Infographic: What Is The Nofollow Tag; When & How To Use It

The nofollow tag is a way publishers can tell search engines not to count some of their links to other pages as “votes” in favor of that content. Why would publishers need to block such votes? Doing so can help them avoid problems with search engines believing they are selling influence…

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Google’s [Not Provided] At 87% Of Google Search Traffic To Major News Sites [Report]

If you’ve been hoping that the hypocrisy of Google hiding keyword referral data from natural search traffic but still sharing it with advertisers would get some attention from the mainstream press, this might help: New data from Parse.ly shows that 87 percent of all Google organic traffic to…

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Google’s Matt Cutts: Guest Blogging Best Done In Moderation

In his latest video, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts answers the question, “How can I guest blog without it appearing as if I paid for links?” According to Cutts, when his team reviews spam reports, there is usually a clear distinction between organic guest blog content…

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The Structured Data Brouhaha At SMX East: Clarifying Contentious Issues

If you attended the Structured Data Superstars session at SMX East earlier this month, you probably witnessed a very brief interchange between myself and Googler Pierre Far at the end of the session. Pierre woke everyone up by stating that some of the semantic markup recommendations I’d…

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MugShots.com Says Google’s Algorithm Change Puts Americans At Risk

About a week ago, Google released an algorithm update we named the Google’s MugShot Algorithm. This update specifically targeted sites ranking well for names and displayed their arrest photo, name and details. The new algorithm update impacted sites such as Mugshots, BustedMugshots and…

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Google And SEO Communications: Swahili Vs. Latin

There are many in the SEO community that get very frustrated with Google, and one of the reasons for this is simple: there is a communications gap. This is not a simple case of US English vs. UK English, but more like Swahili vs. Latin. Many publishers — and many who profess to be SEO…

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Google’s Matt Cutts: User Redirection Based On Location Is Not Spam

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video yesterday clearly stating the geo-location or redirecting users based on their location is not spam. Google will not consider a site that uses geo-location techniques as spam. What Google does consider spam is when you redirect…

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Hummingbird’s Impact On B2B Sites

The new Hummingbird algorithm will revolutionize the way B2B companies market their sites in search. Many larger B2B companies tend to invest marketing dollars in more traditional forms of marketing rather than SEM because the B2B space is usually not …

Google’s Matt Cutts: No More PageRank Updates This Year

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said on Twitter yesterday that Google won’t be pushing out a new Google Toolbar PageRank update this year. Niels Bosch asked on Twitter if we should expect an update to PageRank before 2014. In response to that, Matt Cutts said, “I would…

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Google Launches Fix To Stop Mugshot Sites From Ranking: Google’s MugShot Algorithm

On Thursday, Google released yet another algorithm update, no – not the Penguin update, but an algorithm to combat mugshot web sites from showing up highly in their search results. In February, Jonathan Hochman wrote a story here named Why Google Should Crack Down Harder On The Mugshot…

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Penguin 5, With The Penguin 2.1 Spam-Filtering Algorithm, Is Now Live

The fifth confirmed release of Google’s “Penguin” spam fighting algorithm is live. That makes it Penguin 5 by our count. But since this Penguin update is using a slightly improved version of Google’s “Penguin 2″ second-generation technology, Google itself is…

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SEO Reporting: It’s Time We Get Away From Minutia & Focus On What Matters

For SEOs, reporting hasn’t exactly been easy over the past few years. How we measure and how we strategize has had to evolve as Google has altered or retired the tools we use or the way search works. We’ve seen five main shifts that have truly changed how we originally measured SEO…

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What The Government Shutdown Means For .gov SEO

As part of the US government shut down, many .gov sites have also shut down, replaced by messages like this: “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available. We sincerely regret this inconvenience.” But one day, the government will start up again and government…

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After Blocking Keywords In Referrers, Now Google Stops Sharing Through Google Webmaster Tools

Last week, Google moved to send all searches through Google SSL Search, setting up the ultimate end of keyword data passed along via referrers non-advertisers. Now, Google’s official alternative channel for this information — Google Webmaster Tools — has also stopped sharing the…

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Google’s Matt Cutts: NoFollow Attributes On Internal Links Don’t Hurt But Generally Don’t Do It

In a video, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts published today Matt answered the question, “Should I use rel=”nofollow” on internal links to a login page?” Matt Cutts basically said you shouldn’t but said it won’t hurt you if you did. Matt said,…

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Hummingbird Takes Flight: SEOs Give Insight On Google’s New Algorithm

On the eve of its 15th birthday last week, Google revealed a new search algorithm named Hummingbird. Designed to be more precise and provide faster query results, the algorithm is based on semantic search, focusing on user intent versus individual search terms. As Search Engine Land’s Danny…

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Google: SEO Problems, Solutions & Wishlists

When I was a little boy, my parents had an effective way of making me behave. They’d warned me that if I was rude, disobedient or messy, the bogeyman would come and get me. I never saw a bogeyman or even knew what one looked like — but my imagination ran wild over this terrifying…

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Google’s Matt Cutts: Google Does Not Penalize For Broken HTML

In a video published today by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts – Google confirmed that they do not penalize sites that have broken or invalid HTML. Matt Cutts said, “so Google does not penalize you if you have invalid HTML, because there would be a huge number of web pages…

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Google May Have Penalized Another Major Link Network: Ghost Rank 2.0

Google has significantly penalized another underground link network over the weekend and we believe that one of the link networks targeted by Google is named Ghost Rank 2.0. A few weeks ago, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, tweeted “Thinking of ghost-related puns for a spam…

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