I'm a big Google fan - my wife often sleeps in their t-shirts, I speak on panels with Googlers all the time and I've even got a Google water bottle for working out (which happens all of once a month these days). However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I'm shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO and technology industries who haven't realized this. ...
Our web index, Linkscape, updated again recently, and in addition to provide the traditional stats, we thought we'd share some of the cutting edge research work we do here. Below, you'll find a post which requires extremely close and careful reading. Correlation data doesn't have all the answers, but it's certainly very interesting. Likewise, the ra...
The last 3 months have heralded a bevy of new tests and features from Google's search results, and it's worth taking a review of the most frequent of these and examining what it potentially holds for optimization of the future. The new results types include: Growth of Rich Text Snippets Internal Anchor Links Page-Specific "Sitelinks&qu...
Freshness seems important, but what signals does Google use to determine freshness? Do the spiders pay attention to on-page signals, such as dates in body content or URLs? I thought it might be fun to try and find out.
We've heard a lot of speculation lately about the future of rankings – the SERPs are clearly evolving, and what was once a simple list of 10 results has gradually become personalized, localized, and wikified. It begs the question: As the SERPs diversify, do rankings matter as much as they used to?
The blog post - PageRank Sculpting - from the head Google's Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide: So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave...
Google Authorization is a topic which crops up a fair amount in our day-to-day search wanderings. Not really because clients are asking if we're authorized but more because they always claim that previous SEO companies they received pitches from claimed to be Google Authorized SEO consultants. Unfortunately (fortunately?!) no such certification exists so we have to set them straight....
After my post last night and the many follow ups from around the SEO sphere, I (along with most observers from the world of search) strongly anticipated clarifying statements from Google's representatives at the SMX Advanced conference. Unfortunately, there's very little to report. The best I have comes from secondary sources, albeit relatively trustworthy ones:
Today's article from Search Engine Land: Google Loses "Backwards Compatibility" on Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting is a must read, but it's frustratingly hard to understand Google's position shift on the topics. In this post I'll talk briefly about ...
Last week I gave the keynote presentation at SMX Munich, Lessons Learned Building an Index of the WWW. In that presentation, I shared a great deal of data from our web index as well as some SEO tips based on our experience replicating many search engine activities (crawling, indexing, building a link graph, de-duplicatio...
Hello, my name is Tom, you've seen me guest blog here before but today I'm blogging and ill. So I'm going to dispense with the usual chit-chat approach and lay out the facts. Some of you may even like it that way! Shame on you. Still, here's the content.
Tonight, as I was writing another blog post, I started working on a graphic that probably deserves a post and discussion of its own. Below is my personal opinion of how some of the key factors in Google's ranking system have changed through the years I've been in SEO: ...
Hello, I'm here today to talk about Google penalties. There's much talk and confusion in the SEO industry about penalties. We're always seeing in Q&A questions like: Do I have a penalty? Why do I have a penalty? How can I get rid of my penalty? ...
For many in the SEO field, Google's "sandbox," a filter the search quality team created to help fight spam, is a relic of days gone by. However, we've been spotting new cases over the last few years, and I finally found a great example to share publicly (and got permission from the site owner). Grader.com, and the four subdomains underneath it - Twitter.Grader.com, PressRelease.Grader.com, Website.Grader.com & Facebook.Grader.com - are all under pronounced effects that highlight this algorithmic element's impact.
