Archive for the SEO News & Tips Category

Google tends to roll out lots of new features around the holidays, and in November 2017 there were several updates. One of which is going to hurt Amazon’s organic traffic JUST as they begin their Black Friday week. Did Google intentionally do this to Amazon? If you

I’m sick and I just got done making my annual pumpkin pie, so this Thanksgiving Eve I am on the computer. I was doing some poking around at one of the niches I monitor and the change happened literally around 9PM ET 11/22/2017. No, it isn’t the

For many many years, BAD SEO agencies have pushed “disavow” services. While there were indeed legitimate reasons to use them in the past and legitimate consultants disavowing links, some SEO agencies took advantage of the fear factor and sold these services to people who simply did not

According to Talos Intelligence, a banking trojan recently targeted people trying to bank online in India called the Zeus Panda banking Trojan. You can read on their blog all about the attack vector and how it works. I’m a sucker for security blogs but this one in

Every once in a while the “age old” question comes up. Is the age a domain or a website a ranking factor? There are many answers to this question. In this quick article I’ll address the important variables along with my insight and even some opinion. Is

Back in the late 1990s there were only 2 people who caught my attention in the world of SEO and they were Danny Sullivan and Eric Ward. 95% of SEO to me is getting links and putting together great content. I never had an interest in writing

Today, September 21, 2017, I went down the rabbit hole of researching a network of attorney websites who are all linking to themselves using very poorly written content (by someone who obviously doesn’t speak English very well) and I was checking their rankings to see how these

SEO agencies and personal injury lawyers in California who pay attention to who is linking to them in Google Search Console have been discovering a huge surge in backlinks recently beginning in 2017. I believe most of this started around March and surged in June and July.

Late on Thursday, August 3, 2017, Google rolled out a new feature right at the top of search results for “mobile friendly test” queries. Now if you search for Mobile Friendly Test, you’ll see the neat new feature. The new addition saves people like myself a step

You could be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a small business, a partner at a law firm or someone who like to blog about cookies, but if you want your site to rank better in Google search you know that you need links. 15 years

Fiddling with my phone I saw a new feature this past weekend. It came and went a few times which means that Google is testing it out and I happened to hit their servers during the test. The new layout includes a card-like (aka boxed) layout which

On July 5, 2017, Google AdSense released “Native Ads”. The announcement claims that the new suite of ad formats will help ads match the look and feel of a website providing a “great user experience“. The problem with this is, ads which blend in with a website’s

Recently I saw a website taken offline. This was a website which performed extremely well for a variety of highly competitive key phrases. I won’t “out” the site here but I just happen to have screenshots of the site’s performance in Google search up until the day

There is no doubt in my mind that Google is well aware of the authors contributing to sites like Forbes, HuffPost, Engadget and all the others solely to obtain a link. I believe that is what they were hinting at today when they put out an article

A site that I established in 2001 has several popular pages. Over the years, many of the pages accrued hundreds of natural inbound links. I had absolutely nothing to do with these links, they were 100% natural. In fact, I didn’t learn of the source websites linking

Backlinks are a funny thing in Google and they have definitely evolved over the years. They changed in 2016, how, nobody can completely pinpoint. I’d argue that Google engineers themselves can’t totally predict how a certain link will affect rankings. I do know that I have seen

Google’s Answer Boxes, aka Featured Snippets, have been showing up in more and more search results lately, and I’ve been on a binge, obtaining as many of these as possible for clients, trying to steal existing answer boxes and positioning new content for future snippets. In April

InfoWars.com is a website operated by Alex Jones. While I am not a regular reader I am pretty sure that sometimes you will find satire there, a couple stories some people would disagree with, and news that the mainstream media outlets such as CNN simply do not

For some search queries, Google displays a “Top Stories” section above search results, replacing what used to be “In The News”. What is The Google Top Stories News Algorithm? The Google Top Stories News Algorithm determines which articles are displayed in Google’s “Top Stories Carousel” in Google