Forum Topics Tagged [seo]

Google's seemingly always changing indexing algorithm continues to hit site rankings as the search giant continues to drive a new generation of SEO relying upon original and relevant content generation and sharing above all else. Now a panel of SEO experts in the UK has warned that companies need to avoid putting all their SEO eggs into the one Google basket and instead embrace SEO strategic evolution in order to maintain and grow traffic.  At a round-table discussion, hosted by cloud provider UKFast, Sam Allcock, CEO of Custard Media, stated that the key to successful audience growth was …

As many of you know, DaniWeb was hit by a Google algorithm update back in November 2012 and we lost about 50% of our search traffic. In investigating the issue, I discovered that DaniWeb, in addition to most other programming forums out there, all lost their google traffic to [StackOverflow](http://www.stackoverflow.com). For those who don't know, StackOverflow is a Q&A-based wiki-forum hybrid that was born a few years ago and subsequently received a lot of venture capital. Hands down, it deserves really high listings in Google results: it is fast-loading, lots of people link to it, it has almost exclusively high …

When 'Thefacebook' first launched in February 2004, access was initially restricted only to students of Harvard University where Mark Zuckerberg was a student. Facebook went on to become something of a success, with the social network [controversially being valued at more than $100 billion](http://www.daniweb.com/internet-marketing/social-media-and-web-communities/news/423739/is-the-facebook-bubble-ready-to-burst#post1810124).  Microsoft must have been watching from the sidelines, wondering when and if it could join the social networking revolution; conscious of how it was relatively late to embrace both the Internet and search bandwagons but still able to make more than a little impact when it did. Google limped into the social networking space …

An interesting [post](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.in/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal_6.html) appeared yesterday in the official Google Online Security and Webmaster Central blogs which confirms that in an effort to "make the Internet safer" it has been testing a system which looks at "whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms." This follows calls for HTTPS everywhere at the recent Google I/O a few months back. Google says is has seen positive results, and is now actually using HTTPS as a ranking signal albeit a "very lightweight" one which only impacts <1% of queries. Nonetheless, the intention is now clear that this …

First there was Panda, and then there was Penguin, but is there now Ghost as well? Webmasters will immediately know what I'm talking about as far as Penguin and Panda are concerned: updates to the Google search results ranking algorithm designed to make the search experience more relevant for end users by lowering the rank of 'low quality' sites such as content farms and those who use black-hat SEO techniques. Ghost, however, is not only rather spooky but also remains unconfirmed by Google itself. While anything that makes search better for the user has to be a good thing …

Until not very long ago, the More dropdown menu on the Google search results pages offered the ability to filter the results by type: News, Discussions, Blogs, etc. There were quite a handful of choices and they've all existed for years and years. It used to work great for me, but for the better part of 2013, I actually found it quite frustrating because whenever I was filtering `site:daniweb.com` results by Discussions, *only* news stories and code snippets would come up, and meanwhile all of the forum threads would show up when filtering by Blogs. In fact, I posted something …

If you have never stopped to think about language in terms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) then the results of a survey by digital marketing agency Greenlight might make you do just that. According to the global Search and Social Survey, some 76% of people do their online searching in at least two different languages. This should come as no real surprise when you consider how many countries have more than one official language, and explains why Belgium with three official languages was towards the top of the survey for countries topping the multilingual searching stats. However, this explanation does …

Most observers will agree that Google+ has failed to set the social networking world alight, and is far from being a thorn in the side of Facebook. However, now that Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed he's serious about search, could Facebook possibly compete in the Google hood?  The Facebook founder and CEO has gone on the record to insist that "Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of questions people have" and reveal that the social network is currently fulfilling a billion searches every day "and we’re not even trying". Of course, the arguments have raged for …

According to the network security team at Oxford University Computing Services ([OxCERT](http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/oxcert/)) with the title of 'Google Blocks' the world famous seat of learning has decided to put a block, albeit a temporary one, on the use of Google Docs. Robin Stevens from the network security team at Oxford says that the "extreme action" was felt necessary in order to protect "the majority of University users".  While admitting that Google Docs is a "perfectly legitimate site" and one which is "widely used by staff and students as part of their work and personal lives" Stevens explains that it …

[ATTACH=RIGHT]16182[/ATTACH][URL="http://www.microsoft.com"]Microsoft[/URL] got some bad news this week when it found out that [URL="http://www.yahoo.co.jp/"]Yahoo Japan[/URL], unlike its U.S. parent company, will be partnering with [URL="http://www.google.com"]Google[/URL], rather than Microsoft's search engine, [URL="http://www.bing.com"]Bing[/URL]. The decision means that most of the Internet searches originating in Japan will use Google's search engine rather than Bing. Yahoo Japan is currently the leading search engine in Japan and handles over half of search activity. Yahoo Japan CEO Masahiro Inoue said in a press conference that, "At the present time, we feel there are quite a few areas where Microsoft is not yet ready. Google is one step …

