Google To Stop Showing Authorship Information In Search Results by @mattsouthern

Last month we reported that Google would be removing Authorship pictures from search results. Now it has been confirmed by Google’s John Mueller that Authorship information will be removed from search results entirely.

The decision was made to drop Authorship information because the information was not found to be overly useful to searchers, and at times has even detracted from the search results.

Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.

While it’s unfortunate to see Authorship information going away, it really should not make a difference to site owners. Since Authorship didn’t help to increase traffic to pages, then site owners shouldn’t notice a decrease in traffic going forward.

Something Mueller notes that Google will continue to focus on is Schema.org structured markup: “This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.”

Google first started implementing Authorship around the time as the launch of Google

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Google Acquires Gecko Design, Designers Of The Original Fitbit by @mattsouthern

TechCruch reports that Google has acquired Gecko Design, the firm responsible for the mechanical design of the original version of the fitness tracking device Fitbit.

Gecko Design was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Google reportedly acquired them to help with its Google X special projects laboratory. In addition to working for Fitbit, Gecko Design has also worked with high-profile clients such as Aliph (Jawbone), Dell, HP, Slingmedia, and OLPC.

Here is what the President of Gecko Design had to say about the acquisition in a statement posted on their home page:

This is an incredible opportunity for everyone at Gecko. We are very excited and honored to join Google(x) and work on a variety of cutting edge projects.

We have enjoyed working with all our clients. Words cannot express the level of appreciate we have for your support throughout the many years that Gecko’s doors have been open.

Google X has spawned some of Google’s most ambitious projects, such as Google Glass and its driverless car program. With Gecko Design on board, Google now has the product design talent to help bring life to new hardware.

Rumors have alleged that Google has been shopping around for Jawbone or other wearable device makers, but it appears that Google has instead opted to acquire a design partner used by these startups.

Google has yet to release any details regarding their deal with Gecko Design.

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Google Webmaster Tools Just Got a Lot More Important for Link Discovery and Cleanup

August 20th, 2014 - Posted by Robert Fisher to Advanced SEO

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.
The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

What if you owned a paid directory site and every day you received emails upon emails stating that someone wants links removed. As they stacked up in your inbox, whether they were pleasant or they were sternly demanding you cease and desist, would you just want to give up? What would you do to stop the barrage of emails if you thought the requests were just too overwhelming? How could you make it all go away, or at least the majority of it?

First, a bit of background

We had a new, important client come aboard on April 1, 2013 with a lot of work needed going forward. They had been losing rankings for some time and wanted help. With new clients, we want as much baseline data as possible so that we can measure progress going forward, so we do a lot of monitoring. On April 17th, one of our team members noticed something quite interesting. Using Ahrefs for link tracking, we saw there was a big spike in the number of external links coming to our new client's site. 

When the client came on board on two weeks prior, the site had about 5,500 links coming in and many of those were less than quality. Likely half or more were comment links from sites with no relevance to the client and they used the domain as the anchor text. Now, overnight they were at 6,100 links and the next day even more. Each day the links kept increasing. We saw they were coming from a paid directory called Netwerker.com. Within a month to six weeks, they were at over 30,000 new links from that site.

We sent a couple of emails asking that they please stop the linking, and we watched Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) every day like hawks waiting for the first link from Netwerker to show. The emails got no response, but in late May we saw the first links from there show up in GWT and we submitted a domain disavow immediately.

We launched their new site in late June and watched as they climbed in the rankings; that is a great feeling. Because the site was rising in the rankings rather well, we assumed the disavow tool had worked on Netwerker. Unfortunately, there was a cloud on the horizon concerning all of the link building that had been done for the client prior to our engagement. October arrived with a Penguin attack (Penguin 2.1, Oct. 4, 2013) and they fell considerably in the SERPs. I mean, they disappeared for many of the best terms they had again began to rank for. They had fallen to page five or deeper for key terms. (NOTE: This was all algorithmic and they had no manual penalty.)

While telling the client that their new drop was a Penguin issue related to the October Penguin update (and the large ratio of really bad links), we also looked for anything else that would cause the issue or might be affecting the results. We are constantly monitoring and changing things with our clients. As a result, there are times we do not make a good change and we have to move things back. (We always tell the client if we have caused a negative impact on their rankings, etc. This is one of the most important things we ever do in building trust over time and we have never lost a client because we made a mistake.) We went through everything thoroughly and eliminated any other potential causative factors. At every turn there was a Penguin staring back at us!

When we had launched the new site in late June 2013, we had seen them rise back to page one for key terms in a competitive vertical. Now, they were missing for the majority of their most important terms. In mid-March of 2014, nearly a year after engagement, they agreed to do a severe link clean up and we began immediately. There would be roughly 45,000

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Google Ends Exact and Phrase Keyword Match Ability in AdWords; Now Applying Close Variant Keyword Matching by @mattsouthern

At least 7% of Google searches contain a misspelling, according to a new post on Google’s Inside AdWords blog. However, people still want to find what they’re looking for even if they haven’t spelled it correctly.

That’s why Google has announced that they’re applying close variant keyword matching to all exact and phrase match keywords starting in September.

Close variant keyword matching is an intuitive way to return the correct results that users are searching for. It was introduced in 2012, and Google says advertisers have seen strong results. “Advertisers are receiving an average of 7% more exact and phrase match clicks with comparable clickthrough and conversion rates.”

These incremental increases in clicks help advertisers seize opportunities to convert customers that are otherwise missed by “Low search volume” keywords that are common for misspellings and abbreviations.

Google’s announcement contains testimonials from three advertisers. Here’s one from Stitch America:

“In matching common stemming variants such as “custom hats” for “customized hats”, we’ve seen five times as many clicks for exact and phrase match keywords. What’s more impressive is that this additional traffic costs half as much.”

Close variant matching was already the default setting for campaigns, which means most advertisers won’t see a change in keyword matching behavior. The option to disable close variants will be removed in September.

Advertisers will no longer be able to build extensive lists of misspelled, abbreviated, and other close variations of your keywords. Instead, Google recommends to focus on adding negative keywords–including close variants you don’t want to match for–to shape traffic and reduce cost.

In addition to improving your campaigns’ ROI with an improved click-through rate and lower cost per click, with this update Google also wants to help deliver a better ad experience for your customers.

To learn more about keyword matching options, please see Google’s Help Center article.

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Enable two step verification on your GMAIL account

Gmail is the most popular free email service provider among all the other free email services provider. People use email accounts to communicate, to send and receive important files. Some of those files can be very important for a person or an organization if the email address is used by an organization.