Google’s web page structure algorithm launches
In 2012, Google introduced it might penalize websites with pages that had been top-heavy with adverts.
The web page structure algorithm replace took direct goal at any web site with pages the place content material was buried underneath tons of adverts.
According to Google:
If you click on on a web site and the a part of the web site you see first both doesn’t have numerous seen content material above-the-fold or dedicates a big fraction of the positioning’s preliminary display screen actual property to adverts, that’s not an excellent person expertise. Such websites could not rank as extremely going ahead.
Google’s Matt Cutts, Page structure algorithm enchancment
On the identical day, a message from Google’s AdSense workforce went out, encouraging some publishers so as to add extra adverts to their websites.

Isn’t it ironic.
Read all about it in: The Top Heavy Update: Pages with too many adverts above the fold now penalized by Google’s “Page Layout” algorithm.
Also on at the present time
Google explains the way it deduplicates Top Stories from foremost search outcomes
2022: Google stated it deduplicates a hyperlink from its foremost net outcomes if that very same hyperlink seems within the first Top Stories slot, as long as the Top Stories part seems earlier than the principle net outcomes.
Google recipe markup now requires particular instances, no extra time ranges
2022: Google eliminated all references to utilizing time ranges within the recipe schema markup assist paperwork.
Marketers, Google agree that proposed ‘surveillance promoting’ ban goes too far
2022: The laws would have been a game-changer for each digital marketer who advertises on Google, Facebook and different promoting platforms.
Google Ads’ up to date Experiments web page sheds marketing campaign drafts and provides experiment sync
2022: Advertisers not needed to create a separate marketing campaign draft and adjustments made to the unique marketing campaign are robotically synced to the experiment as nicely.
Google heightens grownup advert coverage enforcement after Reuters finds illicit adverts
2022: Ads for intercourse toys, liquor and high-risk investments had been found in Google’s search outcomes, which violated the corporate’s makes an attempt to adjust to UK rules.
Google crawl stats report now exhibiting extra crawls
2021: This was only a reporting change and any change seen in crawling was not reflective of any change in search outcomes.
DuckDuckGo’s give attention to privacy-minded customers pushes it previous 100 million searches in a single day
2021: DuckDuckGo served 102,251,307 search queries for the primary time, breaking previous the 100 million question milestone.
Video: Phillip Thune on discovering good writers and writing good content material
2021: In this installment of Barry Schwartz’s vlog sequence, he additionally chatted with Thune about how SEOs modified how they approached content material improvement after Panda and Penguin.
Search in Pics: A pig visits Google, massive teddy bear & a damaged Google signal
2018: The newest photographs culled from the online, exhibiting what individuals eat on the search engine firms, how they play, who they meet, the place they converse, what toys they’ve and extra.
Matt Cutts formally resigns from Google
2017: Cutts grew to become the brand new director of engineering on the US Digital Service. He had been on depart with Google since 2014.
Study exhibits search phrases with the very worst (and finest) click-through charges
2017: Study examined the highest 50 key phrase “stems” to seek out what phrases helped spur clicks and, extra importantly, what phrases didn’t.
DuckDuckGo surpasses 10 billion searches, with 4 billion occurring in 2016 alone
2017: The search engine stated 4 billion of these searches occurred in 2016.
Google Revamps Their Webmasters Portal With Clean New Slick Design & Resources
2016: The useful resource bought a brand new design, higher group and three new options (webmaster troubleshooter, standard assets, occasion calendar).
Google Expandable PLA View Test Displays 16 Product Listing Ads
2016: When expanded, PLAs muscled out different adverts and natural listings to take over a lot of the above-the-fold actual property.
You Can Now Install Android Apps Directly From Google’s Search Results
2016: Bypassing the necessity to go to the Google Play retailer.
Google Sending Mobile Usability Warnings To Huge Number Of Webmasters
2015: These notifications warned there have been crucial cell usability errors on 100% of the pages on the positioning and thus the pages can be “displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone customers.”
Bing-Yahoo Paid Search Share Rises For Two Consecutive Quarters [IgnitionOne]
2015: Advertisers elevated spending by 31% year-over-year on the Yahoo Bing Network (via the Bing Ads platform). Spending on Google AdWords rose by 5%.
Yahoo Search Testing Google’s Search Results Design?
2015: The complete web page appeared proper out of Google’s search outcomes design.
Google’s 2015 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Logo Designed By Ekua Holmes
2015: The Doodle featured Martin Luther King, Jr. in locked arms with fellow civil rights activists with the American flag within the background.
Google: Paid Clicks Up 34% While Cost Per Click Down 8% YoY
2012: More individuals had been clicking on adverts, however these clicks had been costing advertisers much less cash per click on.
Nokia Now “Powering” Bing Maps
2012: Nokia branding would quickly be exhibiting up on Bing Maps for cell.
Google Maps Now Highlighting Borders Of Cities, Postal Codes & More
2012: Google Maps added a characteristic the place it might spotlight in a pink shade the borders of a metropolis, postal code or different borders primarily based in your search.
How To Track U.S. Congress Members’ Tweets
2012: PolitickerUSA allow you to entry the continuous real-time stream of tweets from Senators, Reps, President Obama, governors, and some of the Republican presidential candidates.
Study: Google “Favors” Itself Only 19% Of The Time
2011: “Even if Google listed itself first for [email] … is it actually anti-competitive when its competitor is prominently listed in second place? Wouldn’t it actually be extra of a priority if Google didn’t checklist its rivals in any respect?”
