Google Experts got a spam email that they thought about Blogging about, but decided not to. Then they spammed me *again*. Sheesh.   So here goes. If you get an email with a subject like “Affordable Link Building Outsourcing,” think twice. Any email that starts out     Make your links appear Natural   Link Building is one of the most significant aspect of the off page optimization process and is a major determinant is starting off on the wrong foot. The objective is not to “make your links appear natural”, the objective is that your links are natural... || Continue Reading →

About some months ago, Google published a graph showing that Unicode on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The growth since then has been even more dramatic.   Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252 or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few languages, but Unicode can represent thousands: from Arabic to Chinese to Zulu. We have long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text we search: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode for processing.     This.. || Continue Reading →

Google went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search.   To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role in search rankings. We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google. Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be.   In addition to the official.. || Continue Reading →

Here’s some more stuff you should know about.   Google expert I did a monster-long interview with Eric Enge. I think the interview lasted an hour or something like that, and we covered several areas in depth.   Next, take a break and go read this post by Rhea Drysdale. Heck, maybe send her a donation by Paypal (Added: the address if you want to send a Paypal donation is rhea_drysdale [at] yahoo [dot] com). Rhea took on a big fight for the benefit of the SEO industry, saw it through to the end — and won! In the process, she earned the sort of credibility that you.. || Continue Reading →

Did you know that a majority of users surveyed feel that having information in their own language was more important than a low price? Living in a non-English-speaking country, I’ve seen friends and family members explicitly look for and use local and localized websites—properly localized sites definitely have an advantage with users. Google works hard to show users the best possible search results. Many times those are going to be pages that are localized, for the user’s location and/or in the user’s language.     If you’re planning to take.. || Continue Reading →

Members of the Google Search Quality Team have participated in site clinic panels on a number of occasions. We receive a lot of positive feedback from these events and we’ve been thinking of ways to expand our efforts to reach even more webmasters. We decided to organize a small, free of charge pilot site clinic at Google in Dublin, and opened the invitation to webmasters from the neighborhood. The response we received was overwhelming and exceeded our expectations.     Meet the Googlers who hosted the site clinic: Anu Ilomäki, Alfredo Pulvirenti, Adel Saoud,.. || Continue Reading →

When you participate in a conversation in Google Buzz, we bring that post to your inbox so it’s easy to keep up with the discussion. But we’ve heard loud and clear that buzz in your inbox can get noisy — we feel it too, so today we’re launching two features to help with this: 1) Settings to control what gets sent to your inbox From the Buzz tab of Gmail Settings, you’ll be able to choose whether the following buzz items get sent to your inbox:   Comments on your posts Comments on posts after you comment on them Comments on posts after you are @replied.. || Continue Reading →

Robots are an important part of the Google Wave API, and they’ve just become a lot more powerful. We’ve recently released version 2.0 of the robots API, which includes a bunch of new features:   Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.   Context: Robots can now more precisely specify.. || Continue Reading →

Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here’s how to send us more info. Go to     https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport     and tell us about the site that appears to be employing link spam. Be sure to include the word “linkspam” (all one word, all lower-case) in the textarea (the last field.. || Continue Reading →

HTML5 is the fifth major revision of HTML, the core language of the World Wide Web. The HTML5 specification includes a description of microdata, a new markup standard for specifying structured information within web pages. Today, we’re happy to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets in addition to our existing support for microformats and RDFa. By using microdata markup in your web pages, you can specify reviews, people profiles, or events information on your web pages that Google may use to improve the presentation of your pages in Google search results. Here.. || Continue Reading →