Google recently has made a big play to take over the majority of the internet search business in the Japanese market as part of an aggressive campaign to shut Microsoft out; but Microsoft is not going to sit idly by while Google gains a virtual monopoly in Japan and they have a plan to block the [URL="http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2010/07/27/google-yahoo-redux-why-deal-in-japan-is-worse-than-attempted-2008-deal.aspx"]deal[/URL]. [ATTACH]16285[/ATTACH]Microsoft's legal team will pitch its case to the Fair Trade Commission in Japan. The basis of the [URL="http://www.cio.com/article/600843/Microsoft_Cries_Foul_Over_Google_Tie_Up_with_Yahoo_Japan"]argument[/URL] is simply that the deal that Google has made violates fair trade and would hurt competition by giving them far too much control over …

IT Security experts Barracuda Labs recently researched the business of selling Twitter followers to those companies which cannot wait to build organic follower growth. Despite the purchasing of Twitter followers being an explicit breach of the Twitter terms and conditions of use, punishable by the deletion of the account concerned, the lure of instant followers seems to appeal to what you might call the 'lazy SEO' demographic.  Interestingly, the accounts used to sell fake followers are usually fake themselves. As was the case with the more than 70,000 such randomly sampled accounts analysed by researchers at Barracuda Labs. …

Since last fall, Google has either closed down or combined more than 30 different products. If you thought that was the end of the axe wielding, think again: another bunch of Google technologies are to bite the dust.  According to the General Manager of Global Enterprise Search at Google, [Matt Eichner](http://googleblog.blogspot.fr/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-summer.html#!/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-summer.html), the closures are part of a streamlining process that will enable Google to "focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people’s lives" by ensuring the company remains focussed so as to prevent it from ending up "doing too much and not having the impact we strive …

A Google official has announced this morning that the search giant is back in action in China. Google, the second most popular search engine in China, behind Baidu, announced in January of this year that it would no longer censor its search results on the Chinese version of its website, against the wishes of the Chinese government. As a result, Google's stock price plummeted while Baidu's stock price saw all time highs, surpassing Google on the stock market. A couple months later, Google began redirecting users accessing the google.cn version of Google to the uncensored Hong Kong version. Unfortunately, Chinese …

While I can't imagine for a moment that Google is in danger of going out of business, with the searching masses marching elsewhere in dismay at various perceived privacy infringing issues. However, if you look at the media attention regarding just that, the privacy issue, then Google is going to have to start doing something to head off the bad press before the whole Do No Evil image gets tarnished with a brand stain that will not come off.  According to the latest figures from HighBeamResearch, looking at the last five years of Google media attention, only 4.8% …

Google might be the biggest search resource on the Internet bar none, but it's far from perfect. In some areas it's actually worse than that, and simply fails to work at all. Now students at the University of Glasgow in Scotland are attempting to fill one of these search gaps with the development of the SMART search engine.  Here's the problem: ask Google "How busy is it in New York?" and you will be confronted by a whole bunch of results which don't answer you query at all. In fact, I've just done exactly that and the first …

How do consumers engage with marketers today and what does the future hold? Those were the questions posed by the Greenlight [Search and Social Survey](http://gossip.greenlightdigital.com/magazine/the-search-and-social-media-survey-edition-2012/ ). The answers might come as something of a surprise to those who had all but written off Google+ or think that Facebook couldn't be a search player.  The simple fact is, as revealed by the Greenlight questioning of a cross-section of consumers, if Facebook was to launch a search engine tomorrow it could immediately soak up a 22% share of the global search market. That would be enough to turn it overnight …

As many of you are probably aware, DaniWeb was hit hard by Google's Panda algorithm update back in February. A news story written by Davey entitled [url=http://www.daniweb.com/internet-marketing/search-engine-optimization/news/350575]Google Farmer Update: what went wrong?[/url] explained that the February 24th Panda algorithm targeted at content farms literally cut DaniWeb's US traffic by half. The global rollout that followed a month later did the same to all of our English-speaking traffic. On March 3rd, I started a forum thread in Google's [url=http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6546710fb55bd11b&hl=en]Webmaster Central forum[/url] as a plea of desperation. A couple hundred responses explained in detail all of the different things that I've done …

I have always thought of Google as being a search engine for everyone, that's part of the appeal. So when the development team behind a web portal for 'mature users' contacted me about the launch of a new search engine specifically designed for the older user I was a little confused.  Maybe it's my age, after all I am fast approaching the '50 plus' demographic that the Mabels development folk are targeting with [AskMabel](http://www.askmabel.co.uk) or maybe it's just that I have seen it all before. Ever since Google burst onto the search scene, redefining and dominating it, start-ups …

Is the press release dead? Earlier this month, Esther Schindler [URL="http://tinyurl.com/6e5rmu"]wrote in her You’re the Boss blog [/URL]that “PR is broken. Social media might, [I]might[/I] glue some of the parts back on.” To test this supposition, I spoke to David Meerman Scott, who is the author of the bestselling book [URL="http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/books.htm"]The New Rules of Marketing & PR [/URL](and also a fellow Contributing Editor at [URL="http://www.econtentmag.com"]EContent Magazine[/URL]). Scott, who speaks frequently on the subject, thinks Web 2.0 has changed the way everyone should think of marketing and that marketers who fail to grasp that are doomed to be left in the …

