Tweet A few weeks ago, one of our clients accidentally released duplicate description tags across all the pages in one section of their site. They were using template based formats for the descriptions so that every page would have a unique description but the system failed and every description ended up being identical. The effect [...]
Tweet Update: Google has confirmed the behaviour and provided detailed documentation. The original Robots.txt syntax was pretty straightforward. You could only use the Disallow directive to exclude pages and each Disallow directive acted like a broad match at the end. This seemed pretty intuitive to most people and for a while the world was a [...]
Tweet It’s been over a year since Google conducted a survey asking webmaster which features they wanted the most. Our analysis of that survey showed that people were desperate for more information on backlinks. Google obliged by updating ‘Links to your site’ in Webmaster Tools to provide a full list of all backlinks which could be exported [...]
Tweet UPDATE: This technique does NOT track Google Instant as Google isn’t passing through the original query as thought. We were incorrectly picking up referrals from the old Google suggest. UPDATE2: Google Analytics have confirmed it on their blog. The launch of Google Instant has caused a lot of excitement and SEOs around the world [...]
Tweet Google recently added a new report to Webmaster Tools called ‘short meta descriptions’ which sits under the HTML Suggestions menu. Analysing the data for a few large sites quickly showed that descriptions of 49 characters or less are included in the report. So what is the impact of having a ‘short’ meta description? On [...]
Tweet The new Google Images has finally been rolled out to the UK and it’s causing a mild buzz. The general consensus seems to be that it’s a big improvement on the old one and not too disimilar from Bing. One key difference is that you can’t actually tell which site you’re about to visit [...]
Tweet The Google Webmaster Tools team clearly spent a lot more time thinking about their Halloween costumes than their latest updates. After the slightly puzzling updates released in October, expectations were low. Keywords feature. We’ll now be updating the data daily, providing details on how often we found a specific keyword, and displaying a handful [...]
Tweet Google recently published a couple of new updates to Webmaster Tools. They are part of a process for delivering updates under the new ‘Labs’ menu which simply means that it’s a beta feature and might break. After our careful analysis of the user feedback survey some months ago, it was clear what features webmasters [...]
Tweet The idea that Google might be using click-through-rate (CTR) data to influence natural search results has been around for many years. We have witnessed the use of CTR as a fundamental criteria for PPC ranking and its use in personalised search to identify a users favourite sites so they will appear higher in the [...]
Tweet Google’s recent request for SEOs to provide feedback on Webmaster Central and further new ideas Webmaster Tools generated some interesting insights into the tools failings. The site stopped accepting new entries and votes on July 24th but they have left the results available for everyone to see. We decided to analyse the data to [...]