Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

A Google Webmaster Help thread has an office furniture site complaining that his Google rankings dropped after the Hummingbird update was pushed out.

Of course…

Despite it being the month of December, which normally means it is slow, it was a pretty busy month. The past week or so has been dead, so not much to report in the first week of January…

Zemanta is a content discovery platform, they have a popular WordPress plugin that helps bloggers find related posts and related images while you write your post.

It does mention a bit on links on the plugin page:

Link Love by linking to other blogge…

Google has said time to time that having some unique content, even if it is a few sentences of unique content may be enough.

So when Gary Illyes from Google responded to a thread at Google Webmaster Help – his response stood out…

Over Christmas, Rap Genius was penalized by Google for unnatural links. In short, they offered an exchange of traffic for keyword rich links to their site. It was outed, Google’s Matt Cutts saw it, it lead to a manual action that had a serious impact o…

Did you know that if Google cannot crawl your robots.txt file, that it will stop crawling your whole site…

We know Google doesn’t like it when you submit a new reconsideration request a day or two after you get a rejection response from your reconsideration request. They want to see you put effort in after you get that response…

So we know Google has penalized sites that accept user generared content, such as Mozilla…

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a webmaster all upset that Google shows that they have indexed none of the URLs they submitted via the XML Sitemap file. Obviously, this can be concerning to any webmaster.

The thing is…

A webmaster is upset that his images aren’t being indexed from his site. He posted a complaint in the Google Webmaster Help forums…

Google’s John Mueller responded to a question in the Google Webmaster Help forums about changing a site’s URL structure completely…

Gary Illyes, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst for Google Switzerland, who was recruited back in 2011, responded to a few threads over the holiday break. Here are two medical related sites that are complaining they don’t get traffic from Google…
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Greg Niland, aka GoodROI, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld arguing that if you do not hand over your data and content to Google in a structure format, then you will die a slow death…

It seems like Google is on a trend of telling webmasters which algorithms are impacting their site the most, at least in a negative way…

A Google Webmaster Help has Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, giving advice to a webmaster. The advice, don’t copy content from Wikipedia and expect to rank well.

The truth is…

We know manual actions expire but what about algorithmic actions, do they expire?
When you pick up a new domain name, you now need to look to see if it had a bad history. We know expired domains can either benefit you, do nothing for you, or seriously …

For the past six-months, Google has been working on an algorithm to promote authorities on topics.

In short, Google is going to try to figure out which authors or individuals are authorities on a specific topic and promote their content across any sit…

As I said, Googlers were spam fighting over Christmas and it is interesting to see Matt Cutts chime in on the forums. In fact, I believe he is most active in the Google forums on holidays.

That being said…

This is likely obvious to most the readers here but it is simple, submitting an XML sitemap to Google does not mean the pages in that sitemap will be fully indexed…

John Marbach outed Rap Genius for masking a link building scheme as an affiliate program. Right before Christmas, Matt Cutts posted first on Hacker News and then on Twitter that Google is looking into it. A day later…