Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Last night, Google pushed out a new and major local search ranking algorithm change. Where Google provided details for me on this update. This is not really a spam change but more of a fundamental change to the local search ranking algorithm.

A discussion forum administrator posted questions about how to improve his forum in the eyes of Google, the question was posted in a Google Webmaster Help forum and Google’s John Mueller responded to it in detail…

A Black Hat World forum thread asks if Google’s algorithms work the same in all the various countries throughout the world.

The quick answer is no…

The co-founder of Moz, Rand Fishkin, posted on Twitter and also on the Moz blog that one of the YouMoz, the user generated content portion of Moz, contributors received a Google Manual action for a link violation and it cited an article posted on YouMo…

I am a bit tired of covering the negative SEO topic but no one can fully deny that it does not exist…

We’ve covered this before, don’t lie to Google in their Google forums. But it happens all the time…

Duplicate content in the SEO space has been an important topic for as long as I’ve been in the industry. I’ve covered it here countless times.

Today…

In a Google Webmaster Hangout from a week ago on Google+, John Mueller of Google was presented with a question on why some brands rank so well within the Knowledge Graph on Google.
Here are two examples…

Back in May we reported that eBay had some sort of penalty that hit their Google search visibility by about 50%. That is major but now we somewhat know how major.

Danny Sullivan reports on Search Engine Land that it may have costed them $200 million….

Google announced that they’ve updated the Robots.txt tester tool within Google Webmaster Tools. The tool adds three things; highlights, testing and revision history.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered the topic of a possible Sandbox 2.0 Google algorithm targeting churn and burn web sites.
I decided to bring it up in a Google Hangout with Google’s John Mueller a couple days ago and you can see his response to my…

In a Google hangout yesterday with Google’s John Mueller, John explained that Google updates their data for manual actions within Google Webmaster Tools twice a day on average and then only sends out emails once a day on average with notices.

The SEO space is very negative these days, not many smiles unless you work at large brands. A WebmasterWorld thread has a common topic come up, the topic of us being corkscrews and how the answers will dominate and weed out the source of the content, …

In June, Google began privately beta testing a new feature, which we uncovered as a Webmaster Tools href lang debug tool…

A couple weeks ago we brought up some conversation on the black hat forums around a new Google Sandbox.

The Google Sandbox dates back to 2004 where new sites would sit in a hold pattern, i.e. a sandbox…

Irving Weiss, the SEO lead at Vitals.com, shared a thread with me on Moz that in some cases, Google is only showing the reviews rich snippets when the query is a site command.

Here is an example…

Jennifer Slegg reports that Google has completely revamped the Google Quality Rating Guidelines, which is used for Google contractors to manually review search results and send that feedback to Google’s team to improve the overall algorithm…

We know that in many cases, after a penalty is lifted by Google, your traffic may not improve all that much. Sometimes it might even lead to less traffic than before. But sometimes…

When it comes to ranking issues in Google, there are two main reasons why your rankings can drop. The first is you made a technical mistake on your own site…

Back on June 12th, I published a story on Search Engine Land on how Google is working on a fix for Metafilter.

Back then, I was under the impression that Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, was in direct communication with Matt Haughey…
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