Wix.com recently spent a lot of money on a Super Bowl ad during Super Bowl LIII to promote how easy it is to use Wix to create a website. While I appreciate them mentioning SEO and getting good search results, the way it’s being promoted is deceiving. Furthermore, the showcase website in the ad is a horrible example of an optimized website. [Read more…]
The search marketing industry, providing search engine ranking or search engine marketing or digital marketing type services to website owners, is, give or take a year or two, about 20 years old now. It has certainly changed over the years, and in my experience as an SEO since the 1990s, I’ve seen all the changes. SEO ethics is an issue SEOs have wrestled with over the years. It’s still time for an SEO code of ethics. But we certainly don’t need the SEO Police. [Read more…]
One of the jobs of a technical SEO or tech SEO is to dig into a site’s code and find issues that are causing ranking or other types of search engine related issues. A good technical SEO understands code and SEO enough that they can help diagnose most search engine ranking issues that are self-inflicted. Some issues are related to search engine rankings but there are issues that are unrelated to search engine rankings. For example, typically date issues aren’t related to actual search engine rankings–it’s just how your blog post, for example, shows up in the search engine result pages (SERPs). [Read more…]
We all know that links are a must if you’re going to get good search engine rankings. Google’s algorithm has been centered around links to websites for years. In fact, since the beginning, links for ranking in Google have been important. And as Gary Illyes once admitted, they tried testing the Google organic search engine algorithm without links. And apparently that didn’t work out so well. So, you still need links to rank well in Google’s natural search results. [Read more…]
There is a new type of virtually undetectable type of negative SEO attack that I discovered. This type of negative SEO attack is a particularly nasty type of attack, as it’s virtually undetectable by you (if you are a victim of the negative SEO). It takes advantage of a fairly new tag (the canonical tag) that search engines like Google and Bing support–but uses it in a very mischievous way. In fact, as a technical SEO myself, having practiced organic SEO for 20 years, I normally wouldn’t have been able to spot this type of negative SEO attack on my client’s web site. But, just like a lot of criminals out there, they can be sloppy, which ultimately lead to this negative SEO attack being discovered. [Read more…]
There is a lot of really, really bad SEO (search engine optimization) advice out there, some worse than others. Luckily we have Googlers like John Mueller and Danny Sullivan that take the time to dispell some of the rumors out there. For example, John Mueller recently did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit, which was great. But then again, there are places where people give SEO advice and they have absolutely no business giving that advice. In fact, they can even spread the rumors further, making it even worse SEO advice. Here’s a perfect example. [Read more…]