Ever Google yourself? [Don't worry, we all do it.] Ever notice how your results might be vastly different from someone sitting right next to you?
There are a ton of factors that Google incorporates to make your search results the best they can be - and they all amount to a little thing called personalized search. Personalized search incorporates:
Web history
Personalized results
Recent searches
Universal search
Geographic location (Local Results)
Starred results
Social search
Real time search
Personalized Search affects everything you Google. Your results will look very different from the guy down the street, which will look very different from the guy across town. So how are you to know what other people see?
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, recently said, “We have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search results that we can find.”
Google constantly changes its algo to provide info that’s relevant and useful to users, as quickly as possible. What ranked well last year might not rank so well this year. As they put it ...
*The following is the guest post by Emily Thompson*
The Google Local Listing has grown in importance more and more in recent time. In many instances, the local 7-pack, consisting on local listings, is appearing at the top of a search results page, above even organic listings. This placement creates huge opportunities for small businesses to gain visibility and traffic on the web.
There are many components that work together to create...
*The guest post is by Hugo Guzman who is the Vice President of SEO & Social Media at Zeta Interactive. He can be reached via email at hguzman@zetainteractive.com or via Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/hugoguzman*
I was speaking with a prospective client today that shared what they thought was their most pressing SEO issue for one of the larger sites in their network. Basically, they explained that in the...
*The following guest tip was provided by Umair Asif*
Links are an important part of SEO strategy. While, most of us are already aware of its significance, it sometimes gets difficult to acquire a list of high quality websites related to our industry. Tweaking Google directory listings may resolve this problem.
By default, Google directory offers listings based on Page Rank, but these groupings may not include every major website. For example,...
Note from Ann: I'd like this post not to turn into another "PR algorithm" one. Instead, I'd love us to discuss how many of us still use this information and how we do that. So please, share your opinion in the comments!
*The following tip was shared by Eric Gesinski who does Tulsa Website Design and SEO*
One area of SEO that is limited to one search engine but gets plenty of...
Today's tip was submitted by Umair Asif
Google has already started integrating local search results into the main page of regional search engines. Few US users may have noticed it, but it has huge implications for webmasters and SEO experts outside the United States. Here is how it may look for someone searching in Ireland…
It may be not a frequent situation but it may happen so that you need to remove a page from Google SERPs really fast. What's the best way to do that?
Try this:
Exclude the page in Robots.txt + remove the pages using the URL removal tool in Webmaster Tools.
Return 410 status code for the page (to show the page is gone for ever);
Don't do this:
The following guest tip was provided by Umair Asif.
While Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a great resource to evaluate the number of searches for a keyword, I assume that a majority of webmasters do not realize how easy it is to inadvertently distort calculating the amount of traffic for a keyword. The reason for this posting is to clear a common misconception regarding the amount of searches for a given ...
This question is being asked so often that I just decided to go ahead and write a post about that:
You notice Google report a 404 page on your site;
You go to your site and fix the error (delete the link to the non-existent page or just fix the broken URL);
Your Google Webmaster Tools account is still reporting the error
Is there any way to tell Google the error is fixed?
Currently, the only question to this question...