In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. Google pills: Source: Instagram Google Doodle postcards: Source: Twitter...
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AdWords recently released a Health Score feature that 'grades' your account, but is it just a rip-off of an existing free performance grader? Columnist Larry Kim compares. The post What’s the Google AdWords Health Score and how is it different from existing tools? appeared first on Search...
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The latest announced release, Penguin 4.0, will also be the last, given its new real-time nature. The post Google updates Penguin, says now runs in real-time within the core search algorithm appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Credited with popularizing the Mexican sport of lucha libre wrestling, the legendary wrestler would have been 99 years old today. The post El Santo Google doodle honors Mexican wrestler Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/el-santo-google-doodle-honors-mexican-wrestler-rodolfo-guzman-huerta-259467 Posted by randfish Featured snippets are the name of the rankings game. Often eclipsing organic results at the top of the SERPs, "ranking zero" or capturing an answer box in Google can mean increased clicks and traffic to your site. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains the three types of featured snippets and how you can best position yourself to grab those coveted spots in the SERPs. Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're going to chat about answer boxes, those featured snippets that Google puts in ranking position zero, oftentimes above the rest of the organic results, usually below some of the top ads, and sometimes they can draw a ton of the clicks away from the rest of the 10 results that would normally appear in Google's organic ranking. Now, thanks to our friends up at STAT in Vancouver — Rob Bucci specifically, who did a great presentation at MozCon, he delivered some really interesting research — and so we know a little bit more about the world of featured snippets. Specifically, that there are three kinds of featured snippets or answer boxes, if you prefer, that appear in Google's results on both mobile and desktop. Now, Rob used desktop-based, but in my research I checked through all the examples that I could find, and the same featured snippets that we saw in desktop were replicated on mobile. So I think this is a pretty one-to-one ratio that's going on here. The three were paragraphs, lists, and tables. I'll show you examples of all of those. But globally, we're talking about 15% of all queries in STAT's database that came up with one of these answer boxes. ParagraphsSo I did a search here for "Istanbul history." You can see that Wikipedia is not just ranking number one, they're also ranking number zero. So they have this nice featured snippet. It's got a photo or an image that'll appear on the right-hand side on desktop or on top of the text in mobile, and then the snippet, which essentially tries to give you a brief answer, a quick answer to the question. Now, of course, this query is pretty broad, I probably want to know a lot more about Istanbul's history than the fact that it was a human settlement for 3,000 years. But if you want just that quick answer, you can get those. There are paragraph answers for all sorts of things. These are about 63% of all the answer boxes are in paragraph format. ListsLists look like this. So I search for "strengthen lower back," I get, again, that image and then I get — this is from wikiHow, so quality, questionable — but back strengthening exercises. They say, number one, do pelvic tilting. Number two, do hip bridges. Number three, do floor swimming. Number four, do the bird dog exercise. That sounds exciting and painful. This is from an article called "How to Strengthen Lower Back," and it's on wikiHow's URL there. These lists, that are usually in numeric or they can be in bullet point format, so either one can appear, they're about 19% of answers. TablesAnd then finally, we have ones like this. I searched for "WordPress hosting comparison." These tables show up in a lot of places where you see a comparison or a chart-type of view. In this case, there actually was a visual of an actual graph, and then performance of the best WordPress hosting companies, the name, the account type, the cost per month. This is from wpsitecare.com. Again, this was ranking, I believe, number two or number three and also ranking number zero. So this is sort of great. I can't remember who was ranking number one, but they're ranking ahead of the number one spot, as well, by being in this position zero. These are about 16% of answers, so really close on tables and lists. This is via STAT's featured snippet research, which I will link to. It's a great PDF document that you can check out from Rob that I'll point to in the Whiteboard Friday. In addition to knowing this about featured snippets, that, hey, it's a fairly substantive quantity of things, it can also jump you above the rest of the results, and there are these three different formats, we had a bunch of questions and we keep getting them on, "How do I get in there?" I actually have some great answers for you. So not only has Rob and his team been doing some research, but we've done some research and some testing work here at Moz, and Dr. Pete has done a bunch. So I do have some suggestions, some recommendations for you if you're going to try and get into these featured snippets. Best practices to appear in the answer box/featured snippet1. Identify queries in KW research that, implicitly or explicitly, ask a question.You actually need to do your keyword research and identify those queries that implicitly or explicitly are asking a question. The question needs to be slightly broader than what Google can deliver directly out of Knowledge Graph. So for example, if you were to ask, "How old is Istanbul," they might say "3,000 years old." They might not even give any citation at all to Wikipedia or any other website. If I were to ask, "How old is Rand Fishkin," they might put in 37, and they might give absolutely no citation, no link at all, no credit to any