Entries from Search Engine Roundtable tagged with 'rankings'

Every month we give you a Google specific update on what webmasters are talking about at WebmasterWorld, complied with the past month of changes we reported, specifically at Google. To see last month's report, see the October 2009 Google Webmaster...

Posted on November 4, 2009 9:17 AM

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster who was trying to figure out why his site was not coming up for a search on its own name. After some review, Googler, JohnMu, said the site has recently shown a...

Posted on October 20, 2009 8:36 AM

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster who noticed Google indexed his site with the server port in the URL structure. So instead of Google ranking the http://www.domain.com/ it ranks the site, and every page within the site as...

Posted on October 14, 2009 9:06 AM

One of the key topics I have heard being discussed in the speaker room last week at the SMX East conference was that the Google results were not good. It rarely came up in the sessions, except for Greg Boser...

Posted on October 12, 2009 8:25 AM

A Google Webmaster Help thread once again confirms that Google ignores the geo-meta tags. Those tags somewhat look like this and use to serve the purpose of telling search engines where the site is based: <meta name="geo.placename" content="United States" /><meta...

Posted on September 29, 2009 9:07 AM

The question of having valid HTML and would it help your rankings in Google or other search engines is not new. Most SEOs believed that it made no impact on your rankings, unless Googlebot has serious issues crawling your site....

Posted on September 17, 2009 8:40 AM

There is a featured WebmasterWorld thread on the topic of how Google treats affiliate links and if there are ways to hide your affiliate links from Google. There is discussion that Google will lower your rank of a web page,...

Posted on September 16, 2009 8:28 AM

It has been a somewhat slow start to our typically monthly report based on a WebmasterWorld thread that tracks day-to-day changes with Google's web results. Overall, it seems like people are discussing two main things. (1) The Caffeine preview, Google's...

Posted on September 4, 2009 8:43 AM

Two threads at Google Webmaster Help report that .ME ccTLDs (domain names) can now be geo targeted in Google Webmaster Tools. Typically, Google doesn't allow you to geo-target a ccTLD (country specific top level domain). Google assumes that if you...

Posted on August 28, 2009 8:23 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread has new discussion around how important it is to have keywords in the URL. This is a very old SEO topic, but new chatter in the industry is saying how keywords in the URLs actually make more...

Posted on August 27, 2009 8:34 AM

It is that time of the month again and we have your Google webmaster update, brought to you by a WebmasterWorld thread. The July '09 report complaints and issues linger on. Including those issues found in the small Google July...

Posted on August 4, 2009 8:39 AM

There is some discussion in the forums about a potential Google update underway. Keep in mind, the Google results are always in a state of fluctuation, so updates have to be more about how many people are noticing a major...

Posted on July 27, 2009 8:12 AM

One person posted a rant in the Google Webmaster Help forums about the "Top Contributors / Bionic Posters" in that forum. In short, Top Contributors / Bionic Posters are given the title by Googlers, who believe that these people are...

Posted on July 24, 2009 8:30 AM

I have been tracking the WebmasterWorld thread on the July Google changes and a lot of people are now discussing how Google is treating location specific queries differently. By that I mean, the consensus in the thread is that there...

Posted on July 22, 2009 9:03 AM

Title tags in the search results are very important, they drive clicks, which drives sales. It now appears that Google is pulling the title for some listings from Google Maps and not from the title tag in the page's source...

Posted on July 16, 2009 9:07 AM

There is only so much CSS can accomplish with making headlines pretty. If you want to give your headlines a pretty font that not all computers support, then you need to go with graphics. But as an SEO, you don't...

Posted on July 16, 2009 8:24 AM

We are a few days into July and the WebmasterWorld thread that covers Google changes from month to month has been getting a lot of traction over the past couple weeks. The overall theme is that there is a lot...

Posted on July 3, 2009 8:43 AM

An interesting WebmasterWorld thread has a theory that for some sites, Google may give that site higher ranking based on what day of the week it is. The SEO has been tracking the traffic from Google to the site for...

Posted on May 27, 2009 8:16 AM

Like every month, we try to provide you with a Google webmaster report on what is going on with Google over the past month, in terms of the SEO perspective. You can read the April 2009 report, in case you...

