5 Times Google Penalized Itself For Breaking Its Own SEO Rules
Make no mistake. Plenty of sites — big brands included — willingly do things in an attempt to rank better on Google that go past SEO tactics that Google itself considers acceptable. However, there’s also no better poster child for how complicated and confusing Google’s rules…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: Don’t Worry About Poor Grammar In Comments
In today’s video from Google’s Matt Cutts, Matt addresses the concern over having third-party comments with poor grammar on your blog or site. Matt said that you do not need to worry about the grammar people use on your site. You should worry about your writing style and your grammar…
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Google Updates Its Page Layout Algorithm To Go After Sites “Top Heavy” With Ads
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced that Google has released a refresh of its Page Layout Algorithm. The filter, also known as the Top Heavy algorithm, downgrades the ranking of a web page with too many ads at the top or if the ads are deemed too distracting for users. Cutts…
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Suspected Paid-Link Penalty Hasn’t Hit Expedia Bottom Line — Yet
Yesterday online travel giant Expedia announced Q4 2013 and full year results. The company “beat the street,” reporting strong room night and revenue growth across all geographies. So far a suspected penalty from Google hasn’t hurt the company’s bottom line. See our earlier…
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How Google Glass Will Change Search — And What It Means For You
Last week, Google officially announced that Glass will be made available for purchase to the general public by the end of the year. The impending launch of Glass is exciting, but it does present some new challenges for search marketers. Given the differences between how Google Glass handles search…
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Google Penalized A Germany Agency & Their Clients For Link Schemes, Says Matt Cutts
Soon after Google has warned Germany SEOs about paid links and link schemes, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted on Twitter that they took action on a German agency and their clients for link schemes. Matt Cutts wrote, “this week we took action on a German agency’s…
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Authority Is The New Links: Reading Between The Lines Of Matt Cutts’ Guest Post Critique
The SEO industry has been all aflutter over the last few weeks, ever since Matt Cutts stated that guest blogging is dead. In The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO — a headline that is a particularly strong statement from Google’s Head of Webspam — Cutts essentially said…
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Google’s Latest Manual Action Penalty: Spammy Structured Markup
Google has recently began sending a new manual action spam notification to webmasters for “spammy structured markup” also known as rich snippet spam. This comes after Google dropped 15% of the rich snippets, setting the bar higher for what sites are able to display rich snippets in the…
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Google Warns German Webmasters That Paid Links Violate Google’s Guidelines
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted on Twitter this morning, another stern warning to German webmasters about a link penalty looming for them. Matt Cutts tweeted: A reminder (in German) that paid links that pass PageRank violate our guidelines: http://t.co/u1MpvL7kh4 — Matt…
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Google Is Not Broken
In spite of what many think, Google is not broken. But wait, naysayers will say, Look at this search result, it stinks! This spammer is succeeding in ranking high, they emerged from nowhere and are now in the top three results! It’s true — there are many such examples that you can point…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: Don’t Try To Build Links Through Article Directories
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted a video answer encouraging webmasters not to use article directory web sites with the goal of building links. The question posed was: Links from relevant content in article directories — Seen as good or bad? eg. I link my beauty website from a…
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Google Takes Down Another Link Network, France’s Buzzea
Google’s head of search spam, announced on Twitter earlier this morning, that Google has taken action on another “link network” named Buzzea. Matt Cutts tweet read, “Today we’re taking action on a French link network that violates our quality guidelines…
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Google Issues Subtle Warning To Affiliates That Have “Thin-Content”
Google’s Chris Nelson of the search quality team issued a warning on the Google Webmaster Blog to affiliates who produce thin-content. He said that affiliates that produce thin-content and have little-to-no value-add on their site may be penalized for going against Google’s guidelines….
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Google’s Matt Cutts Explains That Older Sites Won’t Always Keep Their Current Rankings
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video yesterday answering why some old sites may not have their rankings in Google last forever. Matt Cutts explained that there are many old sites that are in the range of about 15 years old and while that is a good thing, some of these…
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Google To Replace Smartphone User-Agent To Improve Smart Phone Indexing
Google announced they are replacing the old smartphone crawler user-agent with a new one in order to make it possible for Google to index more smartphone content. Zhijian He, a smartphone search engineer at Google said that the previous user-agent “made it impossible for Google to index…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: Facebook & Twitter Pages Are Treated Like Any Other Web Page On The Internet
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video today answering the question, “are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm?” The short answer was no. Matt said that Google does not give any special treatment to Facebook or Twitter pages. They are in…
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Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors Reports Now Showing Errors On Final Redirect URL
Google’s John Mueller announced on the Google Webmaster blog this morning that the Google Webmaster Tools team has updated the crawl errors report to show errors on the final URL of the redirect, as opposed to the origin URL of the redirect. What this means is that Google is now showing the…
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Matt Cutts: “Stick A Fork In It, Guest Blogging Is Done”
Google and Matt Cutts, in particular, has made a number of statements about guest blogging over the past year as the tactic has grown as a link building tactic. None of those statements are as clear as the one Cutts wrote today on his personal blog. Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team,…
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Expedia Lost 25% Of Their Search Visibility In Google Possibly Over Unnatural Links
The major travel web site, Expedia, seems to have lost 25% of their search visibility in Google according to Search Metrics. It appears that drop was due to an unnatural link penalty, where Nenad called out Expedia over a month ago for paid links on article sites. Expedia.com’s Google Traffic…
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5 Not-So-Common Reconsideration Request Errors
I’ve been struggling with a particularly difficult link cleanup project lately. On the occasion of my 100th reconsideration request (4th for this particular client), I thought it might be helpful to share five not-so-common problems that you might run into during your own link cleanup…
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