Sep
20
Any SEO worth his or her salt knows how useless the META keyword tag is. It has been for years. Having said that, Google released the news yesterday that they will now support a META keywords tag for Google News. The obvious benefit is that you can have some additional freedom in creating headlines, although it is obviously still advised that you mention important keywords with the title, <h1>, caption (if you have one) and opening paragraph.
Aug
30
Google News. I should have done it a long time ago with my football blog but you know how is is. Writing the content, maintaining the forum, uploading statistics – it all takes time. Having updated the skin of the blog last summer (general downtime in football blogging unless you want to write pointless transfer rumour stories!), I felt it was time for me to get my blog into Google News.
Here is how I did it and the results the website has gained since it was accepted.
Jul
27
Google fully rolled out their knowledge graph in the UK today for people and events. I had noticed the knowledge graph returning, when logged in, for a few searches that I conducted – but never as prominent as in the US, which was launched back in May. I for one welcome such a feature, although I’m sure many will oppose yet another Google tool that promotes Google products and keeps you within their space. Take a look at some of the examples this morning.
Jul
23
To be honest, I really should be experimenting with more WordPress plugins than I currently do. I focus (as you would expect, considering it is my job) most of my efforts on SEO, but there are some really cool plugins that can make your job a hell of a lot easier. Over the weekend I experimented with a number of different Google News plugins, but the best one was by 4visions.nl.
Jul
20
The dreaded Google link penalty message made its way to a number of terrified webmasters yesterday, as Google ramps up – again – its quest to clean up ‘unethical’ linking techniques.
Buying links or participating in link schemes with the sole purpose of passing PageRank from one website to another is against Google’s guidelines – every SEO knows this and is probably the first point you were told when you started working in the field.
None of my current client websites received such a wanring, but a website I used to work with (that I am still verified for) did indeed get one.
Jun
21
Looking in the SERPs today, I was quite baffled when searching for ‘Wayne Rooney’ information, to find that two of the UK’s leading newspapers appears to have had their Google+ strategy (or lack of strategy!) influenced by a hacker of some sorts OR is this an automated result from Google? I’m still unclear as to how this was achieved but I am going to try and investigate, whilst notifying Google of the issue. Could Google even be forcing both websites into implementing a Google+ strategy to stop these “automated” results returning?
May
7
I’ve been quite outspoken about Google’s half hearted attempts in the past to create an environment that offers the best quality results – that of course are legal for the general public. Google wouldn’t allow a website to sell class A drugs over the Internet, so why allow websites to offer pirated material? It is a big debate, which I address in the Google, piracy and SOPA blog a couple of months back – but I generally think if Google had not have taken the “It has nothing to do with us!” policy, then the need for SOPA would have materialised.
Having said that, in the last few months, I’ve noticed a vast amount of URLs being removed due to DMCA complaints. I’ve even received one, wrongly, myself!
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Apr
25
Having created an original rel=alternate study that focused on internal content, I wanted to test whether or not you could setup this on a cross-domain basis. I’m very pleased to announce that you can indeed set this up on a cross domain basis and I’ve included my results below.
Apr
11
I use Google Insights quite a lot and I think that the data you can extract from it, in its most basic form, is the first obvious step to keyword discovery if you embark on a new SEO project. Looking in the SERPs today, I noticed that Google.co.uk now has a version of insights, which is identical to Google.com.
I checked the backend code to look for a canonical tag and more importantly a rel=alternate tag. Both were not present, so I ask the question – why isn’t Google using the tag on their own products but are recommending webmasters use it on multi lingual and multi regional websites?
Mar
20
Following a tweet by Patrick Altoft, I can confirm that Google+ accounts for brand searches are now appearing in Google’s UK SERPs. I’ve run a few tests against some brands that I know have rel=publisher setup in the backend code. The screenshots are highlighted below.