Every page on your site is indexed in Google, so it has a chance at appearing for a search query relevant to that page. You would think the more pages you add, the more overall chances you’ll have to rank, and get increased visibility. However, as Google’s own Matt Cutts has pointed out on several […]
How Google Handles Rankings for Sites That Go Offline
The question came up whether rankings or a site’s reputation would be affected by being offline for a period of time. How does site being offline affect its reputation. Does it have long term negative effects on site reputation? Aaseesh Marina from Google, one of the hosts of the English/Hindi office hours, responded, and details […]
Should You Change Dates on Evergreen Content for SEO?
In today’s Google Webmaster Hangout, the question came up regarding evergreen content and the dates used on them. This has been a hot topic recently, especially since Google sometimes displays the date in the search results. But does this affect rankings specifically? Does the date of publish on the page affect google rankings? What is […]
Google Entity Metrics: The Role of Entities in SEO
According to the recent Google patent “Ranking Search Results Based On Entity Metrics” an entity is, “a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable.” I wrote a lengthy analysis of the patent on my blog but decided to save the discussion as to what it really means for SEO for this article. […]
Google Penguin Weeks Away, Will Be Part of Core Algo
We have another new Google Penguin status update (and no, it isn’t rolling out now). Gary Illyes responded to a question on Twitter where he was asked about the timeline for the real time Penguin being launched. Illyes responded it is weeks away, which is much better than the other option of months away. He […]
Google Redesigns Google Search Console for Webmasters
If you go to login to Google Search Console, you will discover that the website has a brand new redesign and look, which makes it much easier to find the current information as well as some new pages, including a calendar that lists all Google webmaster related events. Google announced it on the Webmaster Central […]
The Google “Penalty” That is Actually From a Hacked Site
Recently, there has been an increase in the number of webmasters who are reporting that they have lost all Google referral traffic. Normally, when one sees organic referrals from Google drop to zero, the natural assumption is that the site has a site-wide manual action applied. Yet when looking in Google Search Console, there is […]
Google Testing Gray Stars in Ratings, Local & AdWords
Google is testing yet another color of stars in the search results, but I bet many business and website owners won’t be so happy with this one. Here is how it appears in the search results, this one in a local 3-pack. This is also the last color of the collection of star colors that […]
Why SEOs Shouldn’t Trust All Algo Weather Reports & Winner/Loser Lists
There was a pretty active discussion on Twitter earlier today about the accuracy of the so-called “algo winner and loser” lists that many companies publish based on their data…. and how accurate that is. And with sites normally reporting on only the top handful of sites – 10-20 – it is hard to get a […]
Google Algo Changes Aren’t Niche Specific
There has been a lot of discussion on Twitter recently about the latest core update we saw this weekend, and whether it could possibly be niche specific. While some were reporting that it appeared several niche markets were hit, I wondered if the data was skewed since it was limited to top ten results and […]