We fought off the Panda… We fought off the Penguin… Seriously. We’ve been working for more than a year, and every Google update means we have to go over each piece of what we teach to check for possible changes. But after a year of work, and a bunch of false alarms: White Hat Black [...]
Edge Cases & SEO Consequences: Bad Behavior vs. Cloudflare
May 22, 2012 By 11 Comments
One of our consultant clients pointed this one out to me. It’s a good example of how vitally important it is for SEO consultants to understand how the search engine machine actually works. While troubleshooting a potential Penguin issue for a client, she discovered that the client was using the “Bad Behavior” plugin for WordPress, [...]
Video: Google Penguin Webinar w/ Dan, Leslie, and David Harry
May 17, 2012 By 16 Comments
Forget the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012. The world ended for many businesses — regardless of size — on April 24 when Google announced major changes in their search algorithm, code-named “Penguin”. (A penguin is a flightless marine bird. Don’t let that predict the future of your business!) . Download the [...]
Google Notes of Note: Title Attribute Abuse
May 16, 2012 By 15 Comments
An interesting note from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable today… Barry spotted a thread over on the Google Webmaster Help forums, where Googler John Mueller (aka JohnMu) noted that a particular site had approximately 3 metric tons of text stuffed into title attribute of links, and said: To our algorithms, that might look [...]
Hit By Penguin? Take the Red Pen Test
May 11, 2012 By 124 Comments
Like a lot of folks in the SEO world, I’ve been analyzing, dissecting, and pondering the significant changes that Google made in April 2012 – from Panda to Penguin and a lot of little things in between. Leslie and I have the good fortune to work with hundreds of clients in our training and coaching [...]
Quick Penguin Updates – What We Learned This Week
May 11, 2012 By 2 Comments
Just some quick notes to keep you up to date. More coming, but the East coast folks are already demanding the answers that I promised to give today, so… Penguin = Periodic Updates: Google did confirm what most SEOs assumed… Penguin, like Panda, involves an offline data processing function, which means that there will be [...]
Penguin Cases of Interest: Twin Studies
May 3, 2012 By 20 Comments
Like a lot of folks in the SEO world, I’ve been looking at sites which were “hit” by Google’s Penguin update. At this point, I have done a detailed analysis of the first 7 cases (involving a total of 9 sites) on my list. In six of the seven, I have found what I could [...]
Understanding the Facebook Like Button: Not All Likes Are Equal
May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
That darned “Like” button is everywhere these days… Matt Inman, famously of The Oatmeal web comic, and less famously (also formerly) of SEOMoz, lampooned the excesses of like-mongering in his own hilarious way, just a few weeks ago. That’s some serious funny. What may be not so funny for marketers, is how much opportunity they [...]
How to Retweet on Twitter – No, Seriously!
May 1, 2012 By 3 Comments
Okay, look – I know what you’re thinking.. “Dan Thies has lost his mind, and started building eHow-style doorway pages.” No. I promise. Here’s the thing… Most people using Twitter – and sadly, especially, marketers – do not understand how the way you retweet impacts what happens down the line. So indulge me for just [...]
Adwords Alert: Changes to Ad Rotation Coming Next Week
May 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Google has announced, on even shorter notice than usual, that they will be changing something. If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you know that every Adwords advertiser should be testing their ads. One of the most critical parts of running any ad test, is the ad rotation settings in your campaign – if [...]
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