page of mine on the web. Again, very frustrating. So these are essentially queries that we're looking for in our keyword research that are slightly broader than a single line or single piece of knowledge, but they do demand a question that it's being answered. You can find those in your keyword research pretty easily. If you go into Keyword Explorer, for example, and you use the suggestions filter for our questions, virtually all of those are. But many things, like Istanbul history, it's an implicit question, not an explicit one. So you can get featured snippets for those as well. 2. Seek out queries that already use the answer box. If the competition's doing a poor job, these are often easy to grab.You want to seek out queries that already use the answer box. So again, if you're using a tool like Keyword Explorer or something — I believe STAT does this as well — where they will identify the types of results that are in the query. You're looking for these answer box- or featured snippets-types of results. If they are in there and someone else already owns it, that means you can usually leapfrog them by providing a better-formatted, more accurate, more complete, or higher-ranking answer. So if you're ranking number three or number four and the number two or number one result is producing that answer box and you reformat your content (and I'll talk about how we can do that in a sec), you reformat your content to meet one of these items, the correct one, whichever one is being triggered, you can leapfrog them. You can take that position zero away from your competition and earn it for yourself. It's especially easy when they're doing a poor job. If they've got a weak result in there, and there are a lot of these that are very weak today, you can often take them away. 3. Ranking #1 can help, but isn't required! Google will pull from any first page result.Ranking number one is helpful, but it is not required. Google will pull from any first-page result. In fact, you can test this for yourself. Very frequently, if you do a query that pulls up an answer box and then you take the query string and you add "&num=100", or you change your settings in Google Search such that Google shows 50 or 100 results, they are often going to pull from a lower-down result, sometimes in the bottom 30 or 40 results rather than the top 10. So Google is essentially triggering this answer result from anything that appears on page one of the query, which is awesome for all of us because it means that we could be ranking number 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and still get the answer box if we do other things correctly, like... 4. Format and language are essential! Match the paragraph, or table, and use the logical answer to the query terms in your title/caption/label/section header.Format and language. These are essential. The language means the language used. We need to use the terms and phrases a little more literally than we would with a lot of other types of keyword targeting, because Google really, really seems to like, if I search for "strengthen lower back," they are showing me an article called "strengthen lower back," not "back strengthening for newbies" or that kind of thing. They are much more literal in most of these than we've seen them be, thanks to technologies like RankBrain and Hummingbird, with other kinds of queries. We also need to make sure that we're matching the paragraph, the list, or the table format and that we're using a logical answer to those query terms. That answer can be in the title of your web page, but it can also be in the caption of an image, the label of a section, or a section header. In this case, for example, part three of this article was back strengthening exercises. That's where they're pulling from. In this case, they have "City of Istanbul" and then they have history and that's the section. In this case, it's the performance chart that's shown right at the top of the web page. But they will pull from inside a document. So as long as you're structured in one section or in the document as a whole correctly, you can get in there. 5. Be accurate. Google tend to favor stronger, more correct responses.You want to be accurate. Google actually does tend to favor more accurate results.I know you might say, "How do I know I'm being accurate? Some of this information is very subjective." It is true. Google tends to look at sources that they trust to look for words and phrases and structured information that matches up many, many times over across many trusted sites, and then they will show results that match what are in those trusted sites more often. 6. Entice the clicks by using Google's maximum snippet length to your advantage.This is less about how to rank there, but more about how to earn traffic from it. If you're ranking in position zero, you might be frustrated that Google is going to take those clicks away from you because the searcher is going to get the answer before they ever need to click on your site, thus you don't earn the traffic. We've seen this a little bit, but, in fact, most of the time when we rank number zero, we see that we get more traffic than just ranking number one by itself. You're essentially getting two, because you rank number zero plus whatever normal or organic position you're in. You can entice the click by using Google's maximum snippet length to your advantage. Meaning, they are not going to put all the different numbered answers in the lists here from wikiHow, they're only going to put the first four or five. Therefore, if you have a list that is six or seven or eight items long, someone has to click to see them all. Same thing with the paragraph. They're only going to use a certain number of characters, and so if you have a paragraph that leads into the next paragraph or that goes long with the character count or the word count, you can again draw that click rather than having Google take that traffic away. With this information at your disposal, you should be armed and ready to take over some of those result number zeros, get some answer boxes, some featured snippets on your side. I look forward to hearing your questions. I would love to hear if you've got some examples of featured snippets, where you're ranking, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Use Moz Pro to track which SERP features drive traffic to your site. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. 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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: AdWords call tracking, SEO failures, & SERP tools appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Track calls from the phone number on your website with a couple of pieces of code. The post Setting up AdWords website call conversion tracking just got a bit easier appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/google-website-call-conversion-tracking-update-259290 Posted by Nathan Martz, Product Manager, Google VR At Google I/O, we announced Daydream—Google's platform for high quality, mobile virtual reality—and released early developer resources to get the community started with building for Daydream. Since then, the team has been hard at work, listening to feedback and evolving these resources into a suite of powerful developer tools. Today, we are proud to announce that the Google VR SDK 1.0 with support for Daydream has graduated out of beta, and is now available on the Daydream developer site. Our updated SDK simplifies common VR development tasks so you can focus on building immersive, interactive mobile VR applications for Daydream-ready phones and headsets, and supports integrated asynchronous reprojection, high fidelity spatialized audio, and interactions using the Daydream controller. To make it even easier to start developing with the Google VR SDK 1.0, we’ve partnered with Unity and Unreal so you can use the game engines and tools you’re already familiar with. We’ve also updated the site with full documentation, reference sample apps, and tutorials. Native Unity integration This release marks the debut of native Daydream integration in Unity, which enables Daydream developers to take full advantage of all of Unity’s optimizations in VR rendering. It also adds support for features like head tracking, deep linking, and easy Android manifest configuration. Many Daydream launch apps are already working with the newest integration features, and you can now download the new Unity binary here and the Daydream plugin here. Native UE4 integration We’ve made significant improvements to our UE4 native integration that will help developers build better production-quality Daydream apps. The latest version introduces Daydream controller support in the editor, a neck model, new rendering optimizations, and much more. UE4 developers can download the source here. Get started today While the first Daydream-ready phones and headset are coming this fall, you can start developing high-quality Daydream apps right now with the Google VR SDK 1.0 and the DIY developer kit. We’re also opening applications to our Daydream Access Program (DAP) so we can work closely with even more developers building great content for Daydream. Submit your Daydream app proposal to apply to be part of our DAP. When you create content for the Daydream platform, you know your apps will work seamlessly across every Daydream-ready phone and headset. Daydream is just getting started, and we’re looking forward to working together to help you build new immersive, interactive VR experiences. Stay tuned for more information about Daydream-ready phones and the Daydream headset and controller coming soon. via Google Developers Blog http://developers.googleblog.com/2016/09/google-vr-sdk-graduates-out-of-beta.html
Columnist Trond Lyngbø believes that SEO can be a powerful addition to your marketing mix, but its success will depend on how intelligently you invest in it. The post 6 reasons why SEO fails, and how you can succeed at it appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Columnist Jordan Kasteler notes that strong search performance requires more than just ranking well in organic results. The tools listed here can enhance your existing listings and help you to appear in other places on the search results pages. The post 9 tools to help you succeed with Google SERP...
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To mark the Autumn season, Google brought back the same artwork from its Vernal Equinox doodle earlier this year. The post Autumnal Equinox Google doodle welcomes first day of Fall in the Northern Hemisphere appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Originally posted on Google Apps Developers Blog
Posted by Michael Winser, Product Lead, Google Apps and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps Last week, we clarified the expectations and responsibilities when accessing Google user data via OAuth 2.0. Today, we’re announcing that in order to better protect users, we are increasing account security for enterprise Gmail users effective October 5, 2016. At this time, a new policy will take effect whereby users in a Google Apps domain, while changing their passwords on or after this date, will result in the revocation of the OAuth 2.0 tokens of apps that access their mailboxes using Gmail-based authorization scopes. Please note that users will not notice any specific changes on this date and their applications will continue to work. It is only when a user changes their password from that point moving forward that their Gmail-related tokens become invalid. Developers should modify their applications to handle HTTP 400 or 401 error codes resulting from revoked tokens and prompt their users to go through the OAuth flow again to re-authorize those apps, such that they can access the user’s mailbox again (additional details below). Late last year, we announceda similar, planned change to our security policy that impacted a broader set of authorization scopes. We later decidednot to move forward with that change for Apps customers and began working on a less impactful update as described above. What is a revoked token? A revoked OAuth 2.0 token no longer provides access to a user’s resources. Any attempt to use a revoked token in API calls will result in an error. Any existing token strings will no longer have any value and should be discarded. Applications accessing Google APIs should be modified to handle failed