Google+ Local Pages Not Showing Categories

Yet another Google Local bug to report.

Jade Wang from Google said in a Google Places Help thread there are confirmed reports on the categories not showing up on Google+ Local pages.

Jade explained, "It seems that categories are not appearing on some local Google+ pages. (Or, relatedly, some categories are showing, and some are not.)"

She said Google's engineers are working on fixing it but she does not have an estimated time for a fix.

She said there may be a work around to get them to work. She said:

Poke/Null Edit:

- Go into your dashboard to edit your page.

- Submit the edit without changing anything. 

MapMaker:

- Find your location on mapmaker.google.com 

- Edit -> Select a Place, then click where your business is located

- Edit -> Edit this place

- add your desired category if it's not already there, Submit

Please note -- MapMaker edits need to go through review (just like all other edits) before going live.

Forum discussion at Google Places Help.

Google: A Manual Penalty Might Not Result In Major Ranking Decline

Typically, if you get a penalty and your rankings drop, you assume when the penalty is lifted your rankings return.

Often that is not the case, especially when it comes to link penalties.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has two statements from John Mueller from Google which explains why that may be the case.

First let me quote his post:

The primary manual action that is affecting your site is that these unnatural links are being ignored. This is more or less in line with the spreadsheet that you have submitted, and would generally not be affecting the other links to your site. That said, while these things may have been counting for your site in the past, they no longer are -- so it's possible that you'd see some effect in your site's crawling, indexing, and ranking. Past that, keep in mind that the manual action here might not be the strongest element affecting your site's performance, we use over 200 factors in our crawling, indexing, and ranking, and regularly announce updates. My recommendation would be to not focus so much on this specific manual action, but instead to work to make sure that your site (and how it interacts with users and the rest of the web) is the best it can possibly be.

Now let's pull out two clauses:

(1) The primary manual action that is affecting your site is that these unnatural links are being ignored. Yes, when links that were once counted in your ranking are no longer counted and never will be counted in the future, that will have an impact on your rankings for a long time.

(2) Keep in mind that the manual action here might not be the strongest element affecting your site's performance, we use over 200 factors... Now this statement is more interesting. John is saying that a manual action might not be the reason his rankings are not doing well in Google.

John is saying that even if he didn't have a manual action his rankings still probably wouldn't be all that great.

I love the transparency in this post.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google EMD Update: Exact Match Domains No Longer Rank As Well

Late Friday afternoon, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, dropped a bomb on some webmasters and SEOs.

He announced on Twitter that Google is going after "low quality" exact match domains (EMD) to ensure they do not rank well in the Google search results. Matt said this algorithm update only impacts 0.6% of English-US queries.

He has two tweets on this, here they are:

Matt Cutts

• ✔

@mattcutts

Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality "exact-match" domains in search results.

29 Sep 12

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Matt Cutts

• ✔

@mattcutts

New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.

29 Sep 12

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Honestly, I am a bit surprised it took Google so long to do this. I mean, Matt said publicly that Google will look into exact match domains almost two years ago. I would have thought Google would have done something shortly after. Maybe they have and maybe this is just an update to that? I am not sure. But this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone going after the exact match domains.

I believe Google was slowing pushing this out a few days ago, on Thursday night. I saw an uptick in SEO chatter in the WebmasterWorld thread but I really didn't think it wasPanda or Penguin related, which it wasn't, so I decided to wait it out and see what I could find out over the weekend. It was this, an exact match domain algorithm change.

It seems like many sites were hit, as many webmasters have reported being hurt by this update. A WebmasterWorld thread has several webmasters claiming to be victims. I will do a poll on this in about a week, I don't want to poll our readers until they have time to investigate if they were impacted by this. But it seems pretty significant, especially for SEOs and domainers.

SEOmoz has some early data on who was hit and how many sites were impacted. They say it seems like a pretty big update and shared this chart via mozcast:

Anyway, this is a special weekend report - I rarely do this but hey, I am offline Monday and Tuesday.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Google Webmaster Help and DigitalPoint Forums.

Will Email Authorship Confirmation To Bloggers

Have any of you out there received an email this morning from Google Authorship? If you have, you are not alone, it looks like many writers and bloggers who are currently working with websites that have set up Google Authorship have received email confirmations from Google today. This email basically confirms your participation.

This email welcomes you to Google Authorship and even shows you how authorship works within the search results. If you would like a snapshot of what this email looks like, then simply look below:

It is important to note that not everyone who uses authorship received confirmations from Google. As some authors from one website received a confirmation email and some didn’t, so at the moment it’s unclear what the criteria was to get one of these confirmation emails.

Redirect Old Domain to New Domain

How to redirect old domain to new domain through .htaccess? Here are few code formats which would helps to your site redirect old domain to new domain. You should add this code in .htaccess file.

Method – 1:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Method – 2:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \olddomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Method – 3:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Method – 4:

Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/