Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Shocking news, at least to me, came out yesterday at Pubcon from Gary Illyes talk. The other day, Gary said Google’s Penguin algorithm is prepared for manipulation but in his presentation, he took it one step further…

Back in 2007 Google added a feature to Search Console, back then known as Webmaster Tools…

Ever since Google announced Penguin 4.0, SEOs began talking about how they are now more eager to try to escalate link buying and other link schemes

This week we reported that Google’s Penguin algorithm doesn’t use machine learning. This was based on what Gary Illyes told us on Twitter. But then someone asked John Mueller of Google answered the question differently…

This happens all the time for what I write here or at Search Engine Land – I write something, and someone will say “Barry wrote this at SER” or something like that…

Google’s Penguin 4.0 algorithm, the real time granular version, is now fully rolled out. We’ve been covering Penguin…

When Google launched Penguin 4.0 some folks speculated that it was using some sort of machine learning (or RankBrain) to get better by itself…

Yesterday, I covered at Search Engine Land an interview I did with Gary Illyes last week where Gary Illyes from Google told us Google has link labels.

Link labels are basically various attributes or characteristics added to a site’s link profile…
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Another story I wrote at SEL based on the interview I did with Gary Illyes of Google was that Google Penguin is mostly a link spam algorithm and it works by mostly linking at the source of the link…

Often I see webmaster basically disavow links simply because they are from a site that is written in a different language…

We’ve covered the topic of Google remembering stuff for a long long time – yes, they keep an archive of what has changes…

The last month was pretty insane with a lot of changes happening at Google, which is partially why my monthly report is a bit delayed. We had Penguin 4.0 finally go live and I covered that release with well over 15 stories alone…

As you know, with Google Penguin 4.0 the algorithm no longer demotes (downgrades the ranking) of a page…

Every now and then, a Googler will say something fairly obvious to most SEOs and webmasters, it would make you scratch your head. Gary Illyes from Google did that on Twitter on Friday, saying “Reminder: if you have both “noindex” and “index” on the pa…

I cannot tell you how many times I speak to people about site migrations or mass CMS changes to their web site and they tell me, we are just going to 301 redirect all the internal pages that no longer exist to our home page – so our home page will rank…

Rand said that reconsideration requests via the Google Search Console did work and help reverse Penguin penalties. Jennifer Slegg pointed out to Rand…

A Google Webmaster Help thread has someone pointing out that Apache, world’s most used web server software, has a thank you page where they have do-follow links for sale…

So Google has been confusing us a bit, with good intention, on the disavow file and its use after Penguin 4.0. Initially, Google implied disavow files help with Penguin still – but that does not seem to be true…

A month ago we posted a poll asking you if you think Google should build us a testing tool to see if our interstitial ads on mobile will fail and lead to a penalty. As you know on January 10, 2017…

One of the rumblings going on since Google announced Penguin 4.0 was that it might be easier to do negative SEO and/or try more link spam because Penguin now devalues web spam and doesn’t demote it…