API calls. Token revocation itself is not a new feature. Users have always been able to revoke access to applications in Security Checkup, and Google Apps admins have the ability to do the same in the Admin console. In addition, tokens that were not used for extended periods of time have always been subject to expiration or revocation. This change in our security policy will likely increase the rate of revoked tokens that applications see, since in some cases the process will now take place automatically. What APIs and scopes are impacted? To achieve the security benefits of this policy change with minimal admin confusion and end-user disruption, we’ve decided to limit its application to mail scopes only and to exclude Apps Script tokens. Apps installed via the Google Apps Marketplace are also not subject to the token revocation. Once this change is in effect, third-party mail apps like Apple Mail and Thunderbird―as well as other applications that use multiple scopes that include at least one mail scope―will stop accessing data upon password reset until a new OAuth 2.0 token has been granted. Your application will need to detect this scenario, notify the user that your application has lost access to their account data, and prompt them to go through the OAuth 2.0 flow again. Mobile mail applications are also included in this policy change. For example, users who use the native mail application on iOS will have to re-authorize with their Google account credentials when their password has been changed. This new behavior for third-party mail apps on mobile aligns with the current behavior of the Gmail apps on iOS and Android, which also require re-authorization upon password reset. How can I determine if my token was revoked? Both short-lived access tokens and long-lived refresh tokens will be revoked when a user changes their password. Using a revoked access token to access an API or to generate a new access token will result in either HTTP 400 or 401 errors. If your application uses a library to access the API or handle the OAuth flow, then these errors will likely be thrown as exceptions. Consult the library’s documentation for information on how to catch these exceptions. NOTE: because HTTP 400 errors may be caused by a variety of reasons, expect the payload from a 400 due to a revoked token to be similar to the following: { How should my application handle revoked tokens? This change emphasizes that token revocation should be considered a normal condition, not an error scenario. Your application should expect and detect the condition, and your UI should be optimized for restoring tokens. To ensure that your application works correctly, we recommend doing the following:
If your application uses incremental authorization to accrue multiple scopes in the same token, you should track which features and scopes a given user has enabled. The end result is that if your app requested and obtained authorization for multiple scopes, and at least one of them is a mail scope, that token will be revoked, meaning you will need to prompt your user to re-authorize for all scopes originally granted. Many applications use tokens to perform background or server-to-server API calls. Users expect this background activity to continue reliably. Since this policy change also affects those apps, this makes prompt notification requesting re-authorization even more important. What is the timeline for this change? To summarize, properly configured applications should be expected to handle invalid tokens in general, whether they be from expiration, non-existence, and revocation as normal conditions. We encourage developers to make any necessary changes to give their users the best experience possible. The policy change is planned to take effect on October 5, 2016. Please see this Help Center article and FAQ for more details and the full list of mail scopes. Moving forward, any additional scopes to be added to the policy will be communicated in advance. We will provide those details as they become available. via Google Developers Blog http://developers.googleblog.com/2016/09/increased-account-security-via-oauth-2-0-token-revocation.html
Posted by Mercy Orangi, Developer Ecosystem Community Manager
Back in May at Google I/O, we announced the expansion Firebase, a mobile platform that enables you to quickly develop high-quality applications, grow your user base and earn more money. To help developers better understand the range of features in Firebase, our Developer Relations team in Sub-Saharan Africa will be hosting the Launchpad Build Event Series in Sub-Saharan Africa The first leg will be held in Lagos (22nd Sep), followed by Nairobi (26th Sep) and finally Cape Town (29th Sep). Launchpad Build is an event series aimed at raising awareness, amongst intermediate and expert developers with an existing Web or Android application, around important tools available today. At this event, engage in talks and hands-on codelabs focused on Firebase Analytics, Firebase Cloud Messaging, Firebase Crash Reporting, Firebase Test Lab, Pirate Metrics, Serverless with Firebase, Tensor Flow and much more. Through the Launchpad Build event, developers will get skills and resources necessary to start using Firebase in their applications. This is a technical event, with multiple sessions on Firebase, facilitated by Googlers and Google Developer Experts from around the world. For further information, visit the Launchpad Build Event Series Sub-Saharan Africa Website. Register now: bit.ly/lpbuildssa2016 This is a limited capacity event and only shortlisted applicants will be contacted by September 16, 2016 with all the necessary details. via Google Developers Blog http://developers.googleblog.com/2016/09/launchpad-build-event-series-sub-saharan-africa.html
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google app deep links, AMP reports & the Possum update appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Wondering what's up with local search rankings lately? Columnist Joy Hawkins has the scoop on a recent local algorithm update that local SEO experts are calling 'Possum.' The post Everything you need to know about Google’s ‘Possum’ algorithm update appeared first on Search Engine...
