Category: SEO Case Studies

How Good Is Google Search? Despite its worldwide popularity, Google can’t answer every query. And many of Google’s search results leave something to be desired. Overall the general public seems satisfied with Google’s search results, but is that really true?   Not everyone agrees that Google is “bad at search”. In fact, in a recent…

What do academic Websites do wrong for SEO? – Websites in every industry and category make SEO mistakes. But many academic Websites follow a common pattern of destroying information not only on their own pages but other sites’ pages, too. I’ve never optimized an academic Website. I’ve never consulted for a university’s Web team (formally,…

SEO Theory is now running on two sites. One is a subdomain. This division of content was necessary for several practical reasons. My decision to archive older content on a subdomain wasn’t based on anything to do with SEO, but there will be some practical SEO benefits from doing so. I don’t want to dwell…

I should create a “Bad SEO Advice” category and collect all the articles I have written about it through the years in one place.  There are days when I am tempted to go back and “update” old articles about bad…

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User experience is supposed to be the most important aspect of Web design today but you won’t find any scientific proof of that if you look at what Web publishers and advertisers are doing.  If we were to judge how…

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The less attention you pay to Web marketing correlation studies the better informed you will be about how to market on the Web.  That is because correlation studies create negative knowledge.  Call it unknowledge, ignorance, pseudo-knowledge, or simply stupidity but by…

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UPDATE 2015-02-27 Googler Doantam Pham replied to my discussion in the Google Webmaster Forums. As I suspected, the images were the cause of the disparity in the test results between the two sites. The problem remains, though. While I can…

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Before you start thinking, “Google penalizes slow Websites” pinch yourself and remember that being slow only affects about 1% of all Websites in Google’s algorithm. So there are a lot of slow sucky Websites out there which are not being…

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Ask any SEO if you should put a Website on a free hosting domain like Blogger or WordPress.com and the majority will tell you not to do that. Of course, over two-thirds of all Websites (including many professional/commercial sites) are…

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I could not help but notice several hundred articles about Google’s Hummingbird over the past few weeks. The SEO pundits and tech journalists are out in force, running with the bulls*** like always. Everyone seems to know what Hummingbird is and how it will (not) affect your online marketing. I just wish I could find 3 articles that all agree on some clear precise details other than “Google announced Hummingbird ….” So, what is Hummingbird? I dunno. Something Google did with its search engine. Matt Cutts spoke at PubCon a couple of weeks ago and in discussing Hummingbird he said it had been live for several weeks without anyone noticing before Google announced it. Um, someone noticed it well before Google Song and Dance day. He just didn’t know what he was looking at. Plenty of people noticed the change in search results. But there are always changes in search results, so it’s really hard for someone to jump up and say, “Hey! Here’s the latest massive rewrite of Google’s system in action — you just wait and see! They’ll announce it in a few weeks!” I, personally, hate what Google has been doing with search for the past few […]

There are two reasons why I don’t use Google+ any more. First, I hate the two-column layout and just want a way to turn it off. It’s hard to read, even harder to navigate (because I have so little screen space where I can click down on the page and disassociate my cursor focus with something that accidentally grabbed it), and just plain ugly and stupid. Second, Google+ has the worst search capability on the Internet. Even Facebook’s totally awful, crappy, incompetently designed and absolutely terribly horrible “search” functionality is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better than Google+ search. You would think that, if one were designing a social media community for Google’s users that the community would have access to Google’s generally fine and quite-refined search engine. But that appears to NOT be the case. I have put up with the absolutely horrible search results in Google Groups for years. I have abandoned all hope of ever seeing any sensible, human-friendly search results in the discussion groups. But that was always a kind of step-child service that Google bought up and perverted in Sauron-like fashion (it was originally DejaNews, which was originally something else in the 1990s). When I need to […]

In 2005 Google published its “Web Authoring Statistics” report, which provided a unique insight into how a large search engine views the Web at the very basic HTML level. In August 2009 Matt Cutts invited Webmasters to help test a new indexing technology that Google had dubbed Caffeine. The SEO community immediately fell to rampant speculation about how Caffeine would affect rankings (in fact, the only effect was unintentional). By February 2010 even I had fallen prey to Caffeine Speculationitis. On February 25, 2010 Matt McGee confirmed that Google had not yet implemented the Caffeine technology on more than 1 data center (at this time, in April 2013, there are only 13 Google Data Centers around the world). On June 8, 2010 Google announced the completion of rolling out its Caffeine indexing technology. Caffeine gave Google the ability to index more of the Web at a faster rate than ever before. This larger, faster indexing technology invariably changed search results because all the newly discovered content was changing the search engine’s frame of reference for millions of queries. On November 11, 2010 Matt Cutts said that Google might use as many as 50 variations for some of its 200+ ranking […]