Industry News

Yesterday, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted a reminder that Google makes one or two algorithm changes every day (around 500 a year).



Google talked about this in a video they published last year, but it can be easy to forget.



The algorithm changes that Google announces are only a tiny fraction of the changes they are making. And if your site loses traffic on a day that Google announces a change, it’s possible that what Google announced isn’t what caused the drop.

The one question I...

Google has published “information for webmasters” as least as far back as 2001. The original information included “do’s and don’ts” and “fact and fiction”.



In 2003, Google expanded this information to include a specific set of “webmaster guidelines”:  

In 2006, www.google.com/webmasters became Google Webmaster Central, and the information for webmasters became a complete help center with lots of details and explanations.

Google has continued to refine and evolve their information...

Yahoo’s Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) has recently expanded to include geolocation data from two Yahoo services: Placefinder and Placespotter. BOSS is Yahoo’s Search API, available for a fee based on usage. From the blog post, it sounds like Yahoo is closing down Placefinder and Placespotter as standalone, free services, and is incorporating them into the paid structure of BOSS. Placefinder provides geocoding and reverse geocoding, which enables developers to convert an address to its...

Google has renamed its rich snippets testing tool in webmaster tools to Structured Data, improved it to better reflect what the search result will actually look like and has expanded the types of structured data supported.

Google first launched rich snippets — enhanced markup of search results — in 2009 and has been adding the types of support markup ever since. In 2011, in conjunction with Microsoft and Yahoo, they launched schema.org, which expanded the types of markup available, although...

I’m planning to record some new webmaster questions next week. I made a Google Moderator page where you can submit topics and vote for different questions.

Please ask your questions in on the Google Moderator page, not in the comments here. When the comments are in Moderator, people can vote them up and down.

Recently a newspaper contacted me. Their PageRank had dropped from 7 to 3, and they wanted to know why. They genuinely didn’t seem know what the issue was, so I took some time to write them an in-depth reply. Part of the motivation for my blog is to provide information in more scalable ways, so I figured I’d strip any identifying information from my email and post it. Here’s what I wrote:

Hi, the usual reason why a site’s PageRank drops by 30-50% like this is because the site violates our...

In the beginning, Google matched the words in a searcher’s query to the words on a web page and ranks those pages (roughly) based on how many external links each had. Over the years, Google’s algorithms have evolved  in numerous ways, including with how Google figures out what the searcher is really looking for. Now, for instance, when you search for [U2], not only does Search Engine Land Executive News Editor Matt McGee’s site appear at the top of the results (go Matt!), but so do images and...

Google AdSense updated their reporting interface today for the first time in years.  It looks sleek, uncluttered and a very minimalist version of the old interface.  If you don’t have it updated in your account, AdSense is rolling it out to all publishers over the next few days.  For those who are in the dark, [...]

For some time (since at least March), Google webmaster tools has been sending messages to site owners about substantial traffic changes (increases or decreases) to pages of a site. Some site owners found these messages perplexing as they weren’t sure exactly what was actionable about the messages. Were the messages just informational, intended to help those who didn’t look at their analytics every day? Did they imply something specific about what Google knew about how the site? For instance,...