Google apparently can’t publicly make up their mind as to whether or not the link search operator works or not. About a year ago I noticed that the link search operator (e.g., link:billhartzer.com) wasn’t working reliably for any website. At that time, Google’s Gary Illyes said that that “short answer is no”, implying that they didn’t remove it. But now, about a year later, Google’s John Mueller said not to use it. [Read more…]

If you’ve taken advantage of Google’s Disavow Tool to disavow backlinks to a website, it’s quite possible that you may not be seeing any results. The whole idea of the disavow tool is to tell Google that there are certain links to your website that you don’t want them to count when they are calculating the Google algorithm. It’s can be helpful to use the disavow too to upload a disavow file if you can’t get rid of certain low quality links to the website. But, if you don’t do it correctly, you may not see any movement in search engine rankings. Here are several reasons why you may not see any results after uploading a disavow file. [Read more…]

Robert Fisher recently asked a question over at Moz regarding the use of CDNs to potentially hide a link network. In the past, there has been (and currently is still) an issue regarding linking websites together that are hosted on the same Class C Blocks of IPs. Essentially, if you own several websites, they’re hosted on the same server, then they will be on the same Class C Block of IP addresses. So, the search engines can easily see that you most likely own all those sites linked together by looking at the sites’ IP addresses. [Read more…]