Google's disavow tool

Can using Google’s link disavow tool help remove penalties? Yes, the company says. But when it comes to manual penalties, disavowing links alone isn’t enough. With algorithmic penalties, there may be a time delay involved. Below, more about how both methods work.
Over the past few days, I’ve encountered a couple of cases where people are confused about how the link disavow tool works to remove penalties. So, I figured a clarification post was in order. Here’s the situation, all of which I reverified with Google yesterday.

Source url  : http://searchengineland.com/how-google-disavow-link-tool-remove-penalties-154928

Google+ circles privacy

Hi Google Plus team,

Kindly add a feature where the unknown people add us to their circles can't do it without our permission, people are using it to peep into the profiles.

Thanks

Get animated GIFs in google search

Google has announce on Google+ that from now they will let you search for animated images, as well as transparent images, using the advanced search feature.

Go through for more details  : http://www.seroundtable.com/google-image-animated-gifs-16530.html

Logging onto Facebook can make you feel happier

Facebook could be used to treat depression as 90% of users log on to the social networking site to remember happier times, experts have said.
According to the research by University of Portsmouth, nostalgic photos and even old comments are used to "self-soothe".
Scientists already know that reminiscent therapy is helpful for older people with memory loss.
Now the University wants to do a bigger study to confirm its findings, which could suggest Facebook can help treat mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, the Daily Mirror reports.

Source url : http://www.dnaindia.com/health/report_how-logging-on-to-facebook-can-make-you-feel-less-depressed_1813026

Google slammed over suicide videos

Russian consumer rights watchdog has hit out at search engine Google and YouTube over what it called online suicide instruction videos.
“Google Russia and YouTube LLC express their position based solely on a threat to the freedom of access to information on the Internet,” the Rospotrebnadzor watchdog said in a statement.
The watchdog’s statement came after YouTube, Google’s video sharing unit, filed a lawsuit against Rospotrebnadzor over a decision to block a video containing alleged “harmful” material. A preliminary hearing into the case began onFriday.

Source url : http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_russian-watchdog-slams-google-over-suicide-videos_1813137

Google Reader shut down

Google is killing off Reader, its web-based RSS reading service, as part of its latest round of culling little-used or unprofitable products. A spring clean, if you will.
The service will disappear on July 1st, 2013.
Google’s reason for the termination, revealed in a blog post, follows:

“There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.”

Software Engineer Alan Green penned the post and added that “We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.”
Happily, users can extract their RSS subscriptions and use them in another reader using Google Takeout.

Source url : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/14/google_retires_reader/?wc=EWJvGgpmBQVHGxVx

2013 Penguin, Panda & Link Networks Updates

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced new updates with Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithms and new link network targets in 2013. Matt announced this during the SMX West panel, The Search Police.

Significant Penguin Update

Matt said that there will be a large Penguin update in 2013 that he thinks will be one of the more talked about Google algorithm updates this year. Google’s search quality team is working on a major update to the Penguin algorithm, which Cutts called very significant.

Source url  :http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-upcoming-penguin-panda-link-networks-updates-151273

Why Google Penalize sites?

In the latest video from Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, he addresses Google’s standards for manually removing spam from the Google index.

Matt Cutts first said and repeated it a couple times within the video that Google will not penalize or ban a site that is being critical of Google. Matt said:

“One thing that we don’t do it is just say or someone has been critical of Google, therefore take action. We’re big believers in the Voltaire saying of I might not agree with what you say but I’ll defend to death your ability to say it. So just because you’re critical of Google that’s not the sort of thing where we’re gonna mark your site as spam.”

Source url : http://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-we-dont-ban-sites-critical-of-google-but-here-is-why-we-do-penalize-sites-150549

How Search Works ?

On Friday afternoon, Google announced a neat new interactive infographic named How Search Works.
It is an excellent way for a newbie to learn the basics on how Google crawls, indexes, ranks and shows their search results. But how is this useful for an SEO junky like yourself? I'll outline the parts I find useful to more savvy SEOs and webmasters.
Source url :http://www.seroundtable.com/google-how-search-works-16442.html

Google search quality rating guidelines

As part of today’s big “How Search Works” reveal, Google also took the big step of sharing its Search Quality Rating Guidelines for the first time.
This is the document that Google’s human search quality raters use when grading Google’s search results.
But the new, public document is actually an edited version of the old one that circulated quietly several times amongst webmasters and SEOs. In fact, “gutted” is more accurate than “edited” — where the most recent non-public version of the document was 161 pages, the public document released today is only 43 pages.

What’s Changed

The biggest change, in my opinion, is the complete removal of Parts 3 and 4 — “Page Quality Rating Guidelines” and “Rating Examples.” These sections offered extremely detailed guidance on how to rate pages, how to rate sections of pages, how to judge the reputation of a website, and specific examples of public web pages and how they should be rated. I’ll share more on this below.

Source url : http://searchengineland.com/google-gutted-its-search-quality-rating-guidelines-for-public-release-150281