Welcome to another installment of SEO news! Join me as we discuss some of the interesting changes for Google and Yahoo, and what it could mean for you!
Google News:
• Sites With Long Histories Of Spam Might Never Recover In SERPs - Search
Engine Watch contributor and Internet marketer, Marie Haynes, has a problem: One of her client’s websites – a payday loan company – has been penalized by Google, and she’s been trying for a long time to get the penalties removed through traditional methods. When she Tweeted Matt Cutts on the matter, Cutts said that if a client has a lot of spam over many years, it can be quite difficult to undo that damage in the eyes of Google. Fellow engineer, John Mueller, confirmed that such sites might never be able to dig themselves out of the hole they’re in, and might even need to consider starting over with a new domain. Cutts then went onto say that other business websites that shared the same business info as a penalized site could also be penalized. This could be very troubling for companies trying to dig themselves out of a deep hole in the eyes of the search engine.
• Google Webmaster Team Finally On Google+ – Given that Google sees Google+
as such an important part of their ecosystem, it’s a tad confusing that it took so long for their Webmaster Outreach team to appear on the platform, but they finally arrived at +GoogleWebmasters. We can now guess that Matt Cutts’ videos will appear here, as well as other forms of webmaster information and outreach.
• Google Recent Menu Design Changes Are Still An Experiment – At the recent Search Marketing Expo West conference, Google head of search, Amit Singhal, told the audience that their new search results features, such as links missing underlines and dynamic menu ordering, is still an experiment they’re toying with. This is good, as a lot of people don’t seem to like the new design.
Other News:
• Yelp Reviews Go Live In Yahoo Results – A little while back, we reported that
Yelp reviews were coming to Yahoo search results after the two companies struck a deal to share content. Well, those changes have arrived, and you can now see these results in the right-hand sidebar whenever you search for a specific restaurant. These results include the overall review score along with a couple of recent reviews as well, to give you a rounded look at the business in question.
• New Facebook Page Insight Tool Lets You Spy On Competitors – An interesting new feature, as part of Facebook’s recent revamp of branded pages, is a new Page Insights section that gives page owners quite a bit more information on reach and engagement for their pages including specific data for their last five posts. The most intriguing feature, however, is the “Pages to Watch” feature. This feature allows you to select other pages to “watch” and see how many new likes they get, new posts and new engagement. You can add up to five sites, and the tool will then rank these sites, including yours, based on how well the pages are doing, which allows you to see how you’re doing socially compared to your competition.
• Twitter Experimenting With Click-To-Call Tweets – In a recent article in Digiday,
Twitter’s VP of Global Online Sales, Tichard Alfonsi, said that they’re experimenting with click-to-call functionality that will appear alongside specific Tweets. This functionality will apparently give advertisers the ability use targeted options such as lists and geo-targeting to offer Twitter users a direct engagement with advertisements. This will work well for important, quick leads such as event ticket sales, local promotions and more. There’s no word as to when or if this will be rolled out to all Twitter users.
Thanks for stopping by the Smattering, hope to see you all next week for more SEO news!
The post A Smattering of SEO News: 3/12/14 appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog.