Archive for the SEO News & Tips Category

In November 2018, Yelp changed their algorithm, also known as their “recommendation software”. Millions of Yelp reviews were lost in what one Yelp representative called the “Yelp Purge of 2018”. Yelp filtering reviews is nothing new, but the way Yelp filters which reviews are prominently displayed as

Update 12/18/2018: I believe I have discovered why some reviews are being filtered in a new way. Please refer to this updated article: The Yelp Review Purge of 2018. A client of mine who checks his Yelp rankings monthly at the end of the month contacted me

Below is a recap of some of my observations on Google algorithm updates throughout November 2018. November 1, 2018 On October 31, 2018, some webmasters saw fluctuations in search results. A few people wanted to name this the Halloween update, but I don’t think that came to

A Branded Backlink is a link from one website to another that uses your brand name as the anchor text. Branded backlinks are usually a company name, person name or blog name, like when the website Pepsi.com gets a link for “Pepsi”. Are Branded Backlinks good to

As time goes on, Google and other search engines are getting better at evaluating the overall “quality” of a website. However, the overall quality of a site is indeed the sum of all of the pages on a site. This is common knowledge in the world of

On September 27, 2018, many webmasters experienced a gain or loss of traffic after the latest Google Algorithm Update. This was another “quality update” in an effort to provide better search results to people searching the Internet. While the algorithm is not perfect and it has indeed

I recently wrote a large article about the August 1 2018 algorithm update. While nobody in the SEO industry really knows precisely what is going on, I did nail down several key issues which all pertain to “content quality”. Also called the “medic” update, the algorithm change

I just wrapped up an article about website “metrics” called Good “Metrics” Do Not Mean Valuable Backlinks. I wrote that because I am constantly hearing about “Domain Authority” when people are evaluating backlinks, as if this magic number between 1-100 is the sole metric to evaluate a

Sometimes when people are looking for a backlink, they’ll try to evaluate the value of the link by looking at the source website’s “metrics”. Metrics many people in the SEO industry use include Citation Flow, Domain Authority, Trust Flow, Spam Score, Page Authority, Alexa Rank, PageRank, Authority

On Tuesday, August 28, 2018, President Donald Trump announced that Google search results for “Trump News” displays mostly news stories which are bad. Is this true? Yes and No. In case you missed it, here’s what Trump tweeted: Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the

During the first week of August 2018, many bloggers and other website owners were dismayed to discover that they had received a 20% – 75% reduction in traffic due to decreased visibility in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages. In short, they had lost their rankings. Searching for

It’s a conversation that seems to come up about once a year. People ask me something along the lines of one of these two questions: “Does linking out somehow reduce the seo value of a website or web page?” or, “Should I NoFollow outbound links on my

Google released an update to their Quality Rater Guidelines on July 20, 2018.Here’s how they’ll help you. You can get them here: Download them from Google here. Download them from our mirror here. What are the Quality Rater Guidelines? Google hires “quality raters”, people who visit websites

On August 1, 2018 and August 2, 2018, many webmasters around the globe felt the effects of Google’s latest “broad core” algorithm update. The update may have began rolling out on July 27th and is continuing throughout the first week of August. Page posted: 8/4/2018 Page last

There were several significant changes in Google’s search engine results in July 2018, including a mid-sized algorithm update. Both the algorithm change and other tweaks to the Google algorithm positively impacted some sites and negatively impacted even more. Tweaks to the algorithm Almost every time someone contacts

Are the Fake Reviews in Google worse than Fake News? One law firm thinks so and believes that users are becoming innocent victims. Google is ignoring the spam reports and leaving fake reviews up for everyone to see. One of my clients has a competitor who has

On July 27, 2018, I received a notification from Google that my Google Bulletin account was now live. I went on Twitter and found people in India and Denmark tweeting about the new Bulletin feature as well. Considering the small size of the town I am in,

On July 9, 2018, Google began rolling out the latest change to the way Google ranks websites. Google named this update the “Speed Update”. Over the years I’ve been asked many times about page speed and site speed and I’ve stated it here on this blog numerous

On July 1, 2018, a new wave of messages went out from Google to webmasters who have Google Search Console configured, previously called Google Webmaster Tools. These messages have been going out to website owners for a while now, but this appears to have been a major

You heard it here first: There is a new feature in Google’s mobile search results that came out a week or two ago. This feature highlights additional locations for multi-location businesses.  I call it “Other Locations For” as the carousel feature shows, well, other locations for a