Does the physical location matter at all? With the introduction of the hreflang attribute we decided to check how it works in practice for different language and location settings. We tested the three following factors for two different languages (en/pl) and two locations (GB/PL): Physical location of the searcher (UK vs PL) Country specific Google [...]
We have just spotted today that Google started displaying a message instead of an empty description. This happens when you disallow a page in robots.txt preventing Google from indexing the content of a page and therefore the description as well. The message looks like this: The “learn more” link points to: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 It is [...]
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 on [...]
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 a [...]
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 in [...]
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 are [...]
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 the [...]
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 before [...]
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 of [...]
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 were [...]