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Sometimes retaining clients is about more than doing great SEO work. Columnist Derek Edmond explains how to increase your value through improved client relationships. The post 4 ways to improve your value as a strategic SEO partner appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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You may see more or less AMP errors in your Google Search Console report. No need to worry, it was an internal change and does not impact ranking or indexing. The post Google AMP error report in Search Console scans for errors differently now appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Your readers download your mobile app? Well, Google won't be sending them to those deep links if you have AMP URLs active on your web site. The post Google will show AMP URLs before App deep link URLs in mobile results appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/google-will-show-amp-urls-app-deep-link-urls-mobile-results-259204 Posted by Joe.Robison A lot has changed in the five years since I first wrote about what was Google Webmaster Tools, now named Google Search Console. Google has unleashed significantly more data that promises to be extremely useful for SEOs. Since we’ve long since lost sufficient keyword data in Google Analytics, we’ve come to rely on Search Console more than ever. The “Search Analytics” and “Links to Your Site” sections are two of the top features that did not exist in the old Webmaster Tools. While we may never be completely satisfied with Google’s tools and may occasionally call their bluffs, they do release some helpful information (from time to time). To their credit, Google has developed more help docs and support resources to aid Search Console users in locating and fixing errors. Despite the fact that some of this isn’t as fun as creating 10x content or watching which of your keywords have jumped in the rankings, this category of SEO is still extremely important. Looking at it through Portent’s epic visualization of how Internet marketing pieces fit together, fixing crawl errors in Search Console fits squarely into the "infrastructure" piece: If you can develop good habits and practice preventative maintenance, weekly spot checks on crawl errors will be perfectly adequate to keep them under control. However, if you fully ignore these (pesky) errors, things can quickly go from bad to worse. Crawl Errors layoutOne change that has evolved over the last few years is the layout of the Crawl Errors view within Search Console. Search Console is divided into two main sections: Site Errors and URL Errors. Categorizing errors in this way is pretty helpful because there’s a distinct difference between errors at the site level and errors at the page level. Site-level issues can be more catastrophic, with the potential to damage your site’s overall usability. URL errors, on the other hand, are specific to individual pages, and are therefore less urgent. The quickest way to access Crawl Errors is from the dashboard. The main dashboard gives you a quick preview of your site, showing you three of the most important management tools: Crawl Errors, Search Analytics, and Sitemaps. You can get a quick look at your crawl errors from here. Even if you just glance at it daily, you’ll be much further ahead than most site managers. 1. Site ErrorsThe Site Errors section shows you errors from your website as a whole. These are the high-level errors that affect your site in its entirety, so don’t skip these. In the Crawl Errors dashboard, Google will show you these errors for the last 90 days. If you have some type of activity from the last 90 days, your snippet will look like this: If you’ve been 100% error-free for the last 90 days with nothing to show, it will look like this: That’s the goal — to get a “Nice!” from Google. As SEOs we don’t often get any validation from Google, so relish this rare moment of love. How often should you check for site errors?In an ideal world you would log in daily to make sure there are no problems here. It may get monotonous since most days everything is fine, but wouldn’t you kick yourself if you missed some critical site errors? At the extreme minimum, you should check at least every 90 days to look for previous errors so you can keep an eye out for them in the future — but frequent, regular checks are best. We’ll talk about setting up alerts and automating this part later, but just know that this section is critical and you should be 100% error-free in this section every day. There’s no gray area here. A) DNS ErrorsWhat they meanDNS errors are important — and the implications for your website if you have severe versions of these errors is huge. DNS (Domain Name System) errors are the first and most prominent error because if the Googlebot is having DNS issues, it means it can’t connect with your domain via a DNS timeout issue or DNS lookup issue. Your domain is likely hosted with a common domain company, like Namecheap or GoDaddy, or with your web hosting company. Sometimes your domain is hosted separately from your website hosting company, but other times the same company handles both. Are they important?
