Posts About ‘News’

Google Blocked in China

Great Wall of China

It seems as if Google has been blocked in China at the moment. The news came from The Next Web who talked to a Googlespokesperson, who confirmed the blockade. The Chinese government has apparently blocked Google.com but also other services from Google like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Analytics.

A Google spokesperson told The Next Web “We’ve checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end.”

It seems as if this blockade is not so much against Google but more because of the current political situation in China where in Beijing currently the Party Congress chooses a new president. It seems as if this is more about preventing the Chinese people from searching for things concerning that or from using Google products to work together. (more…)

Mitt Romney Transition Website Found and Caught by Google

romney-intro

Nothing stays hidden anymore in this digital era. If it isn’t someone blogging about you or putting your picture up on Facebook, it’s you yourself who misplaces a direct message on Twitter or who forgets to take something down.

Mitt Romney, who lost the US elections to Barack Obama this week, has experienced this a few times already in the short period of time he has been running for President of the United States. There was the ‘unfortunate’ coincidence where a search for “completely wrong” triggered images from Romney and now the people who built the transition website that should go online when he was elected accidentally put the site live, and as you know he was not elected… On top of that Google’s caught it. (more…)

Google Moves Search Options and ‘Cleans’ Results Page

top-navigation

It has been buzzing around the search community for a while, but now it’s official, Google has (again) made changes to how the search results are presented. The long awaited change is mostly focussed on the navigation which moves from the left side to the top.

With the new design elements Google wants to give the search results “a bit more breathing room” and more focus on the actual answers people are looking for, which basically means Knowledge Graph gets more attention. (more…)

Majestic SEO Adds Bulk Backlinks Tool with GWT

majestic-seo

In good old fashioned SEO, which still is very important (and far from dead), there is much to gain in analysing your back links. Especially with updates like Google Penguin back links to your site can not only make your rankings, but also break them.

Google has different tools which can help you get under way in analysing your own back links and even potentially cleaning them (in which the Disavow tool comes in handy). In Google Webmastertools for example Google also presents you with a number of back links to your site. Not all of them, but it does give you a nice insight in which links Google feels might be important.

As an SEO or even webmaster you want to analyse these links to find if some need changing or in case of ‘bad links’, if some need removal. That can be a lot of work. Majestic SEO today rolls out a feature which will help SEOs get under way with this: the “Bulk Backlinks Checker” tool with Google Webmaster Tools. This tool allows you to upload links in bulk, from Google Webmastertools, and check them. (more…)

Blekko announce ROCKZi embed feature

blekko-rockzi

In July, Blekko introduced ROCKZi – a social news site to complement the Blekko search engine and generate social signals. This month, the Blekko team have introduced an embed feature to “un-box” results and feed them directly to site owners.

With a Tagline “read, vote, rock” we are expecting great things from the Blekko news feed, and with Digg being revived recently by Betaworks (as mentioned in our SMX Keynote Conversation post), the social news space is about to get a lot more cluttered but potentially a lot more interesting,

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Happy Halloween! Haunted House Doodle From Google

google_halloween_featured

Happy Halloween! In several countries Google will run a neat and scary interactive doodle for Halloween on the homepage. Last year Google recorded a video outside Google’s headquarters in Mountain View for the Halloween doodle, this year it’s a Haunted House. As you can see in the video below the doodle consists of several effects, clicking on the doors of the haunted house brings up some scary monsters and in the trash can at the left there’s even a black cat. The skeleton next to the door with number 13 is also animated just like the black spider and the black bird.

A working copy but also all the doodles Google placed for Halloween since 1999 plus all the logos from YouTube and Orkut can be found here. Like said above last year Google recorded a video for Halloween and in 2010 Google made a doodle with Scooby Doo. In 2009 Google went just as far by editing the Robots.txt with some special Halloween lines next to the animated logo that year. The logo from 2008 is also special because that one had a Triforce Easter Egg in it which was later removed.

2012

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Google Disavow Tool, For Everyone Who Did Something Wrong

dissavow-links-2

“Finally” and “About time” were amongst the remarks of many reactions yesterday when Google officially announced their “disavow links” tool at Pubcon. The tool is a way to let as a site owner Google know which links pointing at your site you think should be ignored by Google.

The tool was already expected by many SEOs because Google had been testing it out amongst several SEOs in the past few weeks and Bing already launched its own tool back in June. The tool can be seen as a direct response to Penguin updates: sites with a lot of bad links need to clean up their act. With this tool Google makes that a bit easier. But not just for the site owners, for themselves as well. (more…)

Finding Forward Features

media

So you want to know what the media are going to be writing about to try and gain inclusion for your client. Where do you look for information about features that are going to be written? This is a short, and by no means exhaustive guide based on my own experience. (more…)

What Happened with the “Shared by” Thumbnails in the SERPS?

images-gone

A few years ago Google for the first time introduced images in to the search results. And not just images, images of people you personally knew. Personalised search had been around for a while (in 2009 it became default) and Google then still had the deal with Twitter which allowed them to see which of your friend had tweeted about a specific article.

When the deal with Twitter went bust Google had nothing left but their Google+-1s and whether or not something was shared on that platform. Thus the images were now not of tweets but of Google Shares. When Google extended their personalised results with Search Plus Your World last year the images were even expanded to the top of the search results page showing some of the faces of the people who were responsible for the personalised results. Now those images seem to have disappeared. (more…)

Author Filtering in Search Results

authorship-filtering

An interesting find yesterday by Andre Alpar on his AKM3 blog (in German) of which I’m not sure its very new (looks new), but it is very handy for sure. Andre found that when clicking the ‘more by author’ link, which now shows up for most results which have the author rich snippet with the image in it, you will not just get the results from that specific author, the author name is also visible inside the search bar.

Andre also found that Google is giving each author a “People ID”, a special number next to the name which can be found within the search url as well. This is the Google+ number you get when you sign up. This makes it a lot easier to search for articles from specific authors, both on their own sites as outside of those sites. It again is another way which can help pinpoint who you should target and who you shouldn’t target. It can help you find the right author to write about your business, a new PR Tool! (more…)

Google Launches Tagmanager: The What and Why

Google-tag-manager-5

Yesterday Google launched a new (free) tool: Google Tag Manager. The tool allows you to manage the tags on your site. Within a Google interface you can add and update tags.

The tool will make the life of a webmaster easier, but it could also create some ‘funny faces’ since Google is getting into the playing field of some paid tools and people might expect the wrong things. (more…)

More emphasis on Author Rank by Google: More Author results

author-rank

We have covered already quite a bit on author rank this week. First there were the e-mails Google is sending out to authors and earlier today Jeroen wrote a great extensive post on the importance of Authorship. That could be enough for one week, but we didn’t want to hold this back from you.

Google has confirmed to Searchengineland that it is now not just showing the authorship markup and showing the ‘more post by’ link, but it is also showing three extra posts from the author when a user comes back to the search results, provided it seems as if they really liked the post they were just reading. (more…)

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