Category: google

In true “googley” fashion, the search giant commemorates its anniversary with a doodle highlighting key events of the past 20 years. Google’s exact “birthday” remains a mystery, but the company officially lists September 27, 1998 as the day the company began. Today it is celebrating the occasion with an animated doodle that spotlights notable events from each of the 20 years since then. It’s an interesting look back in time, and for someone who was present at Google’s “birth,” a remarkable reminder of how much has changed in two decades.…

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Right before I went offline on Tuesday night, Apple approved a new version of the Google Maps app for iOS that added CarPlay support. This is something I’ve been waiting for since March 2016, when I got my new car with Apple CarPlay. Now that it is out, I am happy but a bit underwhelmed. I installed it and drove home from work using it and while it was the first time I was using Google Maps with the new CarPlay user interface, it was a bit lacking of what…

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Less than 20 minutes ago, the whopping news broke that the European Union has fined Google $5 billion €4,34 bn over antitrust and competitive laws around Android. Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition wrote on Twitter that it is time Google stop these practices and this will make them. She wrote: The European Commission ordered Google to end the illegal practices within 90 days or face additional penalties of up to 5 percent of parent Alphabet’s average daily worldwide turnover. Google currently has $102.88B in cash on hand, so…

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I am seeing super early signs of a Google search algorithm update brewing right now. There is some early limited chatter as of early this morning in the forums and on social media. Some of the automated tracking tools also are picking up changes, while some are not. So it is super early but something might be brewing – we should know more within 24 hours or so. Are you seeing any changes as of around 5am EDT this morning in terms of your Google organic traffic and/or keyword rankings?…

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Exclusive: The latest machine learning-powered update to close variants means exact match will match to the intent of the query. Google’s exact match keyword targeting used to mean one thing: the keyword had to match exactly whatever query the searcher used. Then close variants came into the mix, and that definition has steadily morphed over the past few years. First including plurals, misspellings and other similar variants came in 2014 and then different word order and function words took hold in 2017. Now phase three is here. On Thursday, Google…

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VentureBeat reports Google is now speeding up some search queries by two-times by using Service Workers, a script that your browser runs in the background. Google said this currently only works on Chrome for Android running version 62 or up. Dion Almaer, Google director of engineering, and Ben Galbraith, Google senior director of product said last week at Pluralsight Live in Salt Lake City, Utah that this was the “largest deployment of Service Worker probably out.” They were able to get Service Worker to “give you results sometimes twice as fast”…

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I know Google has said that with the Google Medic Update that started around August 1st that there is “no fix.” Google just wants you to make your site better and over time, you might be rewarded. But SEOs and those impacted in a negative way want to know what they can do to recover. While I personally cannot say you need to remove bad links or improve your on page SEO, I decided to run the survey data through a toolset named Cora that has a reputation of going…

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Google has confirmed that the Google core algorithm update that we named the Medic Update is now fully rolled out. But the SEO community noticed a lot of fluctuations and ranking changes yesterday as well. Danny Sullivan confirmed on Twitter for me that the update is complete, despite the industry noticing a lot of fluctuations in the Google search results yesterday. Danny said the broad August 1st algorithm update is done but “that said, we always have changes that happen, both broad and more specific.” There was indeed significant chatter…

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Google has announced that the new beta Google Search Console is now getting the link report. Google said they are moving the Links to your site and Internal Links report from the old interface into the new Google Search Console under a single Links report. I do not see it rolled out yet but it should be live soon, Google says. You will be able to access the link report, as I covered at Search Engine Land, over at https://search.google.com/search-console/links when it is rolled out – but that might take…

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Today the search giant ranks as the world’s third most valuable company. Despite concerns that going public might endanger Google’s famously quirky but intensely focused culture, the company’s initial public offering (IPO) went forward on August 19, 2004. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share, valuing the company at more than $23 billion. Fourteen years later, Google parent company Alphabet’s market cap is just over $766 billion, behind only Apple ($927 billion) and Amazon ($778 billion). The company was just five years old at the…

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