While Google states that many DNS issues still allow Google to connect to your site, if you’re getting a severe DNS issue you should act immediately. There may be high latency issues that do allow Google to crawl the site, but provide a poor user experience. A DNS issue is extremely important, as it's the first step in accessing your website. You should take swift and violent action if you’re running into DNS issues that prevent Google from connecting to your site in the first place. How to fix
Other tools
B) Server ErrorsWhat they meanA server error most often means that your server is taking too long to respond, and the request times out. The Googlebot that's trying to crawl your site can only wait a certain amount of time to load your website before it gives up. If it takes too long, the Googlebot will stop trying. Server errors are different than DNS errors. A DNS error means the Googlebot can’t even lookup your URL because of DNS issues, while server errors mean that although the Googlebot can connect to your site, it can’t load the page because of server errors. Server errors may happen if your website gets overloaded with too much traffic for the server to handle. To avoid this, make sure your hosting provider can scale up to accommodate sudden bursts of website traffic. Everybody wants their website to go viral, but not everybody is ready! Are they important?Like DNS errors, a server error is extremely urgent. It’s a fundamental error, and harms your site overall. You should take immediate action if you see server errors in Search Console for your site. Making sure the Googlebot can connect to the DNS is an important first step, but you won’t get much further if your website doesn’t actually show up. If you’re running into server errors, the Googlebot won’t be able to find anything to crawl and it will give up after a certain amount of time. How to fixIn the event that your website is running fine at the time you encounter this error, that may mean there were server errors in the past Though this error may have been resolved for now, you should still make some changes to prevent it from happening again. This is Google’s official direction for fixing server errors: “Use Fetch as Google to check if Googlebot can currently crawl your site. If Fetch as Google returns the content of your homepage without problems, you can assume that Google is generally able to access your site properly.” Before you can fix your server errors issue, you need to diagnose specifically which type of server error you’re getting, since there are many types:
Addressing how to fix each of these is beyond the scope of this article, but you should reference Google Search Console help to diagnose specific errors. C) Robots failureA Robots failure means that the Googlebot cannot retrieve your robots.txt file, located at [yourdomain.com]/robots.txt. What they meanOne of the most surprising things about a robots.txt file is that it’s only necessary if you don’t want Google to crawl certain pages. From Search Console help, Google states: “You need a robots.txt file only if your site includes content that you don't want search engines to index. If you want search engines to index everything in your site, you don't need a robots.txt file — not even an empty one. If you don't have a robots.txt file, your server will return a 404 when Googlebot requests it, and we will continue to crawl your site. No problem.” Are they important?This is a fairly important issue. For smaller, more static websites without many recent changes or new pages, it’s not particularly urgent. But the issue should still be fixed. If your site is publishing or changing new content daily, however, this is an urgent issue. If the Googlebot cannot load your robots.txt, it’s not crawling your website, and it’s not indexing your new pages and changes. How to fixEnsure that your robots.txt file is properly configured. Double-check which pages you’re instructing the Googlebot to not crawl, as all others will be crawled by default. Triple-check the all-powerful line of “Disallow: /” and ensure that line DOES NOT exist unless for some reason you do not want your website to appear in Google search results. If your file seems to be in order and you’re still receiving errors, use a server header checker tool to see if your file is returning a 200 or 404 error. What’s interesting about this issue is that it’s better to have no robots.txt at all than to have one that’s improperly configured. If you have none at all, Google will crawl your site as usual. If you have one returning errors, Google will stop crawling until you fix this file. For being only a few lines of text, the robots.txt file can have catastrophic consequences for your website. Make sure you’re checking it early and often. 2. URL ErrorsURL errors are different from site errors because they only affect specific pages on your site, not your website as a whole. Google Search Console will show you the top URL errors per category — desktop, smartphone, and feature phone. For large sites, this may not be enough data to show all the errors, but for the majority of sites this will capture all known problems. Tip: Going crazy with the amount of errors? Mark all as fixed. Many site owners have run into the issue of seeing a large number of URL errors and getting freaked out. The important thing to remember is a) Google ranks the most important errors first and b) some of these errors may already be resolved. If you’ve made some drastic changes to your site to fix errors, or believe a lot of the URL errors are no longer happening, one tactic to employ is marking all errors as fixed and checking back up on them in a few days. When you do this, your errors will be cleared out of the dashboard for now, but Google will bring the errors back the next time it crawls your site over the next few days. If you had truly fixed these errors in the past, they won’t show up again. If the errors still exist, you’ll know that these are still affecting your site. A) Soft 404A soft 404 error is when a page displays as 200 (found) when it should display as 404 (not found). What they meanJust because your 404 page looks like a 404 page doesn’t mean it actually is one. The user-visible aspect of a 404 page is the content of the page. The visible message should let users know the page they requested is gone. Often, site owners will have a helpful list of related links the users should visit or a funny 404 response. The flipside of a 404 page is