Quality Guidelines Re-Write Shows Anchor Text Is Out?

Formerly Google were known for their ‘as many links as you can’ metrics in order to provide the signals that they required to justify ranking a website within their search engine results but following continued progression towards cleaning up their organic results, Google have once again made a firm stand in their mission to guide […]

6 Google Analytics Custom Dashboards To Save You Time NOW!

top google analytics dashboardsNed Poulter talks about the 6 most useful Google Analytics Custom Dashboards he has discovered. Read his post to find out how to get the most out of your GA today.

Post from on State of Search
6 Google Analytics Custom Dashboards To Save You Time NOW!

Ten ways to know what features the media will be covering

mediaMost people can guess what makes news, but I had a request this week asking how you know what features are coming up. So, building on article I wrote for State of Search almost a year ago now, here are 10 good places to start. Some publications still publish features lists/editorial calendars, mostly for the read more »

Post from on State of Search
Ten ways to know what features the media will be covering

New Spam Technique Overwhelms Google

In 2009 I wrote about “Percolation Theory and the Web”, in which I noted that “Percolation Theory holds that in every system there must be a threshold point, a value Pc where things change.” I believe we have just crossed such a threshold point with a fairly common news Website tactic that is now being abused by people in the search marketing community. I began to notice old articles appearing in Search Engine Land’s daily “SearchCap” articles some time ago. A few days ago they ran an article mentioning the problem has begun to boil over on Google News. The Perpetual Update Spam Trick News Web sites have to deal with the challenge of keeping information fresh while making their articles searchable. The compromise they have settled upon for years is to add update blocks to their articles. This practice has spread to non-news sites (you can even find articles on SEO Theory where I have added date-stamped updates). This is, in my opinion, a fine practice and one I hope will continue (at least until we have a new mix of content publishing and search-indexing technologies to work with). But lately it seems like people have struck upon the […]

In Memoriam: Ilya Segalovich, Search Engine Pioneer, Leader & Visionary

Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, was disconnected from life support on July 27. During routine cancer treatment, he unexpectedly slipped into a coma earlier in the week from which he did not recover. I had the honor of knowing Ilya personally. In addition…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google Changes How AdWords Quality Score Is Reported

In a post today, Google announced it is updating the way AdWords quality scores are reported. The changes will roll-out globally over the next few days. The updates are designed to “tie your 1-10 numeric Quality Score more closely to its three key sub factors – expected clickthrough…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google Warns Against Large-Scale Guest Posting, Advertorials & “Optimized Anchor Text” In Press Releases

Google has quietly updated the link schemes document under their Webmaster guidelines to add large-scale guest posting, advertorials and optimized anchor text in articles or press releases to the list of types of links that violate their guidelines. Th…