Google does not use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking. Google's Matt Cutts explains this in a Webmaster Central video. This is not breaking news, by any means, but there are a lot of people out there that still put a lot of stock into this.
Google has people riled up with its latest local search effort Google Place Pages. Place Pages are a Google Maps feature launched last week, which serve the purpose of providing everything you want to know about a place (a city or a business) in one spot. For example, if you search for a specific restaurant, you should get web pages, directions, reviews, images, street view imagery, business hours, etc. Google lets businesses submit specific categories they want to include.
You may recall back at SMX Seattle earlier this year, Google's Matt Cutts talked at length about paid links. He touched upon the topic of Google being able to read javascript after giving out advice for so long to use javascript as a way to keep Google from reading paid links.
As you're probably aware, the plan for the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that dominated many of the headlines this summer, is for Bing to take over Yahoo search, in terms of algorithmic ranking. Basically, Bing will handle the back-end, while Yahoo will handle the front-end design of the new Yahoo Search. That should be happening next year sometime.
I thought that one of the more interesting topics addressed at Search Engine Strategies San Jose a while back was that of SEO and the publishing industry. This is an industry seemingly at war with entities like Google (at least partially), even though there are clearly measures publishers could take, which would make Google and Google News in particular work to their advantage.
In a previous article, we discussed why and how to rank in image searches. The article was based on discussion from the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. Bing's Todd Schwartz was part of that discussion, and he has now shared additional insight into Bing's image search.
Google appears to be testing breadcrumbs in some search results, at least in some areas. If you are unfamiliar with the term breadcrumbs, it refers to the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page.
Google is traditionally the main area of focus when it comes to search engine optimization. With the search engine giant so far ahead of the game in terms of search market share, it's not hard to understand why.
Google announced today that its SEO Starter Guide is now available in 40 languages. This covers 98% of the global Internet audience according to the company.
"We hope that webmasters around the world can use the guide to improve their sites' crawlability and indexing in search engines," says Brandon Falls of Google's Search Quality Team.
Bruce Clay, who has been in the search engine optimization game since 1996 (before Google), sat down with WebProNews to discuss how the search industry has evolved over the years. Discuss search industry changes with WebProNews readers.