Google’s Disavow Conundrum
What you’re about to read is excerpted from an older, longer premium article. The excerpts provided below omit details and context provided by even older articles from which they were taken. Be careful not to infer meaning beyond what you see here. I received the following question (reformatted for this article): “Michael, you’re convinced no…
Can You Resurrect An Old PBN Blog?
A newsletter subscriber sent the following question to us in 2021: “Michael, I picked up an PBN domain. It was spammed out but the name is really good. There are about 95 articles. Some look like great content. Have you ever rescued a blog from PBN hell? What would you suggest?” Almost any site can…
How Do You Know If A Link Is Safe?
How Do You Know If A Link is Safe? The search engines provide clear guidelines about which links are acceptable to them. Begin learning about safe backlinks by reading the Webmaster guidelines. Hardly a week goes by where I don’t see someone asking in an onilne discussion group, “how do I know if these are…
Quality Signals that May have Affected the March 2017 Google Fred Update
Googler Gary Illyes declared that unless otherwise given a name by Google ALL of their search “updates” will be referred to as “Fred”. He was joking but, honestly, I like that. Some years ago I wrote a brief article titled…
What is an exact match domain (EMD) and why does Google want to punish them?
In which we describe what an exact match domain (EMD) looks like, how they can manipulate search rankings and why you should avoid them.
Penguin 4.0: a link builder’s perspective
It’s been two weeks since Penguin 4.0 was officially announced.
Google Penguin: Why You Cannot Fix Your Website
UPDATE: 2016-09-29 Google announced a few days ago that the Penguin algorithm is now part of the “core” (indexing and ranking) algorithms, that it is now a “signal”, and that it is updated as Googlebot crawls the Web. The algorithmic discussion…
Google Penguin: Why You Cannot Fix Your Website
Despite all that has been written about the Google Penguin algorithm, including numerous question and answer articles that Googlers have assisted with and promoted, many Web marketers and business owners continue to drag their feet about pursuing alternative solutions to…
How Google May Respond to Reverse Engineering of Spam Detection
The ultimate goal of any spam detection system is to penalize “spammy” content. ~ Reverse engineering circumvention of spam detection algorithms (Linked to below) Four years ago, I wrote a post about a Google patent titled, The Google Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent. It told us that Google might be keeping an eye out for someone attempting … Continue reading How Google May Respond to Reverse Engineering of Spam Detection →
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How Google fights webspam and what you need to learn from this
Google has this week revealed its annual report on how it has policed the internet over the last 12 months. Or at least how it policed the vast chunk of the internet it allows on its results pages.
How to Recover from the Penguin Algorithm In Less Than 1 Hour
We don’t offer Penguin recovery services. We view such work as completely avoidable and unnecessary. There are some good-hearted, wonderful people selling Penguin recovery services, strategies, and plans and we don’t want to make them look like bad people but…
Google Turns to Deep Learning Classification to Fight Web Spam
In the past few years, Google has been busy building what has become known as the
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Google Patent Attacks Reverse Engineering of Local Search Listings
The title from a Google patent reached out and grabbed me as I was skimming through Google’s patents. It has the kind of title that captures your attention, as a weapon in the war that Google wages against people who might try to spam the search engine. The title for the patent is Reverse engineering […]
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Why Citations Do Not Make Wikipedia and Similar Sites Credible
If you search Twitter for word combinations like “Wikipedia credible” you may find people arguing back and forth about how credible the site is as a source of information. I even found a Tweet where someone wrote: “I hate when…
Google’s Paid Link Patent
There are things that we just don’t know about search engines. Things that aren’t shared with us in an official blog post, or search engine representative speaker’s conference comment, or through a publicly published white paper. Often we do learn some aspects of how search engines work through patents, but the timing of those is […]
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Dear Mobile Marketers: You Have a HUGE Problem
And you can probably thank Edward Snowden for your trouble. I spend a lot of time defending this and many other sites against botnets that are continually probing WordPress installations for new weaknesses. The latest craze in Website malware seems…
SEOs and Content Marketers Rationalize Their Guest Blogging as Not Spam
“Not Spam” is what you call a Web marketing technique that you believe is somehow NOT in violation of search engine guidelines; therefore, if it’s “not spam” it must be acceptable to search engines. We have had “Not Spam” for years but the search engine optimization and “content marketing” communities have been especially devoted to the cause of justifying and rationalizing “Not Spam” since late 2009 or early 2010 (about the time they finally had to let go of their dear, departed PageRank Sculpting). So yesterday Matt Cutts said that Guest Blogging is dead and people should stop doing this. Then he saw that many people were getting all funky in the social media sphere and he added a clarifying paragraph which, sadly, is about to create a whole new generation of “Not Spam”. Only, I fear that this new “Not Spam” will be more toxic than the last wave of “Not Spam” because it will be fundamentally falsely labeled. It really will be spam. At issue is what Matt was trying to say: Don’t use guest blogging any more as a link building technique for search engine optimization. Matt’s original post was fine. The usual collection of doubts, fears, […]
How Google Might Use the Context of Links to Identify Link Spam
With Google’s Penguin update, it appears that the search engine has been paying significantly more attention to link spam as attempts to manipulate links and anchor text to a page. The Penguin Update was launched at Google on April 24th, 2012, and it was accompanied by a blog post on the Official Google Webmaster Central […]
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Google Scoring Gibberish Content to Demote Pages in Rankings?
This week, Google as awarded a patent that describes how they might score content on how much Gibberish it might contain, which could then be used to demote pages in search results. That gibberish content refers to content that might be representative …
Look Out Tumblr, Here Come the Link Spammers
Takehshi Young reveled in seeing one of his YouMoz posts promoted to the main blog yesterday. And then I came along to pee on his parade and call him a spammer. I am sure few people would delight in that experience and he would be right to be annoyed with me. Nonetheless, I am right to point out that openly sharing how to use a service for Tumblr for search-manipulative linking is spammy. This is one of those sensitive areas of SEO bloggery where some people just absolutely feel vindicated in telling the world how to go out and get all the manipulative links you want. After all, we’re “giving back to the community”, right? But what happens is that the community rushes over to the newly targeted service like a herd of drug addicts in need of a fix and then they start beating the crap out of that service by loading it up with cheap content placed just for the sake of “building links”. I know Tumblr has been used for years for link building. I know that Blogger and WordPress and other popular platforms have been used that way, too. But not every social media platform can […]