When To Consider A Backlink Cleanup
If you’ve been paying attention to the SEO world over the past year and a half, you know that link removal is all the rage. There are countless tutorials that detail how to go about identifying and getting rid of harmful backlinks. If you have the tools, time, patience and ability to follow…
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How Fast Is SEO Really Changing? A Look Back At Search Ranking Factors
Ready for a walk down memory lane? The Search Ranking Factors studies by well-known SEO Rand Fishkin started in 2005, and he and his group have been churning out perceptive insights every two years ever since. If you take a look at how the findings have changed throughout the eight years that the…
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Someone Outranking You With Your Own Content? Use The New Google Scraper Report
One of the most frustrating experiences for any publisher is discovering that someone not only has copied your content but outranks you on Google for searches related to that content. Now, Google seems to have heard the complaints and has launched a to…
Hiding From That Google Penalty? It May Find You At Your New Home
Did you know that even if you try to run away from your Google penalty, it might end up finding you anyway? In a recent Google Webmaster Hangout, hosted by Google’s John Mueller, John said that even if you move your penalized site to a new domain name and don’t redirect the penalized…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: While Scientific Content Is Great, Clarity & Focusing On The Searcher Is Important
In today’s video from Google’s Matt Cutts, Matt answers a question asking if Google prefers ranking content that is more scientific in nature or content that is “easier to read” with greater clarity. First off, Matt said it was a question that made him think, which implies…
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Movie Sites Ranking Better In Google, Now That “Transient Issue” Fixed
A couple days ago, we reported that Google was investigating an issue where several movie blogs lost their rankings in Google. Matt Cutts, the head of search spam, himself said “I hope to dig into this soon.” Well, he did and he restored the rankings for those movie blogs calling the…
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SPONSOR MESSAGE: Webcast – Link Building in 2014
Webcast: Link Building = Successful Marketing. Join us Thursday March 27th to hear link building expert Jon Ball, Page One Power’s Co-Founder and CEO discuss — New techniques for strategic long-term link building success; Does guest blogging really work; Is there a way to leverage your…
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When The Best Move Is To Kill The Site
The contents of the following column are based on real circumstances. Certain elements have been changed to respect the privacy of each site. Imagine there are two websites. Here are their basic profiles: Site One is an e-commerce company and website l…
The Secret To Staying Relevant With Authorship
At PubCon last year, Google’s Matt Cutts discussed big changes to the search results, many of which we’ve seen played out over the past several months. In his talk, he mentioned upcoming improvements to authorship results. A couple months later in December, Google confirmed it had…
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Ray Kurzweil’s Job At Google: Beat IBM’s Watson At Natural Language Search
If Ray Kurzweil is right, computers will be smarter than humans 15 years from now. It’s called “technological singularity” and a big part of his job at Google is making sure that vision becomes reality. Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist that became Google’s Director of…
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Google Targets Two Polish Link Networks While Continuing To Target German Link Networks
Google’s lead of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted on Twitter that Google has taken action on two link networks operated in Poland this week. Matt wrote that Google is “not done with Germany yet, but we just took action on two Polish link networks.” The Google Poland Webmaster Blog…
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Bing Tags Hangs It Up & Shuts Down
Bing Tags, which launched two years ago as Bing Linked Pages and then renamed and did an expansion about a year ago, has hung up the project and shut down the feature. Bing closed down Bing Tags on June 14, 2013. A Microsoft spokesperson told us: We ca…
Google To Look Into Movie Blogs Losing Traffic
About eight different movie blog sites, including Slashfilm.com, have lost traffic in Google — and the issue is apparently big enough that Google is looking into it. On Saturday, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts responded to the owner of SlashFilm on Twitter about the issue where…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: We Reserve The Right To Use EXIF Data For Image Search Rankings
Google’s head of search spam posted a video today reconfirming that while Google may not be using EXIF, exchangeable image file format, data for ranking images today, they do reserve the right to use the data in the future within their ranking algorithm. Google does recommend you use the EXIF…
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Everything’s Not Awesome: Google News Hacked With Pitch To Watch “The Lego Movie” For Free
It’s definitely not what you expect to make the top of a Google News section, a crappy article promising that you can watch The Lego Movie online for free, not when the film is still in theaters. But that’s what Google is delivering up. The screenshot above shows the situation, which…
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How To Rebrand Without Losing Your Hard-Earned Rankings
As an SEO, I’ve worked with many clients during rebranding initiatives to ensure that their sites retain rankings — and, over the past few months, my own firm has been undergoing a brand transition. Thus, I thought I’d use my column this month to share some advice on how to handle…
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Bing: Poor Grammar & Typos May Result In Lower Search Rankings
Duane Forrester from Bing wrote a blog post on the Bing Webmaster Blog suggesting that Bing’s search ranking algorithms do in fact consider poor grammar, typos and poor language to be part of their ranking factors. Duane said, “just as you’re judging others’ writing, so the engines…
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Bing Webmaster Guidelines Updated To Include Demotions For Keyword Stuffing
Bing has quietly updated their Webmaster Guidelines to include a stern warning to webmasters who think they can use keyword stuffing techniques to manipulate their rankings and get away with it. The warning says Bing may demote the site or delist the s…
Google’s Matt Cutts: Backlink Relevancy Is A Big Win In Terms Of Search Quality
In today’s video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam reaffirms the significance of backlinks. The video is in response to the following question: Does the big G have a version of the search engine that totally excludes any backlink relevancy? I’m wondering what search…
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Can Bing Be More Competitive In Search?
Recently, Nathan Safran wrote a piece titled, “The Bing Dilemma: What To Do With The Little Search Engine That Can’t.” In it, he posits that everything Bing has done in the past to grab market share is not working, partly because people are so used to using Google that any hope of…
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