SEO Techniques

May 29, 2012 •  8:44 am The time stamp on the Google document that answers the question  Can competitors harm ranking?  was updated on May 22nd. Although I swear it was updated a couple months ago and I thought I covered it (maybe I was dreaming, prophecy ;-) ). Now it reads: Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages. Before  it read : There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the...

May 28, 2012 •  8:35 am About a month ago, we polled our readers asking how they were  impacted by  the  Google Penguin  update. We have well over a 1,000 responses and I wanted to share them with you. Keep in mind, those who were negatively impacted are probably more likely to take the poll. That being said, 65% said they were negatively impacted by Penguin, while only 13% said they were positively impacted. This is way more than the Panda update where only  40% said they were negatively impacted  by the Panda update. Again, it depends who takes the poll but huge differences. Note, Panda was a larger update and should have been felt by more sites on the web. But Penguin was likely targeting specific SEO techniques, because it was originally named the over optimization penalty . Forum discussion continued at  Google+ ,  WebmasterWorld ,  DigitalPoint Forums , Cre8asite Forums  and  Google Webmaster Help . This ...

May 26, 2012  For the past few weeks, we have been reporting on speculation in the forums that Google released a Panda refresh. The Penguin 1.1 update is now officially live. All of those speculative posts were down right wrong, according to Google. But Google's Matt Cutts has tweeted  that a Penguin update is now live - the moment many of you have been waiting for. Minor weather report: We pushed 1st Penguin algo data refresh an hour ago. Affects <0.1% of English searches. Personally, I think all those times we reported on Penguin updates - I think those were live tests of what we see now. I think Google was testing this and some webmasters picked up that their sites either recovered or newly hit. Of course, there are many who were under the false understanding that they were hit by Penguin. But for the most part, I believe these were live tests. I can easily be wrong. Those updates were on or about  May 13th ,  May 15th  and last night on ...

May 25, 2012 •  8:26 am Tedster, the administrator at WebmasterWorld, started a thread at  WebmasterWorld  asking if others feel that Google pushed out or is pushing out an update to the  Penguin algorithm . He believes they are due to the increase in discussion in the various forum threads of people claiming recoveries and also new people claiming they were hit. That is the same metric we use to detect and report on possible Google updates - but this time, I am citing Tedster. We thought we saw Penguin updates before, once around  May 13th  and then again around  May 15th  but Google said no, it wasn't Penguin, Panda or anything else. Is this the real Penguin update? Is this version 1.1 of Penguin? I do not know - did you recover? Forum discussion at  WebmasterWorld .

Will the next  Panda update from Google  include a penalty for  over optimization ? That seemed to be the message from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team in a panel discussion at the  South by Southwest Conference  in Austin, Texas this weekend. At a panel discussion titled,  Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!  Cutts hinted that a penalty for “too much SEO” is in the works and could be implemented within a few weeks or months. The idea behind the penalty is to give sites with great content an edge over sites that are merely good at optimization. Google’s Oracle Mention of the new penalties came in response to a question about how mom and pop sites could compete with companies spending thousands of dollar on SEO. Cutts responded by saying that in a perfect world, webmasters wouldn’t need SEO. He then went on to say that while he doesn’t normally pre-announce changes, Google engineers are indeed working on changes that w...

The  Google Penguin Update  is now mainstream after The Wall Street Journal covered it in a feature story named  As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web . The story interviews a few small business owners who were hit hard by the update. One business owner saw his sales drop to $25,000 this month, down from $68,000 the previous month. Another small website owner saw roughly 30% of his traffic disappear over night. And another lost 20% of their traffic. Most of the article goes through small business owners who lives have changed for the worse due to this update. But there are some stories that lead me to believe they are not directly related to Penguin. Again, there were several updates last month – Penguin was happened on the 24th. But there were two Panda refreshes, link network penalties, bugs and many more updates. Even if all those cases were not Penguin related, Penguin is now main stream after hitting a major publication like the Wall Street Journal. Yo...