Posted on May 6, 2009 9:08 AM

Over the past day or two, I have been hearing reports from webmasters and SEOs that Google's geo targeting technology has changed in a big way over in their international or localized search engines. I have one, possibly, two threads...

Posted on April 28, 2009 8:27 AM

In August 2005 was the first time I saw "According To" Google results show up in the search results. Since then, they show up for very specific queries. I spotted an interesting thread, where a webmaster asked why is his...

Posted on February 24, 2009 8:34 AM

Ever since Universal Search hit Google, we have been noticing flavors of video thumbnails and static images left aligned on the Google search results. A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around this latest format and some are happy with it, while...

Posted on January 5, 2009 8:18 AM

A Google Webmaster Help thread has discussion around a webmaster who noticed Google is treating his mobile site as a duplicate site to his main site. This user has his mobile site on a subdomain of m.domain.com, where his main...

Posted on December 30, 2008 8:38 AM

We recently covered a comment from Googler JohnMu on if click data is used in Google for ranking purposes. Of course, John gave the typical Google response. But now we have a comment from Matt Cutts of Google at a...

Posted on December 24, 2008 10:41 AM

Michael Gray has written a great piece at Search Engine Land on how stories promoted in a social media site have actually translated to higher rankings. He takes a bunch of unpopular domains (e.g. not Forbes, Jalopnik, or other known...

Posted on December 19, 2008 9:37 AM

If you get a really high ranking on Google, should you see less traffic? A WebmasterWorld user says that he's getting much higher rankings than before (increases to the first page from page 11) and he's still not getting a...

Posted on December 19, 2008 9:26 AM

In our continued coverage of the a WebmasterWorld thread started by senior member CainIV, we learn two more things. These two items are likely obvious to most, but have been confirmed (at least to CainIV) that they are true based...

Posted on December 10, 2008 8:44 AM

The question over Google using click data, such as how many people click on your site from a Google result, how many people click click the back button and so on, as it relates to ranking web pages in Google...

Posted on December 10, 2008 8:30 AM

Over the course of the past few months, I have hearing buzz from the forums and from people in the SEO industry that Google is dropping pages out of their index. How do these people know? Well, when they do...

Posted on November 17, 2008 7:58 AM

Stoney DeGeyter has written an insightful piece on Search Engine Guide on what you should expect from your SEO consultant. Obviously, depending on your goals, this may differ, but the ideas are the same. He explains that traffic is something...

Posted on October 15, 2008 8:48 AM

In another one of those "I heard it from someone else" rumors circulating throughout the Internet, a High Rankings Forum member claims that he read an article that said that using Google Analytics on his site can hurt his search...

Posted on September 30, 2008 9:05 AM

Andy Beard started a Google Groups thread asking why Google seems to be handling tagged pages (tag cloud results) in a "fairly random fashion." Andy goes through examples of how Google sometimes indexes these pages, sometimes shows a cache page,...

Posted on September 26, 2008 8:07 AM

The Google blog has officially said that they prefer that in most cases, you should not use rewrites to change your dynamic URLs to static looking URLs. In my opinion, this is a major 180° on basic SEO practices. SEO...

Posted on September 23, 2008 9:27 AM

Friday, Google posted a blog post named Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty". The blog post basically describes what many of us have been saying for a long time. Google does not typically penalize for duplicate content, but duplicate content can...

Posted on September 15, 2008 7:59 AM

The Searchlight Digital Blog has an interesting post that illustrates the percentage of click-throughs you'd get based on a specific Google ranking. The analysis performed by Searchlight covers over 36 million queries and more than 19 million clicks. The interesting...

Posted on August 7, 2008 9:34 AM

There is a world of SEOs who continually search Google to track how their keyword phrases are ranking. But they do not just search the main Google.com page, they search each and every Google data center by IP address. A...

Posted on August 5, 2008 8:47 AM

A WebmasterWorld forum member is a bit disturbed by a #1 Google ranking on one of his own websites -- that is BROKEN. It's an old site with many pages indexed and strong inbound links, but every single time he's...

Posted on July 21, 2008 10:32 AM

A WebmasterWorld member says that when he changed his meta description, his rankings plummeted on his site. In the past, US courts found META tags immaterial but Google has recommended it. Tedster points to previous WebmasterWorld coverage that shows that...

