After webmasters were scrambling to make their sites secure with Google’s announcement that using https would give those sites a ranking boost, John Mueller states that using https will not visibly increase your rankings. In a Google Webmaster Help Office Hours, the question about https as a ranking boost came up. I wouldn’t expect any […]
Archives for September 2014
End of an Era: Yahoo Closing the Yahoo Directory
Any old school SEO will remember the days when a Yahoo Directory listing was really important. And while not many still submitted sites regularly to the directory, it still has a place in many SEO’s hearts. But Yahoo has announced that they will be closing the Yahoo Directory later this year. Yahoo announced on their […]
Large Popups on Websites Could Trigger Page Layout Algorithm Penalty
This will be good news for surfers but bad news for marketers employing this tactic – sites that display large popups as soon as a visitor loads a site could trigger the above the fold layout algorithm penalty. “When we look at the page layout, we look at what we crawl with Googlebot,” says John […]
New Google Panda Algorithm Rolling Out, Ranks Small & Medium Sites Higher
Google has confirmed that they are slowly rolling out a new Panda algorithm update, the first one since the 4.0 update that happened back on May 20, 2014. The latest Panda algo began slowly rolling out this week with plans for it to continue rolling out until sometime next week. Pierre Far from Google states […]
In-Depth Articles Significantly Increased in Google Search Results
Mozcast has noticed a pretty significant jump in the number of in-depth articles being displayed in the Google Search results. Looking at Mozcast data, there was a dip on September 9th before it increased to 12.7% the following day. However, the September 25, 2014 jump went up by 30%, with in-depth articles now being shown […]
10 Ways to Make the Most of Attending or Speaking at an SEM Conference
Part 4 in a series. Parts 1 (SEM Conferences: Reflections at the Crossroads), part 2 (Dying Hard or Hardly Dying? The Economic Viability of Live Digital Conferences) and part 3 (21 Non-Obvious SEM Conference Takeaways) here. Here are the remaining ten hopefully unusual insights from the past 12 years of conference-going. This list isn’t directed […]
Google Tracking Number of Phone Calls Made via Google My Business
A great addition to Google My Business is a feature that shows the number of times a business is phoned from a Google My Business (GMB) listing. Owen Kane was the first to spot the addition. Google is getting the data by tracking clicks made on the phone number, so businesses that tend to be […]
Search Engine Marketers Have Become Tools of Their Tools
I live about 10 miles from Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau wrote the bulk of Walden, one of the most famous non-fiction books written by an American author. Thoreau’s book was published in 1854, but it still offers lots of key lessons for search engine marketers today. For example, Thoreau wrote in Chapter 1, […]
How did Google Discover the Private Blog Networks?
Google is in the process of a massive penalty sweep targeting many Private Blog Networks (PBNs) where they have been applying penalties and deindexing sites that are utilizing PBNs. Private blog networks (PBN) get their name because they are generally controlled by a single person or company and are supposedly harder to trace. But with the […]
21 Non-Obvious SEM Conference Takeaways
Part 3 in a series. Parts 1 (SEM Conferences: Reflections at the Crossroads) and 2 (Dying Hard or Hardly Dying? The Economic Viability of Live Digital Conferences) here. Now you’ve heard about why the conference world might be changing, and also why the conferences remain important. Now for the fun. What have I learned at […]