You&A with Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced in Seattle, WA
During the You&A session with Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced 2012 in Seattle, WA, Matt Cutts told everyone that a notification or a message in Google Webmastertools account means that a manual action took place and you were penalized by Google. Continue reading
Starting 05/16/2012 and rolling out to all data centers this week, Google has released search result update that is a change from Google being an “information agent” to a “knowledge agent”.
Basically if you type in a query like “Rangers” (which could mean a solder, a New York based hockey team or a park keeper), and a new information window will appear on the right side of your search results asking you which entity you meant. Select one of the options and your results will be updated based on your selection. Continue reading
During a panel Search Engine Land’s Editor-In-Chief, Danny Sullivan and Microsoft’s Senior Product Marketing Manager of Bing at SXSW named Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better! Matt Cutts announced that “in the next months or few weeks” Google is planning to release a penalty for over-optimized sites. Continue reading
The following factors were deemed to be the worst things you could do it your site as relates to Google News rankings:
Top 10 Negative Google News Ranking Factors:
| # | Factor | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Duplicated Content | Using plagiarized or scraped content on your |
| 2 | Vague Abstract Headlines | No/weak keyword targeting in headlines |
| 3 | No Google News Sitemap | |
| 4 | Poor Quality Content | There’s no excuse for bad writing! |
| 5 | Blocking Googlebot/Newsbot via robots or META tags | Hard to believe this still happens. Go Checkyour robots.txt ?le asap. |
| 6 | Slow Site and/or Lots of 500 Errors | |
| 7 | Poor CitationRank | Your article/site is not deemed and authority on a topic as few 3rd party sites link to you and/or |
| 8 | Low ’PageRank” Domain | If your SEO program is not competitive, you will have a harder time ranking in Google News |
| 9 | New Site | Sites with low/no trust/history will have a harder time |
| 10 | All Syndicated Content With The Same Titles As The Source Site |
| # | Factor | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Category Authority | The news source is known for its expertise on a particular topic (e.g. ESPN and Sports) |
| 2 | Keyword(s) in Headlines & Page Titles | |
| 3 | Domain Authority | The news source has strong SEO presence including strong inbound link profile, social |
| 4 | Social Sharing of Article | Via Facebook & Twitter and maybe even Google+. Velocity is a factor. |
| 5 | First to Publish Story | |
| 6 | Citation Rank | The number of other high value sites that cite your article in their stories. |
| 7 | Unique Articles | Original content with low/no use of other sites’ texts. |
| 8 | High CTR From Google News | From both news.Google.com and other various Google SERPs. |
| 9 | High Quality Content | As determined by Google News editorial evaluators. |
| 10 | Use of Google News XML Sitemaps |