Index Status identifies and fixes sites indexing problems
News on Google Marketing, according to Google Webmaster Central Blog, hoping to help identify and fix indexing problems with your sites as well as bringing more transparency into Google’s index selection process, Google has launched Index Status feature in Webmaster Tools. Index Status shows you the number of pages from your site that has been included in Google’s index.
Clicking the Index Status under the Health menu will give you a graph that shows up to a one year of data of the currently indexed pages. New content on your site is being discovered, crawled and indexed by Google once an increase on number of indexed pages is observed.
However, to help you see the number of pages crawled, number of pages that were not selected for inclusion in our results and pages that are not crawled because they are blocked by robots.txt, an Advanced tab was added to the feature.
This data is important in identifying and debugging different indexing-related problems. Noticing a sudden drop on the graph of indexed pages might be an indication that you have introduced a site-wide error when using meta=”noindex” and now Google isn’t including your content in search results. Also, you may see an increase on the “Not selected” when changing the URL structure of your site. To be able to get better indexing coverage, you must fix the redirects or rel=”canonical” tags.
Read more at Behold Google index secrets, revealed!
Google officials says company prioritizes local market
News on Google Marketing, according to Brafton News, even with the failure to acquire Groupon, Google officials say it hasn’t lost its interest in the local market and is still the search company’s top priority.
Marissa Mayer, vice president of consumer products, emphasizes Google local developments will serve as “contextual discovery” tools, and optimizing their sites and Place pages is suggested to marketers to fit the location context.
Mayer says that using location as a context to help searchers find what they’re looking for is Google’s focus in the local market. And with Google’s Hot Pot, which gives socially recommended Places search results, she believes they have an advantage on foursquare.
In a recent interview with Media Bistro, Mayer dismissed doubts about geosocial platforms saying that “It’s really early. We are still experimenting with [the incentives].” And that they want to “unlock all of this potential.” However, unlocking incentives for local search could have got a big push had the search giant acquired Groupon last month.
Whether through ads or site optimization, marketers should consider Google’s investment in the local market as a sign that local search may soon become a mainstream search practice.
Read more at Google’s Marissa Mayer on location-based services and life without Groupon
Twitter, NBC rolled out hashtag pages for London 2012 Olympic
News on Twitter Marketing, according to Brafton News, before, Twitter has rolled out hashtag for major sporting events like the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship because of the high-volume of traffic it produced on the microblogging site.
Now, with the London 2012 Olympic Games, Marketers website content can be shared in front of new audiences. Twitter and NBC Olympics are cross-promoting the event on the microblogging site. Content shared with the hashtag #Olympics will appear on the hashtag page, which will be broadcast on NBC. However, relevant content of their industry and the Olympics must be created by companies if they plan to use this for their media marketing campaign.
According to Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics, “With the eyes of the world focused on London, there is no doubt the conversation on Twitter will rage around the competition, the athletes and the incredible stories for the games.”
Companies can increase their SEO on their site by including trending topics from around the world as part of a web marketing effort. However, to let user respect a brand, companies must have content that remains true to their industries.
NBC’s partnership with Twitter shows the growth of the social network as a hub of communication on the web. Aside from sports, marketers can anticipate the use of hashtag pages for other major events like the upcoming 2012 presidential election.
Read more at Twitter, NBC partner for Olympic promotion, hashtag page can help marketers boost content visibility
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