Industry News

Google recently released an "interactive infographic" titled "how search works". I ignored it until Barry Schwartz convinced me to take a second look. The infographic starts with the number of "30 trillion individual pages" Google has in its index.

Later on in the infographic another number is mentioned: 0.22% of all domains in the Google index have been subject to a manual penalty.

Remember that Google also employs algorithmic aka automated penalties which are much more common. Anyway, I...

Two weeks ago we reported that Interflora was penalized for advertorial link spam by Google. What did that result in? An 11-day Google penalty.
I assume Interflora was able to convince all the UK newspapers to pull the advertorials and submitted a reconsideration request. If only it was that easy for others.

As long as there have been search engines, there have been people trying to take advantage of them to try to get pages to rank higher in search engines. It’s not unusual to see within many SEO site audits a section on negative practices that a search engine might frown upon, and Google lists a [...]

The post Google Granted Patent on Invisible Text and Hidden Links appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

I just came across this great interview with Edward Tufte from 2011. I love his description of bad information design, and how it’s not the data’s fault:

Overload, clutter, and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. So if something is cluttered, fix your design, don’t throw out information. If something is confusing, don’t blame your victim — the audience — instead, fix the design. And if the numbers are boring, get better numbers. Chartoons can’t add...

On Friday afternoon, Google announced a neat new interactive infographic named How Search Works.
It is an excellent way for a newbie to learn the basics on how Google crawls, indexes, ranks and shows their search results. But how...

It doesn’t do any good to rank well in search results if no one clicks through.

If you go to Google Webmaster tools, and see the list of queries a page of yours might rank well for, you might see some query terms or phrases that you want to show up in search results. [...]

The post Why Google May Change Search Result Snippets appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

In Students to e-textbooks: no thanks Nicholas Carr reflects on a recent study (PDF link) out of Ryerson University in Toronto which shows that students still prefer paper textbooks over electronic textbooks:

What’s most revealing about this study is that, like earlier research, it suggests that students’ preference for printed textbooks reflects the real pedagogical advantages they experience in using the format: fewer distractions, deeper engagement, better comprehension and retention,...

How often does Google take “manual action” against websites for spam, where a human being reviews a site and decides it deserves some type of penalty? For the first time, Google’s released a chart showing this, going back nearly 10 years.

The chart is part of Google’s new “How Search Works” area, and it stretches back from August 2004 to today (click to enlarge the chart): “Legacy” indicates manual actions that Google took that weren’t classified into a more specific category, Google told...