Category: Search Engine Roundtable

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 …