If you are an SEO (or an SEO Consultant like me), then you should be familiar with Google’s Disavow Tool. Essentially you can upload a text file list of URLs or domain names that are linking to your website, telling them to disavow or ignore those links or all links from a certain domain name. But most of the time, we’ll disavow those links in Google but totally forget about uploading the same disavow file to Bing, as well. You’ve done all the work finding the links to disavow, identifying bad and toxic links, so why not upload the list to Bing as well? [Read more…]
How to Stop Lifehacker.com and Reddit.com Fake Google Analytics Referral Traffic
In the past week, you probably have noticed that there is referral traffic from Lifehacker.com that is showing up in Google Analytics. You could also be seeing traffic from one particular Reddit.com URL. This is, in fact, fake, spam, or “ghost” traffic that you should ignore. The only purpose of it is to get you to visit one of those sites, typically trying to get you to copy/paste the URL and visit the website. [Read more…]
Google Bug Causes False Date To Show in Search Results
A bug in the Google’s search engine is causing false, old dates to appear in front of websites listed in their search results. This, in turn, is causing drops in traffic. Some are also reporting ranking drops, as well. [Read more…]
Should You Implement Google AMP?
Back in February 2016, I wrote about Google’s new project, called Accelerated Mobile Pages, and how you can install a WordPress Plugin called the Google AMP plugin. The whole idea is to provide a new web format so that mobile users can view content that loads really quickly, even with a slow internet (mobile) connection. Initially targeted towards news publishers like Practical Ecommerce, we’re seeing a lot more public adoption of this new web standard. Google AMP is not just for news publishers anymore. [Read more…]
Google Launches Allo App – Tough to Find in The App Store
Google just launched a new smart messaging app called Allo. This app is certainly interesting–but do we really need yet another messaging app? After all, Apple just introduced a whole lot of new features of their built-in iOS messaging (imessage) when they launched iOS 10 just last week. [Read more…]
Google Launches Google Analytics Demo Account, Includes Referral Spam
I applaud Google for launching a Google Analytics demo account, which anyone (with a Google Account) can access. Now we can use a real, live, Google Analytics account to play around with and look at the data. Quite often, it’s difficult to learn all of the Google Analytics features because some websites (in your Google Analytics account) may not have that feature. So this is all good. But there’s only one problem: even Google’s own demo account includes referral spam. [Read more…]