During some research in Google, I noticed how Google is presenting additional information about the auto-completed entity your are searching for. An example for the partial query [hilton london]:
Distinguishing entities in Google auto-complete
What can go wrong when migrating a website to HTTPS?
Today Google finally came with a clear statement about HTTPS: HTTPS as a ranking signal. So what will happen in the upcoming months is that lot’s of companies are going to buy some SSL certificates and migrate their website to a new domain. Sounbds easy, but in practice this is a complicate challenge which will be different for every websites.
Never forget: there will be a temporary traffic loss from organic traffic, even when everything is properly executed. Be prepared for that, add some extra AdWords budget for example to make sure sales are not decreasing to much. The biggest risk of not doing a migration properly is traffic loss over a longer period instead of just a temporary loss.
These SEO Chrome extensions have access to your (browser) data
Today my fellow SEO, Sander Tamaëla pointed out on Twitter that the popular Chrome extension Webpage Screenshot (4 million downloads according to their website) is sending all kinds of data to their servers, like the visited pages, session IDs, social connections etcetera:
Webpage Screenshot extension voor Chrome: dat ding post allerlei info naar zijn servers, oa: sessie ID’s,bezochte pagina,social connections
— Sander Tamaëla (@tamaela) 5 augustus 2014
This made me curious, since I was aware of the possibilities of tracking people’s behaviour by browsers add-ons like toolbars and extensions but I never heard anyone about a popular Chrome extensions. I’m not that paranoia and mostly aware of what I’m doing online, but I wanted to know how Google Chrome is dealing with plugin acception and how it communicates about these permissions given once you install an extension.
How to get your author photo back in the SERPs
It is two weeks ago since John Mueller announced: we’re simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results. Google is not showing the author photo’s and circle count in the SERPs anymore. This is what changed in the SERPs:
How do you get those pictures back?
There is another rich snippet which gives you the possibility to add a picture to the SERPs: the recipe snippet! All the information can be found in Google’s documentation: Recipe rich snippet documentation. An example:
So you just add two of the required mark up data from this list of four characteristics:
- photo
- prepTime, cookTime, totalTime, or ingredients
- calories
- review
This means the following code is enough to implement, just use your blog title as the Name element, use your profile photo as the Photo element and reviews can be added everywhere:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Recipe" >
<h1 itemprop="name">This is my blog title</h1>
<img itemprop="photo" src="author-photo.jpg" />
<span itemprop="review" itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Review-aggregate">
<span itemprop="rating">4.0</span> stars based on
<span itemprop="count">35</span> reviews
</span>
</div>
Disclaimer: this tactic is not allowed by Google, so it could harm your other rich snippets if Google decides your spamming their SERPs with irrelevant rich snippet additions. In most cases they will removed all your snippets, it will not affect your rankings.
Taming The Hummingbird – PMI Berlin
Performance Marketing Insights in Berlin has been a great experience this week. Always good to meet with industry friends and visit a conference which is not only focused on Search. Below you can find my slides:
Taming The Hummingbird – PMI Berlin
Hummingbird is all about processing words, texts, content. With Hummingbird Google became better in building relations between words and based on that rewrite queries to be able to query their index more effectively. A lot of confusion is made with the Knowlegde Graph cards in all their representations. In Europe only English queries are fully integrated, which shows Google is not familiar enough with smaller languages like Nordic languages, Dutch etc. The combination of Hummingbird (parsing queries) and the Knowlegde graph (making use of external datasources like DBpedia, Freebase and some smaller ones) will be key in future search. Invest some time in getting familiar with language processing and entity linking to understand the principles behind the additions Google is building at the moment.
