Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s 2.0 Penguin update went live over 3 months ago and we ran a poll shortly after asking how many of you were impacted by this Penguin update.

We had almost 1…

I see many threads with complaints, excitement, sadness and fear in the forums. Most have to do with Google rankings. It goes like this… The webmaster says something like, “my rankings and traffic from Google tanked,” now I look and I have…
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Google launched the data highlighter tool in December to make it easier for website owners to add rich snippet data to their web pages. Google last added six new data types a few months ago to the tool and now has added support for book reviews…
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Last week, we reported on a situation where Google said a link to a site was unnatural and thus the site still has a penalty but the truth is, the link was indeed natural and as natural as it gets…

Google’s disavow tool launched almost a year ago and has been a very common topic amongst the SEO and webmaster community since…

I see a lot of different web sites, with a lot of different problems. From manual actions, to huge drops after a major algorithm update, to hacked sites…

Last night, Matt Cutts tweeted that he is working up several “ghost-related puns for a spam network.”

I suspect they are working on targeting more and more link and spam networks and it is thus on his mind…

In a video by Google’s Matt Cutts yesterday, Matt shared that Google receives about 5,000 reconsideration requests per week. Google has told us they review each and every request submitted individually. So as you can imagine, that can take a lot of m…

Over the past few days, there were several reports in the Google Webmaster Help forum that the structure data report within Google Webmaster Tools was reporting zero elements of structured data…

The question of big sites vs small sites and how they rank in Google has always been one of those questions SEOs have asked. In fact, it seems that only 30% of SEOs believe web site size does not matter in terms of rankings…

There are two common sayings you’ve all heard in this field. The first is, “no one is perfect” and the second is, “never tell Google they are wrong.”

As you can imagine, they don’t go well together. No one, including, no algorithm or person…
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Some people think that if you know someone at Google, they can pull strings and give you better rankings. Truth is, it doesn’t work that way. In fact, I know Googlers who struggle with their own personal sites’ rankings more than most SEOs…
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If you didn’t get the memo yet, and we’ve covered what Google expects from reconsideration requests before – Google wants details in the request.

If you have a manual action and it shows up in the manual action viewer…

Yesterday on the Google Webmaster Blog, Maile posted and FAQ on using Google authorship, rel=author…

Typically, SEO concepts are very logical. You want your pages to be easy to read, you want your title tags descriptive (bookmarks, etc)…

There has always been a lot of confusion amongst none experienced SEOs about the difference between a manual and algorithmic action by Google. And Google is aware of that and promises to make changes to help clarify the difference between the two…
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Moz published a story yesterday showing a high correlation between Google +1s and Google’s search rankings.
Shortly after, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, went over to Hacker News and debunked it. He said, +1s do not have any impact on search…

A WebmasterWorld thread has SEOs and webmasters discussing what is better, a manual penalty or an algorithmic penalty? If you had to choose between Google giving you a penalty, which would you choose…

There has always been a lot of talk about page speed and Google rankings. There are several tools that Google has for documenting page speed and improving it. Google even has the features in Google Analytics and had it in Webmaster Tools…

Back in early June I reported how Google told us that the only links you need are the links in Webmaster Tools for reconsideration request purposes…