Jennifer Slegg says, “For many SEOs, a glimpse at the Google’s Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines is akin to looking into Google’s ranking algorithm. While they don’t give the secret sauce to rank number one on Google, they do offer some incredible insight into what Google views as quality – and not-so-quality – and the types of pages they want to serve at the top of their search results. Last week, Google made the unprecedented move of releasing the entire Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines, following an analysis of a leaked copy obtained by The SEM Post. While Google released... [...]

Gianluca Fiorelli says, “Whenever Google announces something as important as a new algorithm, I always try to hold off on writing about it immediately, to let the dust settle, digest the news and the posts that talk about it, investigate, and then, finally, draw conclusions. I did so in the case of Hummingbird. I do it now for RankBrain. In the case of RankBrain, this is even more correct, because — let’s be honest — we know next to nothing about how RankBrain works. The only things that Google has said publicly are in the video Bloomberg published and the few things unnamed Googlers... [...]

Ben Davis says, “I was going to write a post titled ‘Google Voice Search: What does it mean for marketers?’ But then I realised it would be apt to sum up Google’s update with as few written words as possible. It’s great fun exploring Google’s voice search and knowledge graph, so here’s my summation of Google’s update through some choice screenshots. Google understands superlatives Even if the knowledge graph isn’t all that flattering to English footballer, Phil Jones. As you’ll know if you’re a voice search user, the knowledge graph... [...]

Kat Fay says, “Videos, reviews or an author’s picture can drive clicks on search results, according to a study by Blue Nile Research. Many retailers believe that showing up first in organic search results on Google and Bing is a guarantee of success. But lower positions often generate more clicks than the top spot, especially when the links include videos, pictures and reviews, according to a study from Blue Nile Research. The study identifies the three most common forms of visual content that lead consumers to click: Star reviews of products, such as giving an item one to five stars An... [...]

Jennifer Slegg says, “If you’re a webmaster, you probably received one of those infamous “Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files on example.com” warning letters that Google sent out to seemingly every SEO and webmaster. This was a brand new alert from Google, although we have been hearing from the search engine about the need to ensure all resources are unblocked—including both JavaScript and CSS. There was definite confusion around these letters, supported by some of the reporting in Google Search Console. Here’s what you need to know about Google’s desire to see these... [...]

Mark Traphagen says, “Recently, Google Webmaster Trends analyst Gary Illyes surprised many of us with a remark he made during his keynote Q&A with Danny Sullivan at SMX East in New York City. Illyes said that herecommended webmasters not remove the rel=author tag from their site content. Google had used rel=author as part of its Google Authorship feature that (potentially) displayed a special author rich snippet in search results for content using the tag. Google ended support of this feature in August 2014. The phrase that made everyone sit up and say, “Did he just say that?”... [...]

David Nield says, “Both Facebook and Apple believe they’ve built a better home for news content on mobile devices—self-contained apps where load times are fast and ads are discreet—but Google isn’t going to lie down without a fight. The result is the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, a new open-source HTML standard available to all that uses existing web technologies to do exactly what Facebook and Apple are doing: Creating a structure where pages appear instantly and advertising is tastefully added (this being Google, of course, ads stay in the picture). AMP HTML, as the new... [...]

Damon Rutherford says, “How much do you really know about Google and how it ranks websites? You may have heard about the value of links to improving your rankings, but have you heard of Google penalties such as Panda and Penguin? If you have a website for your business it is more important than ever to understand how search engines work so you can improve your online visibility and, just as importantly, avoid being penalised for breaking Google’s webmaster guidelines. To the uninitiated Google can seem to move in strange and mysterious ways when it comes to ranking websites in search,... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “The Google landscape is constantly changing. Two years ago, I created the Mega-SERP, and within days it was already outdated. This time, we’ve set out to create a more permanent glossary of Google features – a reference that we’ll update as the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) change. If your focus is on organic SEO, why should you care about the wider world of Google features? Put simply, because rich SERP features are no longer the exception to the rule. Across 10,000 keywords tracked daily by the MozCast project, this is what we saw as of September... [...]

Jim Williams says, “As marketers, we have nearly 2,000 marketing technology products to choose from across 43 different categories. The staggering number of vendors available to us hasmore than doubled since last year. We can email, tweet, track, engage, predict, analyze, attribute, optimize and more. There is now a layer of technology (or even multiple technologies) between each and every interaction we have with the buyers we’re nurturing through the purchasing process. Yet despite the proliferation of these technologies, the marketing stack is still largely disconnected from critical... [...]