SEO

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

Last month, Google significantly revamped the "Top Search Queries" section of Webmaster Tools which put some very interesting data at the fingertips of webmasters and search marketers.

Google are today rolling out the first major overhaul to the appearance of their search engine  for a number of years.

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.

Google's newly launched personalised search has attracted little fanfare outside the SEO community, however it

Google have made an announcement which has immense implications for search.

Following Google's recent announcement that they will evaluate site/page

"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?

The Google blog announced today a new approach to finding related images called "image swirl".

(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.

Receptional's MD, Dixon Jones, will be speaking at the 4th annual International Search Summit which takes place at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, London on November 19th.

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.

Earlier this month, Google announced an "infrastructure" update via their Webmaster Central Blog, also providing a link to a test server where users can see changes in action.

Yahoo have announced today the launch of a new note-taking tool for web searches called "Search Pad", which will create notes if users are conducting research.

Leading search engine, Google feared it was under attack when news first broke over the death of pop icon Michael Jackson.

All websites have content. The volume and quality of their website content writing is what separates the good sites from the bad. Improving your existing content and/ or adding new, original, high caliber, informative and concise content to your site has many benefits.

Do Internet Marketing Companies seem to think they KNOW something that you don't? If so - sorry about that. You happen to have stumbledupon a little test we are running.

Receptional are one of the UK's oldest online marketing companies, and since we started providing commercial SEO services in 1999 we've seen dozens of providers come and go - and hundreds of companies enter the marketplace offering paid search engine optimisation.

"PUBCON" is, to many people, where this industry all began. It was a meeting of webmasters at a pub in Holborn, London called the Cittie of Yorke, nearly a decade ago. Receptional was there.

If a website is a body then the content of the site is surely the heart & circulatory system.

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

This post is a little test - which means this post is written and published on this page in two parts.

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.