Saturday, 19 September 2015

Repeated violations of Webmaster Guidelines


Source:  In order to protect the quality of our search results, we take automated and manual actions against sites that violate our Webmaster Guidelines. When your site has a manual action taken, you can confirm in the [Manual Actions] page in Search Console which part of your site the action was taken and why. After fixing the site, you can send a reconsideration request to Google. Many webmasters are getting their manual action revoked by going through the process.

However, some sites violate the Webmaster Guidelines repeatedly after successfully going through the reconsideration process. For example, a webmaster who received a Manual Action notification based on an unnatural link to another site may nofollow the link, submit a reconsideration request, then, after successfully being reconsidered, delete the nofollow for the link. Such repeated violations may make a successful reconsideration process more difficult to achieve. Especially when the repeated violation is done with a clear intention to spam, further action may be taken on the site.

In order to avoid such situations, we recommend that webmasters avoid violating our Webmaster Guidelines, let alone repeating it. We, the Search Quality Team, will continue to protect users by removing spam from our search results.

Thursday, 10 September 2015

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Mobile-friendly web pages using app banners

Source:
When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant answers, no matter if the answer lives in an app or a web page. We’ve recently made it easier for users to find and discover apps and mobile-friendly web pages. However, sometimes a user may tap on a search result on a mobile device and see an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content and prompts the user to install an app. Our analysis shows that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the web page.

Starting today, we’ll be updating the Mobile-Friendly Test to indicate that sites should avoid showing app install interstitial that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page. The Mobile Usability report in Search Console will show webmasters the number of pages across their site that have this issue.

After November 1, mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly. This does not affect other types of interstitial. As an alternative to app install interstitial, browsers provide ways to promote an app that are more user-friendly.


 

 App install interstitial that hide a significant amount of content provide a bad search experience

App install banners are supported by Safari (as Smart Banners) and Chrome (as Native App Install Banners). Banners provide a consistent user interface for promoting an app and provide the user with the ability to control their browsing experience. Webmasters can also use their own implementations of app install banners as long as they don’t block searchers from viewing the page’s content.