Hot answers tagged serps
14
Breadcrumbs.
There is little official information available, but it seems that if you put navigational breadcrumbs on your site's pages (the kind that shows the user where he is within your site's hierarchy), the Google bot will pick up the information from there.
From their original announcement:
The information in these new hierarchies come from ...
11
Yes. It's probably more so when alt text isn't present, just because Google seems to put a lot of emphasis on that.
Give your images detailed, informative filenames
The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the
image. Try to make your filename a good description of the subject
matter of the image. For example, ...
8
It shouldn't have any effect on your pages' rankings. After all, its purpose is to tell the search engines what pages you would like to have indexed and where to find them. It has nothing to do with relevancy. But you see things like the Sitemap Paradox and realize it is far from a perfect system.
Having said that, the odds are it isn't your sitemap that ...
6
As far as I know the official term is just sitelinks. That's what google calls them: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=8523&answer=47334. Also, here is a good article on the topic and they are called sitelinks as well. http://www.click-finders.com/blog/how-to-get-google-sitelinks-on-your-serp-listing/
5
Rich Snippets Testing Tool Improvements
Last year, Google announced a modification to search results to begin
showing site hierarchies (typically referred to as "breadcrumbs")
rather than standard URLs in cases where it helped users to better
understand a website
You can read how to use breadcrumbs rich snippets markup at Google's Webmaster ...
5
Unfortunately there is not a way to tell Google not to do that as of right now.
But this web page had a couple of suggestions worth mentioning:
Use image based dates instead of the usual theme (PHP) generated server
side time stamp. In this case, you
have to convert the date string to
images and hence it may not be very
easy to create the ...
5
It is best to let them disappear as long as your redirects are 301's. Google will in time see that they are 301(permanent) redirects and will switch over to the new URL. I have done this myself and you should see results within 2-4 weeks, if not faster.
If it has been more than a month and your old URLs are still showing up in Google's SERPs then you ...
5
Disqus has a blog post about how using there tool helps, http://blog.disqus.com/post/9956511178/disqus-research-how-comments-drive-traffic.
In the comments, Rob Webb asks the Disqus team about the SEO drawbacks of using Disqus because of the JavaScript not being seen by search spiders. The response from Disqus says that they aren't even sure if there are ...
5
There is no definitive timeframe. In fact, there's no guarantee Google will use breadcrumbs in their search results for your pages. As with anything related to Google displaying search results, you can give them clues and express your wishes as for what to display in the search results but ultimately Google will decide if and when it will happen. All you can ...
4
A list in order-of-importance would be impossible to create if we were hoping for any long term credibility, but yes, SEO does factor into SERPs and no, it's not going to ruin your SEO strategy if you use a non-relevant domain name.
With social marketing, quality content, clean code, etc. it's quite possible to get ranked well if you know what you're doing. ...
4
If the same content can be reached by more then one URL then you will definitely have issues with duplicate content. You will need to specify a canonical URL for each page so Google knows which one is the "main" one and will show that URL in its search results. All other URLs that pull up the same content will be seen as the same page (which means any links ...
4
I've found that the best way to get neutral results is to use chrome's incognito function (tools menu > incognito window).
An incognito window doesn't have a cache, cookies or anything else attached to it at the start of a session, and anything added during a session is deleted at the end.
3
The domain name is important but not the end-all and be-all of SEO. If you can get a domain name with good keywords in it you will definitely have an advantage over someone with the similar content who does not. BUT you can overcome not having a good domain name with quality content, good URLs, etc. as they all are factors and can help you overcome the lack ...
3
According to this Google blog post the TLD is more important then the country the site is hosted in. That post covers working with regional websites in good detail and should be a good point in the right direction.
3
Google Webmaster Tools provides this functionality (along with the ability to see how you rank at localized Google domains, in image search, et cetera) with an approximate SERP rank as well as a percentage-based change in rank indicator for the timeframe you specify within the last 30 days.
Log in and go to "Your site on the web" > "Search queries" - the ...
3
There are lots of tools available for this. Free Monitor For Google is very basic and doesn't have a lot of the fluff others have so if you like simple it's worth checking out.
3
It varies from site to site. This site is very fast. This page is probably in Google's index already. Your site may take days or weeks for new pages t be ffound or existing pages to be updated. It is based on lots of factors but the longer you've been around and the more popular you're content has been with users (I.e. you have attracted lots of links) the ...
3
You may want to have a look at this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2417475/seo-does-google-bot-see-text-in-hidden-divs which is pointing to the Google Webmaster guidelines on the following text
Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as ...
3
As long as your robots.txt is accessible by search engines on your server, any user can directly access it by typing its address.
You could block its access via .htaccess using specific user-agent filters, though, namely authorizing only search engines user agents to access it.
As long as no one is fooling around with a fake user agent to blind guess your ...
3
Enter that website's url into www.opensiteexplorer.org (or any other backlink checker) and you'll see it has lots of backlinks from a variety of domains.
You can further use other toolboxes (sistrix, searchmetrics, xovi, seolytics...) to analyze the value of the site over a period of time to see if there was a sudden spike of links or if the link building ...
2
There are two possible meanings to the way you use "keywords" in your question. One is the meta keywords tag, which you are correct Google does not take into account for relevancy purposes, the other would be keywords within the content of your site, those are still important to Google for determining relevancy.
That said if you're looking to rank for more ...
2
The conversation about "Freshbot" and "Deepbot" are pretty deprecated. I haven't heard those words used since the early 2000s on intermittent Geocities websites. And I can't find any good sources on them that aren't websites riddled with Adsense. The woes of Google indexing is such a nebulous mechanism that you're better off not trying to put such a fine ...
2
The Google Webmaster Help team has uploaded a YouTube video that features Matt Cutts discussing:
Why aren't breadcrumbs displaying in search results for my site?
Any updates on "Site hierarchies display in search results" (AKA
breadcrumbs)? My site has clear breadcrumbs, but Google isn't using
them in search results. Any tips for adjusting the ...
2
The explanation is pretty simple. When you are logged in, Google sorts the results according to your search habits and your search history.
For this reason, the results you browse/click the most are likely to be moved at the top of the SERP when you are logged in.
2
The domain name is very important.
Here is some ideas based on my experience.
People love to see a good domain name that matches their search keywords. If they see it, they click it. A good domain name is a click-magnet.
Google search engine loves to see an exact match between the search keywords and the domain name.
There is a self-reinforcing loop ...
2
The second example is not showing anything because it's using frames, if you view the source, there is nothing for Google to take, use and display:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Welcome... We'll take your orders online!</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<FRAMESET ROWS="94,*" BORDER="0" FRAMEBORDER="0" FRAMESPACING="0">
<FRAME NAME="Header" ...
2
The reasons are pretty simple. Google normally uses the meta description for its snippet. In the first example the meta description is short so Google has used that. (Often in these cases Google would show a snippet from the page if it thinks the meta isn't useful enough.)
The second case normally happens if the page is blocked by robots.txt or the robots ...
2
The second example you provided - the text with URL - definitely looks like a site which has been noindex,nofollow (and Google has yet to catch up with recent changes).
In this case, it appears as though the anchor text and/or anchor title associated with links to your client's site is being used - it's the only info Google has and it beats total ...
2
You're assuming the description always has to be two lines. It obviously doesn't nor should it be. Google's goal when displaying the description underneath the page title is to help users determine if the site listed is a good match for their search query and thus worth visiting. A concise description is the ideal and I am sure Google strives to do that at ...
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