It’s well known that Google began a huge fight against spammers and low quality websites. A lot have been penalized or even banned. Everyone complains and everyone believes he’s been penalized for no reason. While I believe it’s true and some websites have really been wrongly penalized, we can’t expect a computer algorithm to be flawless. But the percent of mistakes it did is small and most of them deserved it. Most of us have faced penalties and I know that I lost some really valuable websites, but I realized [...]

It’s been already 3 months since Google began rolling out the Panda algorithm to filter content farms from the search results and they hit literally tens of thousands of unique content websites, while giving an advantage to scrapers and content aggregators. And this is exactly the opposite of what Google’s Panda should have done. It was supposed to filter all low quality and duplicate content from the search results. So either Google is doing it all wrong, aggregators provide higher quality content than the original sources or Google designed this algorithm especially [...]

On October 19th Google stopped indexing a lot of blogs. I can’t tell the number right now, but I guess there are tens of thousands affected or even more. I noticed that TechCrunch, Mashable and even the Google Apps Developer blog have been affected. It’s been almost 48 hours since Google stopped indexing posts from these blogs, though it is still indexing their tags and that’s why the issue is really strange. I believe it’s either a big Google bug or they’re currently working on something and doing some tests. Something similar [...]

Lately Google has been doing test after test and they’ve just come with a big change today, showing website previews in the search results. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to try it out, because it doesn’t appear to me, whatever I tried doing. It seems like there is a preview button and I hope that the previews are not triggered by a simple mouse-over, because it would be very disturbing. I think this feature might help users to see if what they are searching for is there or not, and [...]

I’ve been sharing my first impressions about Google Instant with you a few days ago and now I’ve had enough time to track the changes and see what changed. Fortunately, I’ve noticed that the traffic on a lot of my long-tail keywords increased dramatically on one of my blogs and my earnings went up by 100%, which is more than great. Google Instant does not only suggest you long-tail keywords, but also show you the results for the specific long-tail keywords, which means you will get more SERP impressions. I [...]

Google has officially release Google Instant a few days ago and I have been testing it a lot since then. Like always, people are split into two camps, the ones who love it and the ones who hate it. Currently, they haven’t been able to research it in depth, though they are confident it will be either good or bad, depending what camp are they in. My first impression is that it’s really useful and it might help both the users and webmasters, while hopefully it will bury spammers. Usually [...]

Google has first unveiled Caffeine, the search engine’s new version, back in August, and now they are preparing to release it. Until now it has been available to test at a special page that it’s no longer available, as Google will start using the improved algorithms widely, starting with one datacenter. Caffeine doesn’t bring huge changes to the algorithm, though it will index pages faster and treat spam more severely. Unfortunately, the exact release date wasn’t disclosed and neither the datacenter it will go live on, though it shouldn’t be [...]

Google has just made public it’s voting-based SearchWiki so now you can upvote, comment,  or remove any result from the SERP. For the moment it only seems to affect the voting user’s rankings and not the whole SERP, so you don’t have to worry. In the future there are many chances Google will use this voting system in it’s algorithm to rank websites, but it surely won’t base on this too much, because it’s much easier to game than using older techniques. We shall see in the future what they [...]

Today me and almost everyone I asked noticed changes in SERPs on a lot of keywords and the strange thing is that the positions have changed for almost all websites in the query and the quality, trusted ones went down with up to hundreds of positions, while new websites, with no inbound links jumped to the first positions. I talked a lot about this today with a lot of people and we didn’t manage to get to a conclusion, because if the SERP remains like this, Google’s relevancy ends today. [...]

A simple SEO guideline says that you should end your urls in .htm, .html or make them as mine. Some do not follow this and end them in .php, .asp and other programming languages. It might not be as good as the ones ended in .html, but Matt Cutts say they are and there’s no problem. Yet he stated clearly that URLs ended in .exe or .0 were not indexed at all until a few days ago. Now it seems Google does index them but we can’t be sure it [...]