We’d like to think that we at Site-Reference are keeping up with the latest in the search engine and marketing industry. However, sometimes we know it looks like we’re a little isolated. As of this week, we’re going to be doing a lot more to look less isolated and more in-tune with what’s happening out there. Part of this new approach will include a Monday recap of the industry news over the last week.
Our sources are pretty much standard (the search engine blogs and large news sites), but we hope to bring the best of it all in one spot so that Site-Reference becomes your one-stop starting point for all that’s search and marketing.
Without further ado, the latest in search is:
Fallout from Google’s algorithm change?
SearchEngineLand examines the numbers resulting from Google’s algorithm change’.
“On Thursday, Google announced a major change to its search algorithm, designed to weed out shallow and low-quality content from its top search results. Content farms were seen by many as the target. Were they hit? Who was hit? Some figures are coming out.”
Other links:
- Google Goes After MFAs @ WebmasterWorld
- Google Announces Major Algorithm Change @ WebmasterWorld
- CNN: Growing Backlash to AdSense Farm Update @ WebmasterWorld
- Google Farmer Update Support Groups @ SEORoundTable
- Google’s Farmer Update Live: 12% Of Google’s Results Forever Changed @ SEORoundTable
Is Google ignoring title tags?
It seems as if Google may be beginning to ignore Title tags more often. SEORoundtable and SearchEngineLand both discussed this issue last week. Additionally, a featured WebmasterWorld thread has dozens of complaints from Webmasters and SEOs about Google selecting a different title from what the Webmaster placed in the title tag. Have you had the same issue? What’s your theory on this?
Bing incorporates Facebook Likes in SERPs
Bing has stepped in to the social SERPs world with an announcement:
“A few months ago, we announced an exciting partnership with Facebook to make search more social. As part of that work, we introduced Liked Results, which promotes links your friends have publicly liked or shared via Facebook. Today we are extending Liked Results to annotate any of the URLs returned by our algorithmic search results to all users in the US.”
Other links:
- Bing Integrates Facebook Likes Further Into Its Search Results @ SearchEngineLand
- Bing Increases Integration With Facebook Likes @ SEORoundtable
- Bing Extends Facebook ‘Liked Results’ @ WebmasterWorld
Is Google’s keyword tool counts sometimes wrong?
A post at SEORoundTable talks about this with some additional information from Googlers.
Google on Mobile friendly websites
Google speaks out about mobile websites, SEO and how to make them more friendly.
“We’ve noticed a rise in the number of questions from webmasters about how best to structure a website for mobile phones and how websites can best interact with Googlebot-Mobile. In this post we’ll explain the current situation and give you specific recommendations you can implement now.”
Other links:
- Google On Mobile SEO: GoogleBot & URL Structure @ SEORoundTable
- Google On Designing Mobile Friendly Websites @ SearchEngineLand
- Mobile site – New domain or Sub-Domain @ WebmasterWorld
Host your own images?
SEORoundtable has an interesting article asking Should You Host Images On Your Domain or Flickr For Best Traffic Potential?
“For years, years, I have been hosting the images from this site on Flickr. Why? Well, initially it ranked incredibly well for images and sent lots and lots of traffic. Plus it even, at one point, didn’t have nofollows on links, so you had nice link juice from a relevant powerful domain. I would say most of these reasons are no longer valid. An image on your domain can rank just as well as Flickr and you can get the immediate traffic to your site, as opposed to Flickr’s site.”
Let us hear from you – what did you find out this last week in the land of Search?