The latest SEO Industry news, notes, and chat.
I couldn’t decide if I should call this post Can You Penalize a Site in Google buy Buying Spammy Links to it? or Getting to #1 by banning everyone above you. Last week, some people decided that they didn’t like Dan Thies (even though I’ve always thought he was a great guy….his book Search Engine Fast Start was required reading for our ninjas for years…and I’ve learned a lot from…
Jim’s thoughts on the Google Over Optimization Webspam Update Google’s updating, look for a few minutes, then get back to work. The sky really isn’t falling, Google’s just going through some growing, and we might have to feel some of the pains. Lee point over to Matt Cutts, where Matt mentions: …we are constantly working to improve our algorithms and scoring. Some changes are hardly noticed at all. Some changes…
Several years ago when I started learning about search engine optimization (SEO) in detail, the emphasis was always fundamentally to improve a website for the human visitor. A site owner should strive to provide great content, make the content easily found, and in the spirit of the web, link out to other resources to further enhance the user’s experience in searching for information. This approach to site design obviously had…
The 40 changes that Google announced last week are a little of what SEO dreams are made of. Not the changes themselves necessarily, which in some cases are significant, but it’s largely exciting for the insights they give. The peek we get behind the curtain in posts like this or like when we got 23 questions to help determine the quality of our content, are a little bit thrilling, at…
Yesterday Search Engine Land reported confirmation from Google that Panda 3.2 happened about a week ago. After a fairly long break it seemed another change was imminent at some point. But what’s interesting about this report is that Google noted this as a “data refresh”. So what does that mean? Well, some individuals in Webmasterworld reported seeing a rebound in traffic around the time frame of the 3.2 update. Of…
I have Google Adsense on some websites I own…and each month I get messages in my adsense account that look just like this….scroll down to see their email they send me every month…. Back to Jim’s Rant: This is just deplorable in the age of the Google Panda Updates! How can Google still hand out advice telling me to add 3 ad units to all my pages, and to use…
A while ago, while on a flight somewhere, I forget where now, I picked up a book titled The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing by Jeffery W. Hayzlett. You know those little airport micro bookstores where you try to kill part of your 3 hour layover, yeah, one of those. This particular book was about measuring the health of your business. Basically, it talked about how there are…
By Ninja Bonnie Machine learning is using a computer to recognize patterns in data, to then make predictions about new data, based on the pattern recognized or learned from prior chosen training datasets. One of the ways that Google uses machine learning algorithms in search is to analyze historical data from the logs they keep to analyze and to predict likely future outcomes of search behavior and the satisfaction level…
I was on my way home tonight listening to an old mix CD I have when I heard an old Hank Williams Jr song called “Country Boy Can Survive.”…. and since my mind is so immersed in this Google Panda Update…I started playing with the lyrics for fun… I ended up reworking the lyrics…and it ended up being a song to the 12 sites that we’re working with that have…
Google Panda Update: Content + Design = Usable, trustworthy websites I stole the headline “Content + Design = Usable, trustworthy websites” from Chris Trude‘s comment in a thread by Derek Halpern of Social Triggers. Derek wrote a great post, where he talks about a study in which people were asked to search and then record if they trusted or distrusted the sites they found… and if they distrusted those sites,…
Let’s Learn Agent Rank and Reputational Scores…it’s about Content and Writers and Panda. So here we are, almost 3 months since the “Big” Panda Poop of Feb 24th…and still, no light at the end of the tunnel for those who got pooped on by the Panda Update. It’s 1:40am…and I still have a few posts in my head, and I can’t sleep until I get at least one of them…