everyone?) is really excited and some (lot of) are really scared. At last, Google hit the panic button and boom, a huge algorithm update has been rolled out, which impacted around 2.3% of English-US search queries (that’s huge!), let’s put how many have benefited a side and talk about how many...

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Free Directory List with Highest Page Rank

Sno. Directory Url Page Rank 4 http://www.alistsites.com/ 0 2 http://www.bestfreewebsites.net/ 2 1 http://worldweb-directory.com/ 3 22 http://viesearch.com/ 4 23 http://www.prolinkdirectory.com/ 4 24 http://www.tsection.com/ 4 25 http://www.gainweb.org/ ...

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Google’s Matt Cutts: Over Time Backlinks Will Become Less Important

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said in a video that backlinks, over time, will become a little less important. Matt did say that backlinks in the Google ranking algorithm still have many years left in them. Matt explained that Google is focusing a lot now on working on ways to determine if a web page is meets the expectations of an expert user. They do this currently by looking at the links to the page, the reputation of the site and pages and the quality of the content on that particular page. When Google is better at understanding...

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Google's Site Removal For HTTPS Will Remove HTTP Version Also

Might be obvious for most of you but not all know that if you use the site removal tool to remove your HTTPS site within Google Webmaster Tools, it will also remove the HTTP version. Google's John Mueller warned about using it that way in a Google Webmaster Help thread. John wrote in the thread: No -- please don't request site removal of the HTTPS version. That would remove your whole website (both HTTP and HTTPS). That's almost...

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Keyword Rich Domain Names Next To Be Hit By Google

It should come to no surprise of readers of this site that Google and Matt Cutts next target will be domain names ranking too well on the merit of the keywords being in the domain name. We covered several times already on how well keyword match domain names rank in the Google search results. We also documented that Google's Matt Cutts said he would look at keyword match domains while giving a presentation at PubCon. In any event, new...

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