the crawler-visible response. The header HTTP response code should be 404 (not found) or 410 (gone). A quick refresher on how HTTP requests and responses look: If you're returning a 404 page and it's listed as a Soft 404, it means that the header HTTP response code does not return the 404 (not found) response code. Google recommends “that you always return a 404 (not found) or a 410 (gone) response code in response to a request for a non-existing page.” Another situation in which soft 404 errors may show up is if you have pages that are 301 redirecting to non-related pages, such as the home page. Google doesn’t seem to explicitly state where the line is drawn on this, only making mention of it in vague terms. Officially, Google says this about soft 404s: “Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic.” Although this gives us some direction, it’s unclear when it’s appropriate to redirect an expired page to the home page and when it’s not. In practice, from my own experience, if you're redirecting large amounts of pages to the home page, Google can interpret those redirected URLs as soft 404s rather than true 301 redirects. Conversely, if you were to redirect an old page to a closely related page instead, it's unlikely that you'd trigger the soft 404 warning in the same way. Are they important?If the pages listed as soft 404 errors aren't critical pages and you're not eating up your crawl budget by having some soft 404 errors, these aren't an urgent item to fix. If you have crucial pages on your site listed as soft 404s, you’ll want to take action to fix those. Important product, category, or lead gen pages shouldn't be listed as soft 404s if they're live pages. Pay special attention to pages critical to your site’s moneymaking ability. If you have a large amount of soft 404 errors relative to the total number of pages on your site, you should take swift action. You can be eating up your (precious?) Googlebot crawl budget by allowing these soft 404 errors to exist. How to fixFor pages that no longer exist:
For pages that are live pages, and are not supposed to be a soft 404:
Soft 404s are strange errors. They lead to a lot of confusion because they tend to be a strange hybrid of 404 and normal pages, and what is causing them isn't always clear. Ensure the most critical pages on your site aren't throwing soft 404 errors, and you’re off to a good start! B) 404A 404 error means that the Googlebot tried to crawl a page that doesn’t exist on your site. Googlebot finds 404 pages when other sites or pages link to that non-existent page. What they mean404 errors are probably the most misunderstood crawl error. Whether it’s an intermediate SEO or the company CEO, the most common reaction is fear and loathing of 404 errors. Google clearly states in their guidelines: “Generally, 404 errors don't affect your site's ranking in Google, so you can safely ignore them.” I’ll be the first to admit that “you can safely ignore them” is a pretty misleading statement for beginners. No — you cannot ignore them if they are 404 errors for crucial pages on your site. (Google does practice what it preaches, in this regard — going to google.com/searchconsole returns a 404 instead of a helpful redirect to google.com/webmasters) Distinguishing between times when you can ignore an error and when you’ll need to stay late at the office to fix something comes from deep review and experience, but Rand offered some timeless advice on 404s back in 2009: “When faced with 404s, my thinking is that unless the page: The hard work comes in deciding what qualifies as important external links and substantive quantity of traffic for your particular URL on your particular site. Annie Cushing also prefers Rand’s method, and recommends: “Two of the most important metrics to look at are backlinks to make sure you don’t lose the most valuable links and total landing page visits in your analytics software. You may have others, like looking at social metrics. Whatever you decide those metrics to be, you want to export them all from your tools du jour and wed them in Excel.” One other thing to consider not mentioned above is offline marketing campaigns, podcasts, and other media that use memorable tracking URLs. It could be that your new magazine ad doesn’t come out until next month, and the marketing department forgot to tell you about an unimportant-looking URL (example.com/offer-20) that’s about to be plastered in tens thousands of magazines. Another reason for cross-department synergy. Are they important?This is probably one of the trickiest and simplest problems of all errors. The vast quantity of 404s that many medium to large sites accumulate is enough to deter action. 404 errors are very urgent if important pages on your site are showing up as 404s. Conversely, like Google says, if a page is long gone and doesn’t meet our quality criteria above, let it be. As painful as it might be to see hundreds of errors in your Search Console, you just have to ignore them. Unless you get to the root of the problem, they’ll continue showing up. How to fix 404 errorsIf your important page is showing up as a 404 and you don’t want it to be, take these steps:
In short, if your page is dead, make the page live again. If you don’t want that page live, 301 redirect it to the correct page. How to stop old 404s from showing up in your crawl errors reportIf your 404 error URL is meant to be long gone, let it die. Just ignore it, as Google recommends. But to prevent it from showing up in your crawl errors report, you’ll need to do a few more things. As yet another indication of the power of links, Google will only show the 404 errors in the first place if your site or an external website is linking to the 404 page. In other words, if I type in your-website-name.com/unicorn-boogers, it won’t show up in your crawl errors dashboard unless I also link to it from my website. To find the links to your 404 page, go to your Crawl Errors > URL Errors section: Then click on the URL you want to fix: Search your page for the link. It’s often faster to view the source code of your page and find the link in question there: It’s painstaking work, but if you really want to stop old 404s from showing up in your dashboard, you’ll have to remove the links to that page from every page linking to it. Even other websites. What’s really fun (not) is if you’re getting links pointed to your URL from old sitemaps. You’ll have to let those old sitemaps 404 in order to totally remove them. Don’t redirect them to your live sitemap. C) Access deniedAccess denied means Googlebot can’t crawl the page. Unlike a 404, Googlebot is prevented from crawling the page in the first place. What they meanAccess denied errors commonly block the Googlebot through these methods:
