Search Engine Optimization Posts - Page 16 of 35 - Bill Hartzer

Moving to HTTPS for a Better Search Engine Ranking

Posted on August 7, 2014 Written by Bill Hartzer

Due to Google’s recent official announcement that an https site is a search engine ranking factor, I’ve decided to move my site, BillHartzer.com, to https from http. Just to see if I can get a better rankings for the pages on my website. Currently, I do not accept any sort of payment for the content that I write here on my site, so that’s not the reason I’m moving the site from http to https.

Trust is the biggest factor in my decision to change from http to https, and that’s one major way you can get a higher visibility in web search. My web host, HostDime, offers secure certificates at a very reasonable rate, which is $30 per year for a basic certificate. It’s good for www and non-www. [Read more…]

Google Authorship Statistics Have Been Removed

Posted on August 4, 2014 Written by Bill Hartzer

I am not sure if this is something that has been done on purpose or not, but Google has removed the Google Authorship stats that were previously available in Google Webmaster Tools.

The page, which was previously located here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/labs-author-stats-1 is now showing a 404 error:

[Read more…]

Danny Goodwin Leaving Search Engine Watch as Editor

Posted on July 31, 2014 Written by Bill Hartzer

Danny Goodwin, the Editor of Search Engine Watch, is leaving Incisive Media. Mr. Goodwin has been at Search Engine Watch since 2007, and is going to work for LinkDex. This was first announced on Webcology this afternoon on WebmasterRadio.FM. [Read more…]

Industry Spam Rings Plague Google Local, Cause Problems

Posted on July 30, 2014 Written by Bill Hartzer

Google Local, now known officially as Google My Business, has to deal with what they call “industry spam rings”, which are plaguing Google’s local listings like a virus. And as a result, they’ve changed their internal policies in order to deal with these industry spam rings. Google is, in some cases, manually going to a location to confirm the NAP data and make sure that they serve customers at that location.

I recently met with an unidentified source who is very familiar with the inner workings at Google Local. He explained to me that Google is ver aware of “industry spam rings”. That’s the exact words that the Google employees have called this issue. The industries involved in the industry spam rings are: [Read more…]

Google Irrelevant Keywords Section In Quality Guidelines

Posted on July 26, 2014 Written by Bill Hartzer

Google added the “Irrelevant keywords” section to the sidebar of the Google Quality Guidelines. This section, called “Irrelevant keywords“, details the practice of keyword stuffing, and gives specific types of examples of where it is being used today is worth noting.

As you can see in the previous sidebar of the Google Quality Guidelines section of Google’s support, there was no page titled “Irrelevant keywords”: [Read more…]

Is It Safe to Pay a Bookmarking Site to Remove Links with PayPal?

Posted on July 17, 2014 Written by Bill Hartzer

That’s actually a great question. Someone recently entered that question into Google and, because I’ve written about link removals before, they found my blog. So, I decided to go ahead and answer that question. I’m sure there are others that would like to know if it’s safe to do so.

[Read more…]

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