It’s been about two weeks since Google launched its  Penguin Update . Google’s happy the new spam-fighting algorithm is improving things as intended. But some hurt by it are still wondering how to recover, and there remain concerns about “negative SEO” as a threat. I caught up with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, on these and some related questions. Penguin: “A Success” The goal of any algorithm update is to improve search results. So how’s Penguin been for Google? “It’s been a success from our standpoint,” Cutts said. What About Those Weird Results? Of course, soon after Penguin was released, people quickly started citing  examples of odd results . The official Viagra site wasn’t listed, while hacked sites were. An empty web site was listed for “make money online,” and there were reports of other empty sites ranking well. Scraper sites were reported outranking the sites they scraped. How could Penguin be a success with these types of things happening? Cutts s...

The phrases “white hat” and “black hat” are loaded guns, and we only use them because they’re so ubiquitous. The reality is, when you tell yourself you are a “white hat,” you can end up fooling yourself into thinking that your strategy will habitually work, and Google will not ever turn it back on you. Worse still, you can close your brain off to insights that spectacularly improve business results. Don’t misunderstand us. Ethics are vital. If you don’t currently realise why it’s wholeheartedly vital for SEO to be crystal clear and ethical in the years going forward, take a gaze at what we composed over at seek motor Journal. (Hint: the algorithm is only a very little part of why ethics matter.) But there’s a distinction between ethics and restrictive marks, and if you aren’t discovering anything from “black hats,” you’re probably missing some key insights, like these: 1. Testing is Always Better than Blind Faith Before you head directly to the comment section and write a...

May 16, 2012 •  9:13 am As of yesterday, the  WebmasterWorld  thread and some other forums starting lighting up again with discussion and SEO chatter around Google's search results starting the shuffle and fluctuate. These are typically signs of an update happening in Google. Maybe a Panda or Penguin refresh? Maybe a new Google bug? Maybe a new penalty or an old one being run again? Maybe Google is testing an algorithm or update? Or maybe it is something completely different or people are on crack? I do not know but earlier this week, when I saw similar discussion around this, I asked Google if there was a  Penguin refresh  and they said no. It wasn't Penguin, Panda or anything else. So do I go back to Google and bother asking about yesterday's increase in SEO chatter? Did you notice ranking and traffic changes between Monday and today? Forum discussion at  WebmasterWorld . Image credit to ShutterStock for  brewing pot  - I added Google logo

Google announced 14-may-2012 There are some reports of major shuffling going on in the Google search results as of yesterday. I believe from the reports that it may be a  Penguin  update - but I do not have confirmation from Google on this yet. Update:  A Google spokesperson told me there was no Penguin refresh or update yet. Google said it was not a Panda refresh either and there is no update as far as they are concerned. Interesting...  continuing story below... There are  Webmaster World  threads and if you scan the  Google Webmaster Help  forums you will see tons of threads about ranking changes in the past 24 hours or so. One of the  WebmasterWorld  threads has one guy claiming he recovered from being hit by Penguin. He said yesterday, "I had around 30 sites hit by Penguin on the 24/4, yesterday the first one resurfaced back to number 2 for it's keywords which is encouraging." He even explained what he did to "recover"...

In Google fashion, late on Friday, Google released their now monthly update on the changes they made to Google search over the past month. It is really great that Google does this and this time they shared  53 changes  in April. Here is  last months  update. Below I grouped and listed out the more important changes, at least the ones I find to me most important. But let's try to see which items in this list are  Penguin  related. Can we even figure that out? Penguin Related? Anchors bug fix Keyword stuffing classifier improvement More authoritative results Improvement in a freshness signal No freshness boost for low-quality content Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking If I had to guess, these and maybe more, are all related to the Penguin update. Here are some more that I find important but wouldn't specifically related to Penguin, Panda or others: Ranking Changes: Improvement in a freshness signal. [laun...