Bill Hartzer Weekly Update – December 7, 2014

Domain Name SEO Search Engine Registration scam, Google SERPs Instagram Date Mistake, 7Search Accused of Traffic Stealing.

Last week was a very short week because of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the USA, so I decided not to send an update. There are a few significant updates since then, including two Google Penguin updates, and a few other posts worth mentioning.

Domain SEO Service Registration Scam

Recently I’ve received a few notices from a Chinese company saying that my domain name won’t have as much visibility unless I pay them $64. First they say it’s for SEO but then they say it’s for search engine submission. Not sure what it’s for, really. Nonetheless, it’s a scam.

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/domain-seo-service-registration-corp-domain-registration-scam/

Google Search Results (SERPs) say Post was in 1970
Google’s search results say that a post from Instagram was posted in 1970 but it was really done a few months ago. Not sure where they’re getting the date.

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/google-serps-say-instagram-post-made-1970/

7Search Accused of Traffic Stealing
7Search, a Pay Per Click Search Engine and Affiliate Network, has been accused of traffic stealing in eye-opening research paper titled Understanding the Dark Side of Domain Parking. The paper is worth reading if you park any of your domain names. Interestingly enough, Google or Yahoo!, major players in the domain parking space, were not even mentioned.

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/7search-others-accused-traffic-stealing-research-paper/

Google Penguin Updates
Since my last update, we’ve seen two significant Google Penguin refreshes or “updates” that could have affected your site’s traffic. One was on November 27th, and the other was on December 4th. Turns out that one site I work on was hit very hard on October 18th, and I started right away cleaning up the site’s links. I immediately did a disavow of the bad links, then started cleaning up the links. The site bounced back on December 4th, and I’m confident that the link cleanup and Disavow file did the trick.

I’m hoping that Google is going to finally integrate the Google Penguin updates into the algorithm and turn them into rolling updates.

When Was Your Last SEO Audit?
I can’t believe we’re already into the holiday season. I always recommend having an SEO audit done on your website at least once a year–and the holiday season is a great time to get that done. For non-ecommerce sites, traffic tends to be slower and it’s a great time to get it done. Feel free to get in touch with me if you’d like to talk about getting an SEO Audit done before the end of the year.

That’s it for this week. I usually send an update weekly, unless there is some sort of “big news” or issue that comes up that warrants an update.