Google’s 2023 Ads Safety Report revealed that it blocked or removed 12.7 million advertiser accounts last year – nearly double the previous 12 months. Additionally, the search engine blocked or removed 5.5 billion ads for violating its policies – slightly up from the prior year. Why we care. Cracking down on fraudulent accounts is critical for … Read more
Google has released its new Google Maps and local spam fighting numbers for the 2023 year, citing a big lift in reviews and other local fraud that was blocked. Google credited a new machine learning algorithm and its spam-fighting team for the improvements. You can see the previous years at 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019 … Read more
X (formerly known as Twitter) has started rolling out a new ad product that cannot be blocked or reported. The new format doesn’t include an ad label so users are not informed that what they’re seeing is an advert. There also isn’t an account associated with the promoted posts, so users also can’t tell who … Read more
At least 69 of the 1,000 most popular websites in the world have blocked GPTBot, the new web crawler OpenAI introduced Aug. 7, according to a new analysis. And the percentage of sites is increasing by about 5% per week, according to AI content and plagiarism service Originality.ai. Why we care. To block or not … Read more
March 16, 2015 | Posted by Joel Janovsky Google recently announced on their official webmaster blog that two new updates had been made for their Google Webmaster Tool (GWT) users. The first update that Google announced was about their Fetch & Render report. From now on, in addition to its original features, GWT … Read more
This morning, we are seeing significant movement with the Google search results ranking and algorithm. Twitter blocked unregistered users from seeing tweets, which blocked Googlebot and resulted in huge drops in Google Search traffic but a few days later, Twitter fixed it. Bing Chat improved its efficiency and dropped latency by 25%. OpenAI disabled the … Read more
In the past few days, Google Search has dropped over half of the indexed URLs from Twitter from the Google Search index. This was done after Twitter added a “feature” on Friday afternoon only to display tweets to signed-in and registered users; also, the throttling going on at Twitter right now is probably not helping. … Read more
On Friday afternoon, Twitter decided to block unregistered, signed-out users, from seeing public tweets. That meant that for Google’s normal crawling purposes, it was unable to see some of these tweets. It seems that Google now has about 52% fewer Twitter URLs in its index today than it had on Friday, just a few days … Read more
Google released spam and fraud prevention stats for Google Maps and local search. In short, Google blocked 21% more reviews, 5% more photos, 40% more videos, and 5% more fake business profiles in 2022 than they did in 2021. Google removed or blocked 115 million reviews, 200 million user-contributed photos, 7 million user-contributed videos and … Read more
Older than most of the search engines we use today, the robots.txt file is a dinosaur of the web. Although there are many articles discussing the protocol and how to use the file, in this post we will cover some ambiguities, corner cases and other undocumented scenarios. Why should you care? The robots.txt is a … Read more
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