Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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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If you try to access your search queries report within Google Webmaster Tools right now, you would be out of luck.

You’d see a message that reads…

Google has suggested that sometimes it makes sense to start fresh and start a new web site if you dug yourself into such a severe penalty.

Google’s John Mueller hinted to it again this weekend in a Google Webmaster Help thread…

We know that Google penalties may follow you when you 301 or create a new site when your old site was burned to the ground. We also know that Google tried to prevent this from a negative SEO standpoint. Google also recommends you start fresh in some …

Google launched the awesome manual actions viewer just about 11 months ago and it is really an awesome step in visibility around penalties (yes we are waiting for an automated actions viewer)…