Posted on July 18, 2008 9:40 AM

The official Google Blog had a post yesterday about the technologies that are behind the Google ranking, following up from a post about how Google ranks results. Amit Singhal is at it again and he talks about the importance of...

Posted on July 17, 2008 9:42 AM

Recently I have been reading and hearing a lot of webmasters complain about a huge drop in their Google traffic. There are just too many threads to reference, so I thought I reference one valuable post by JohnMu of Google....

Posted on July 15, 2008 8:01 AM

On the Official Google Blog, Amit Singhal wrote about the Google Ranking. Rankings are broken down into three core parts, explains Singhal. First, the best relevant results are provided in what Google calls "no query left behind." Second, Google likes...

Posted on July 10, 2008 9:27 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if it is normal to see a downgrade in rankings soon after conducting a link building campaign. In other words, a webmaster builds links to a site that ranks average. The next few days, the webmaster...

Posted on June 19, 2008 7:57 AM

Some webmasters will kill for a top ranking. Others will get it when they least expect it. A WebmasterWorld member talks about how he's ranking above Amazon for his brand new site which has already been fully indexed. He wonders...

Posted on May 22, 2008 9:56 AM

Aaron Wall recently wrote a brilliant piece about the value of a #1 Google ranking. In his in-depth article, which is divided into 9 sections, he explains based on research and a variety of forum discussion that even small declines...

Posted on May 5, 2008 9:13 AM

Forums have been buzzing and buzzing about the possibility of a competitor being able to hurt your Google ranking for the past few years now. We have covered this topic time and time again, just see here for some of...

Posted on May 5, 2008 7:52 AM

A new rankings system is now available within Alexa, we have learned. The new rankings system "now aggregate[s] data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users," according to...

Posted on April 17, 2008 6:46 AM

A WebmasterWorld member has been applying regular search engine optimization and link building techniques and is noticing that the traffic hasn't improved as substantially in the latter months of the campaign as it did initially. Is this something normal? Actually,...

Posted on April 4, 2008 9:02 AM

Aaron Wall has written a pretty awesome rank checker tool Firefox plugin that checks various keywords against results on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live. Here's a sample screenshot of what you're expected to see: While it looks like it's pretty...

Posted on April 1, 2008 8:56 AM

What would you consider a better scenario? Would you rather be below the fold on page one or above the fold on page two of the search results? If so, why? The answer may depend on your wants and needs....

Posted on March 31, 2008 9:55 AM

A High Rankings Forum member has lost his high rankings (no pun intended). Apparently, he's been deindexed since January 2008. His first inclination at this point is to check the IP address, assuming everything else is looking good. Is the...

Posted on March 25, 2008 9:27 AM

This morning, I wrote a parody post on what you shouldn't do when you ask for a link. Now let's take it a step further. Another WebmasterWorld thread asks how you can screw up your rankings and bring your site...

Posted on February 11, 2008 9:56 AM

This question gets asked time and time again, but it's always helpful to enlighten our newcomers and refresh our seasoned folks. Over at High Rankings Forum, someone asks if you can increase your rankings by clicking like mad on the...

Posted on February 5, 2008 7:32 AM

Guess what? Beyond the value that Microsoft's Live Search Webmaster Portal has for gaining statistical information about your website, it also has an added bonus of the ability to connect with the Live Search team. A WebmasterWorld member says that...

Posted on January 18, 2008 9:09 AM

A Cre8asite Forums member was very happy with herself when she realized that she hit the #1 position for a search phrase that had over 70 million results. Who wouldn't be? That takes a lot of time and effort... But...

Posted on January 11, 2008 10:17 AM

When you do your keyword research, my bet is that you may have tens or hundreds of keywords to choose from. How do you keep track of it and monitor your rankings? A High Rankings Forum thread asks this question....

Posted on December 27, 2007 9:40 AM

Last month, we provided you with November 2007 Google SERP changes, and this month, the trend continues. WebmasterWorld members report that their rankings have been fluctuating heavily. One reports that his site was not ranked in the top #1000 on...

Posted on December 7, 2007 7:30 AM

According to recent reports, Al Gore's website was hacked by spammers who were trying to manipulate the SERPs. The article states that deep within the code, links to "bogus pharmaceuticals" were added and brought those companies much higher in the...

