Andy Langton's blog

Browsing Google Product listings recently, I noticed that the seller ratings seemed much higher than you would expect based on the breakdown of reviews provided.

A soft 404 is basically an error page with the technical part wrong (the error code).

For those frustrated with recent Google user interface changes, here’s a quick tip to “revert” to an interface closer to Google’s previous one, with less whitespace and easier access to cached link

This is one for the SEO techies and link builders. Short of time? The Google Verbatim option appears to strip the relevance usually provided by (some?) link anchor text.

If you're an advanced Google searcher, then you're likely to be familiar with the plus operator. If you're not, here's the quick explanation:

As announced earlier this year, Google's experimental site Google Labs has shut down today.

As a T Mobile customer with an "unlimited" internet plan, I'm more than a little disappointed

I noticed a sneaky world cup related logo appearing on Google this morning - not in the usual location for many of the Google doodles, but (as has happened with previous sketches) within the page l

As any self-respecting SEO does, I make an effort to canonicalise all URLs that I deal with. As a preference, this is always with a server-side redirect, with a 301 status code.

"Boilerplate" text is repeated generic text of the kind that search engines understandably don't like. Obvious examples are copyright statements and "placeholder" text on in-development pages. But can you rank pages that contain purely this type of unhelpful text?

(Via WebmasterWorld) Google are currently running a limited-user test on a new SERP feature - instead of the result URL displayed in g

Via SERoundtable I got a heads up on something going wrong with Google results for its own sites. If you search (for instance) for Google Ireland, you'll actually get google.nz (Google New Zealand) as the top result. I tested 162 regional Google sites for their ranking and, shockingly, in 61% of cases Google was unable to return the correct regional site in its own results.

There's a pervading theme in some sections of the web development community to slate SEO, and every 6-12 months, there's a flood of blog posts on the matter. So what's all the fuss about?

Most SEOs and many casual searchers will have noticed something Google do when you search, often called query expansion or query rewriting. At its best, this is a useful feature that overcomes poorly contructed or ambiguous search queries. At worst it is a major annoyance, returning imprecise and irrelevant results for well-crafted and precise search keywords.

My colleague, Nick Andrews pointed out to me that one of the largest sites in the UK car industry recently updated its design - Auto Trader. Of course, being an SEO type, I couldn't help but cast a professional eye over it, to see how well they'd incorporated search optimisation techniques. A new design or development should be the perfect opportunity to embed best practice SEO, and gain additional traffic as well as improving user experience. I say should, because it seems to have gone horribly wrong on the on-page side in this instance.

At the moment, I'm seeing some strange quirks in Google's sitelinks display, most noticeably, odd replacement of English characters with (at a guess) Japanese characters, e.g.

This post is the first part of a series where we will be providing hands-on information as to how an SEO can get efficient, actionable web analytics data using the Yahoo Web Anal

Around 9 months ago Google launched Chrome, their browser akin to Firefox & Internet Explorer.

The over-riding question is why you do you want backlink data? Let's assume the reason is because you want better performance in organic search - probably Google. The question then becomes, how do I find backlinks that increase performance in Google?

It's often hard to do away with personal bias when evaluating the quality of search results across different search engines

Google's Webmaster Tools interface has undergone a big change today with a new visual design and recategorisation of many of the tools

Good news today for any site-owners who have failed to conform to Google's guidelines and have submitted a reconsideration request.