Are they important?Similar to soft 404s and 404 errors, if the pages being blocked are important for Google to crawl and index, you should take immediate action. If you don’t want this page to be crawled and indexed, you can safely ignore the access denied errors. How to fixTo fix access denied errors, you’ll need to remove the element that's blocking the Googlebot's access:
While not as common as 404 errors, access denied issues can still harm your site's ranking ability if the wrong pages are blocked. Be sure to keep an eye on these errors and rapidly fix any urgent issues. D) Not followedWhat they meanNot to be confused with a “nofollow” link directive, a “not followed” error means that Google couldn’t follow that particular URL. Most often these errors come about from Google running into issues with Flash, Javascript, or redirects. Are they important?If you’re dealing with not followed issues on a high-priority URL, then yes, these are important. If your issues are stemming from old URLs that are no longer active, or from parameters that aren't indexed and just an extra feature, the priority level on these is lower — but you should still analyze them. How to fixGoogle identifies the following as features that the Googlebot and other search engines may have trouble crawling:
Use either the Lynx text browser or the Fetch as Google tool, using Fetch and Render, to view the site as Google would. You can also use a Chrome add-on such as User-Agent Switcher to mimic Googlebot as you browse pages. If, as the Googlebot, you’re not seeing the pages load or not seeing important content on the page because of some of the above technologies, then you've found your issue. Without visible content and links to crawl on the page, some URLs can’t be followed. Be sure to dig in further and diagnose the issue to fix. For parameter crawling issues, be sure to review how Google is currently handling your parameters. Specify changes in the URL Parameters tool if you want Google to treat your parameters differently. For not followed issues related to redirects, be sure to fix any of the following that apply:
Google used to include more detail on the Not Followed section, but as Vanessa Fox detailed in this post, a lot of extra data may be available in the Search Console API. Other tools
E) Server errors & DNS errorsUnder URL errors, Google again lists server errors and DNS errors, the same sections in the Site Errors report. Google's direction is to handle these in the same way you would handle the site errors level of the server and DNS errors, so refer to those two sections above. They would differ in the URL errors section if the errors were only affecting individual URLs and not the site as a whole. If you have isolated configurations for individual URLs, such as minisites or a different configuration for certain URLs on your domain, they could show up here. Now that you’re the expert on these URL errors, I’ve created this handy URL error table that you can print out and tape to your desktop or bathroom mirror. ConclusionI get it — some of this technical SEO stuff can bore you to tears. Nobody wants to individually inspect seemingly unimportant URL errors, or conversely, have a panic attack seeing thousands of errors on your site. With experience and repetition, however, you will gain the mental muscle memory of knowing how to react to the errors: which are important and which can be safely ignored. It’ll be second nature pretty soon. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read up on Google’s official documentation for Search Console, and keep these URLs handy for future questions:
We're simply covering the Crawl Errors section of Search Console. Search Console is a data beast on its own, so for further reading on how to make best use of this tool in its entirety, check out these other guides:
Google has generously given us one of the most powerful (and free!) tools for diagnosing website errors. Not only will fixing these errors help you improve your rankings in Google, they help provide a better user experience to your visitors, and help meet your business goals faster. Your turn: What crawl errors issues and wins have you experienced using Google Search Console? Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4462399
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: AMP live in Google, Bing partners with CBS & EU copyright appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/searchcap-amp-live-google-bing-partners-cbs-eu-copyright-259154
We’re only six weeks away from MarTech Europe in London, November 1-2, and I’m thrilled with the program — an incredible roster of speakers bringing deep insights and experience across the intersecting fields of marketing, technology, and management. I’m excited to give you a preview of what the...
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/martech-europe-preview-heres-expect-6-weeks-259127
The deal is aimed at boosting mobile search volume and share for the Bing network. The post Bing partners with CBS Interactive in syndication deal appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/bing-ads-cbs-interactive-syndication-259124
Google reiterated that the move does not include a rankings change. The post AMP — Accelerated Mobile Pages — begin global rollout in Google mobile search results appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/amp-live-in-google-259109
In this helpful how-to, columnist Todd Saunders explains how to structure your AdWords account so as to glean useful insights about your target audience. The post The junior data scientist’s guide to AdWords search campaign structure: how to mine hidden gems for huge wins appeared first on...
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/junior-data-scientists-guide-adwords-search-campaign-structrure-mine-hidden-gems-huge-wins-258789
Columnist Ryan Shelley believes that good long-tail keyword targeting is all about knowing your audience -- something Netflix excels at. The post What Netflix can teach us about long-tail keyword research appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/netflix-can-teach-us-long-tail-keyword-research-258556 |
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