Top Industry News

• 6 Tips to Improve Your Title Tags
  If you're looking to tighten up your on-page SEO, title tags are a great place to start... Read More
• Cool Tools & Plugin Help You Run Better A/B Split Tests
  Conversion optimization has risen to prominence in the last couple years... Read More
• WordPress Complicates Google Authorship Markup
  Back a couple of months ago, I wrote a post For Internet Marketing Ninjas detailing... Read More
• Is the Link "Followed"?
  This is one of the most frequent questions I get in my email inbox. Obviously... Read More
• Make Your Content Multi Task
  Most people have more than one single responsibility at work. For a lot of us... Read More

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SEO Tip of the Month

This month saw a series of changes which increase the importance of being natural and looking natural when it comes to your SEO strategy. Beyond just that, it is important to really look at quality signals in the future and doing easy things to send quality indicators to Google, such as:

• Setting up author in webmaster tools
• Setting up profiles on various networks to build citations for your site and brand across the web
• Making your engagement in social look natural
• Keeping your backlink profile natural looking

Here is a breakdown of some of the months biggest developments:

Panda update
A new iteration of the Panda update, which was uniquely announced with just a tweet: "Panda refresh rolling out now. Only ~1.6 of queries noticeably affected. Background on Panda goo.gl/mTKCH". This update was also referred to in the recent 50 pack update, "High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements...we've pushed updated data for "Panda," as we mentioned in a recent tweet. We've also made improvements to keep our database fresher overall...." Keep in mind this iteration was more of a "refresh" than an update. Since this change, coincided with the other updates, if you recently saw your traffic negatively impacted be sure to disqualify '50 pack' search updates and the blog network deindexing as possible factors.

Blog network shutdown
A blog network shutdown that started with the popular link building network, buildmyrank.com. The interesting thing about this one is that only buildmyrank.com has openly admitted that they were affected by these changes. Of course in light of recent developments like the webmaster tools 'unnatural backlink' warning and the threat of an over optimization penalty, this news is much less shocking. During this wave of change, it's key to focus on the importance of a holistic internet marketing strategy and the importance of emerging ranking factors.

50 Pack
And of course the "50 Pack Update" In Google's official announcement, here are some of the line items that stood out:

Backlink Anchor Text

• Tweaks to handling of anchor text...This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links)...
• Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We've improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text...

Author Rank

• "Better indexing of profile pages...This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites."

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Cool Ninja Tools Worth Playing With

On a lighter note, we have some cool tools to share. We've done some neat updates to the Find Broken Links, Redirects & Google Sitemap Generator Free Tool, if you haven't checked it out, give it a spin. Also, if you're sick of the spam attack you get when you use IP checkers, bookmark ours, it's ad free . We also released a freakin' awesome loadtime speed test tool. It has an awesome UI and it even lets you compare two pages, which I don't think any other tool on the market does.