Forget the Windows 7 launch, the real big news from Microsoft this week is that it has reached a deal with Twitter to include real-time tweet data in Bing searches. If that wasn't excitement enough for the Twitterati, just a few hours after Microsoft made its announcement Google joined in and announced that it too had reached an agreement with Twitter to do the same. If you still play buzzword bingo, then forget Web 2.0 or even Social Media if you want to score big points, the buzzword today has to be Real Time Web. And that is what has …

A funny thing happened this week. Google tried to become Bing by displaying full color pictures on its Home page, and was undone by a bug. The irony here is just too obvious to ignore. Bing influences Google to change its plain white page, and it comes apart because of a bug. You have to admit, it made Google look pretty foolish. Meanwhile, they must have been having a hearty laugh in the halls at Microsoft over this. [B]Bing's Strengths [/B] One of things people have really liked about Bing is the changing high resolution picture it displays on the …

Probably the most common Olympic Games 2012 scam is that of unofficial ticket sales. No great surprise there, but the fact that Google appears to be in on the act might come as a shock to many. So what, exactly, is going on? [ATTACH=RIGHT]23779[/ATTACH]A little known law in the UK is, and I kid you not, the 'London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006' which, amongst other things, makes it a criminal offence to sell tickets for the Olympics without the explicit permission of the authorities running the Olympics 2012 event. Yet when the BBC investigated how easy it …

On the evening of 24th February, Google Principal Engineer Matt Cutts promised that a newly [URL="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html"]tweaked search algorithm that impacted on 11.8% of search queries[/URL] (an absolutely massive change to the way that search works, in other words) would "reduce rankings for low-quality sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful" while at the same time producing "better rankings for high-quality sites with original content and information". Nobody would argue that these are good things, exactly what most of would want our favorite search engine to do, in …

[ATTACH=right]16169[/ATTACH]Today on [URL="http://news.google.com"]Google News' Top Stories front page[/URL] you could find plenty of coverage of the ruling allowing the [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story299633.html"]"jailbreaking" of iPhones[/URL] as well as some discussion of the soon to be released update of the Android operating system and continued skepticism about Microsoft's upcoming Phone 7. Just above most of these headlines was a link to Google News' Mobile Technology "section," a new feature and a slight alteration to the way Google News' algorithms organize its thousands of headline links into something useful. Clicking over to the front of the [URL="http://news.google.com/news/section?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=Mobile+Technology"]Mobile Technology section[/URL], however, brought to light the shortcomings …

Ask a group of 100 people how they search for images online and the chances are that the vast majority will give the standard 'Google' response. Indeed, Google Images is a useful search engine if you are satisfied with a scattergun approach to finding all images that match a specific search term. But what if you wanted something a little more focussed, if you'll excuse the photographic play on words? What of you wanted to find all the images taken by your camera and that now appear online? [attach]21230[/attach] Impossible, you might imagine, but actually it's not only possible but …

[ATTACH=RIGHT]21691[/ATTACH]“Your PC may be infected” says Google, which has taken the unusual step of [URL="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/using-data-to-protect-people-from.html"]warning users[/URL] that a couple of million or so of them have most likely been taken in by a fake AV scam. According to a post on the official Google blog by security engineer Damian Menscher, Google has noticed an unusual pattern of user activity. “We found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers” Menscher explains, adding that they then collaborated with other security engineers at various companies which were sending the modified traffic in question to determine that …

The media seems to have been a-buzz this week following the release of the top search terms from 14.6 million searches picked up by parental control service OnlineFamily.Norton - mainly because it 'revealed' that kids are searching for sex online. I am a parent myself, of young kids, and while of course I was shocked to discover that 7 year olds were looking for porn (and that search term was in position number 4 in the 7 and under age group according to Symantec which operates the service) I certainly would not get my knickers in a twist over finding …

When I researched an article on multimedia search last year for [URL="http://www.econtentmag.com"]EContent Magazine[/URL], (The [URL="ttp://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9879"]resulting article[/URL] was republished on Streamingmedia.com last December.) I learned in the course of my research that it's hard to search for non-text elements because they lack the contextual language of text. Seems logical enough, but the way most search engines get around this is by using the text-based metadata around the image or video to get searchers in the right neighborhood. It works in a 1990s sort of way, but what the world really needs is more advanced multimedia search. That's why my eyes popped …

The great thing about modern technology is that it makes our lives easier, well, most of our lives that is. For some, it would seem, technology just adds another layer of confusion into the whole living their life thing. Take the many cases of people apparently having to do exactly what their satellite navigation system tells them, without giving any thought to what that might actually be. I've written about [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story218321.html"]stupid satnav users[/URL] before here on DaniWeb, such as the Australian chap who turned right when directed and failed to spot this was not a highway turn off but the …