Google Makes Modest Comeback In China
2011: 23.1% of Chinese search customers wished Google.
Deconstructing “Search Neutrality”
2011: In an educational article, an NYU affiliate legislation professor intently examined and deconstructed the arguments behind the thought of search neutrality.
Google Knol Still Alive & Fixed, But Questions Linger About Its Future
2011: Google fastened a bug that made Knol appear like a ghost city.
Google Exposes Maps Options With New Widget Display
2011: Google formally launched a brand new Google Maps show that made the totally different viewing choices rather more seen.
search engine optimisation Gets Dissed by CBS TV Series “The Good Wife”
2011: Let the courtroom report present, for the training of “The Good Wife” writers, and good residents in all places – when “search engine optimisation” or search engine marketing is carried out in line with the perfect practices and tips set forth by main serps, then search engine optimisation is taken into account to be a helpful, efficient and authorized method for driving guests to a web site.
Google Opens Up Downloads To Iran But Blocks Iranian Government
2011: After years of not permitting these in Iran to obtain their software program, Google opened up downloads of their Google Earth, Picasa and Chrome functions.
Search & The 2011 Sundance Film Festival
2011: Bing was the official search engine of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival web site, and YouTube had two particular channels for the occasion.
Real-Time Search Engine Collecta Hits Pause
2011: The firm took “a step again” to retool its method.
Google’s Fourth Doodle 4 Google Competition Announced
2011: “What I’d love to do sometime…”
Google’s Paul Cézanne Logo
2011: The brand was first created as an actual oil portray by a Googler after which digitized.
Google Changes How It Handles Synonyms
2010: Rather than solely bolding direct variants of phrases (like “photographs” for “footage”), Google “prolonged this to phrases that our algorithms very confidently assume imply the identical factor, even when they’re spelled nothing like the unique time period.”
Bing Updates Autosuggest With News & Trending Queries
2010: Bing added “breaking information and sizzling trending queries” into autosuggest, with updates being pushed out each quarter-hour.
Microsoft Complies With EU Demand, First To Cut Data Retention To Six Months
2010: Microsoft grew to become the primary of the key serps to conform to the European Union’s demand that information retention be lower to 6 months.
Yahoo Search Marketing Launches New Network Distribution & Import Campaigns
2010: The new community distribution and import campaigns went stay for Yahoo advertisers.
Can Google Tell Us What Men and Women Are REALLY Thinking?
2010: What Google Suggest needed to say about what women and men had been actually pondering.
Google New York Expanding
2010: Google was increasing its already humongous New York workplace by 57,000 sq. ft.
Google Testing “Preferred Sites” Option In Search Preferences
2009: Users who had been on this experiment might add an inventory of web sites of their search preferences web page as their “most well-liked websites.”
Report: Search Spending Off 8% In This fall
2009: Advertisers who spent lower than $50,000 on search adverts lower their spending by 23% year-over-year, whereas advertisers that spent greater than $200,000 on search per thirty days lower spending by 9% throughout that point.
No Surprise: IAA Survey Shows Concern Over Google Market Dominance
2009: 65% stated there was one dominant participant within the on-line advert market and that there have been “restricted selections and value choices for on-line advertisers.”
Google Quietly Drops iPhone Optimized iGoogle Page
2009: Google stated the rationale they dropped the iPhone model was as a result of they “wish to make sure you’ll all see the identical model” of the iGoogle cell web page.
Live Search News Adds Email Alerts
2009: You might get these alerts by way of e mail both as soon as a day, twice a day or weekly and you can subscribe by part or by search phrase.
Some Parallels Between Obama And Yahoo’s Carol Bartz
2009: Both Barack Obama and incoming Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had been taking cost of their respective administrations at instances of disaster.
GDrive: It’s Alive! — Or So It Appears
2009: Renewed buzz and hypothesis.
Google & Others Martin Luther King Jr.’s Logos
2009: How the major search engines commemorated Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Checking Out Allcheckin Travel Search
2007: Some ideas on a journey search different.
Yahoo Introduces Personal Finance Site
2007: This new sub-site provided “free instruments and how-to guides for tax planning, budgeting, actual property planning, and saving for school and retirement.”
Google Book Search To Add Chinese Books
2007: The preliminary launch can be about 1,000 books, with the hope of getting 3,000 guide titles in Google Book Search by 12 months’s finish.
Search Engines’ Test Beds
2007: An overview of the alternative ways serps like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com used “spin off” websites to check new options.
Yahoo Tells Belgian Newspapers They Did Nothing Wrong
2007: Yahoo stated they didn’t violate any copyright legal guidelines for “publishing snippets and hyperlinks” to their newspapers.
Google, Microsoft & Yahoo To Develop NGO Conduct Code
2007: This transfer was to assist the businesses’ ventures into China and assist paint a greater image for the search giants within the public view.
Yahoo Debuts U.S. Schools Search Tool
2007: Results had been plotted on a map, and you can kind by faculty district, distance from a selected location, grade stage, or faculty sort (public, personal, constitution).
Looksmart’s Furl Gets A Facelift
2007: Looksmart additionally made it simpler to create and discover matters to assist manage saved net pages, and improved the browser buttons and toolbar used to save lots of pages.
Google Picks North Carolina For Server Farm
2007: Google was anticipated to spend about $600 million on their new information middle and make use of 210 individuals.
From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and haven’t been up to date since publishing, except famous. Opinions expressed in these articles are these of the creator and never essentially Search Engine Land.
< January 18 | Search Marketing History | January 20 >
New on Search Engine Land