Posted on November 29, 2007 9:53 AM

After October's Google PageRank massacre, a lot of sites scrambled in hopes of trying to salvage what they had left. Some stopped paid links altogether. Some stopped advertising. One guy audited his site, where he discovered that 20 of 25...

Posted on November 21, 2007 9:02 AM

A High Rankings Forum member discovered the golden Google Box, a widget that displays the top 10 rankings for any particular keyword. It looks like this: embedding a bit of code on your site, you can show your users the...

Posted on November 20, 2007 9:50 AM

A SitePoint Forums member did everything right, or so he thought: he ranks #1 for their target keyword phrase, but they have no customers. Where did he go wrong, or what can he do to right the situation? Forum members...

Posted on November 14, 2007 9:23 AM

Barry Welford presents an interesting question, one that has been highly debated in the past, on Cre8asite Forums: I am getting the distinct feeling based on traffic to my websites that clicks on particular entries in SERPs are being weighted...

Posted on October 19, 2007 9:45 AM

Let's say you're ranking really well for a specific keyword. You also have a PPC campaign and your paid listings are on top. Is it too much? Should you curb your spending and focus on your organic links, since in...

Posted on October 5, 2007 9:58 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if cleaning up code will improve Google Rankings. Can removing bad code get better rankings in the SERPs? Not so much for Google, as one webmaster points out. He has had better success with MSN when...

Posted on September 12, 2007 9:00 AM

Those of us in the US are not seeing the same results in the SERPs as UK web surfers. Sites can be ranked higher or lower in the US SERPs compared to the UK SERPs. So what is one to...

Posted on August 14, 2007 9:33 AM

A web designer at Cre8asite Forums has an interesting predicament. She has a client who has a local store and a headquarters both located in two different states. Would it be bad to put two addresses in the footer of...

Posted on July 30, 2007 9:52 AM

A Search Engine Roundtable Forums member wonders if there is any consequence of having his IP changed on a website that ranks pretty well. Will the rankings plummet? Is this risky? Members believe that a simple IP address change should...

Posted on July 27, 2007 10:22 AM

Let's say that when you first built your site, you relied heavily on directories to get your name out. You've also built good content and get linked to every so often. You're now complacent with your rankings primarily because you're...

Posted on July 19, 2007 9:43 AM

Two posts in DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld post point to a very interesting Forbes article on a lesser known practice of SEO known as "Google bowling" or "negative SEO." In this tactic, search engine optimizers force competitor websites down in...

Posted on July 4, 2007 9:18 AM

A business owner at WebmasterWorld noticed that he has been getting an increase of sales lately which seems to be predominantly because online auction listings, which were ranked higher in the Google SERPs, are now not as visible. The auction...

Posted on June 29, 2007 9:54 AM

We've been watching the Google "minus thirty" penalty for quite some time. Recent reports at WebmasterWorld have webmasters relying upon each other for support and advice, and after several months, some people have lately been successful. Some people admitted to...

Posted on June 25, 2007 9:53 AM

Have any SEOs in the house ever run into a problem with a potential client where the SEO is asked for a position guarantee -- satisfaction, or your money back? I'm sure it's happened to some people, and it is...

Posted on June 14, 2007 11:52 AM

A number of members at WebmasterWorld noticed that their AdWords ads, which previously ranked on the first page, were moved to the second and third page results. This was first observed on May 16th. On the 16th of May, I...

Posted on May 22, 2007 9:40 AM

There's an interesting discussion on Cre8asite Forums about losing rankings when you transfer your domain to another registrar. A few people suspect that doing so could cause a loss of rankings, but some other members have not seen any changes...

Posted on May 2, 2007 9:37 AM

This is fairly entertaining... Via a WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums threads, a blog owner received an email from a online store owner, requesting he lower his ranking for a keyword phrase the blog is ranking well for. In short, the...

Posted on December 11, 2006 8:42 AM

Not only can you check your Google web search rankings in any country, you can now check your rankings for image search, news search, video search and group search on any Google data center. A new tool at http://oy-oy.eu/google/trydc/dc.aspx has...

Posted on October 4, 2006 7:24 AM

On July 13th, Google added support for the NOODP tag and Webmasters rejoiced. But there seems to be a number of reports that claim the NOODP tag is hurting their rankings. All claim that the only change they made to...

Posted on August 1, 2006 7:44 AM