Ignite Visibility and John Lincoln produced one of the first SEO Movies, a documentary about the SEO industry. Well, since I stared doing SEO back in 1996, well before SEO was called “SEO”, I certainly was interested in seeing this SEO movie. I have a bunch of comments after seeing it. It’s certainly one of the first SEO movies, and I commend the producer for putting it together. [Read more…]
If you remove a URL from a disavow file it could take some time before you see actual results in the search results. I asked John Mueller and Gary Illyes from Google about removing a URL from your disavow file, and whether or not we need to wait until the URL is crawled again. [Read more…]
Internal linking on your own website is powerful. When you link to another relevant page on your website, your giving your readers and website visitors a chance to click on over to another page. Another page on your website that they might be interested in. Because it’s relevant to what they’re reading, what you’re talking about. Internal linking, in context, is powerful. And, so much so, that Facebook is encouraging internal linking to other Facebook pages. [Read more…]
At the Engage 2017 Portland conference on March 9th, 2017, I had the pleasure of presenting a technical SEO session with Jon Henshaw from Raven Internet Marketing Tools titled “Improving SEO and User Experience – The Technical Side”. My presentation is embedded below, along with transcribed notes, courtesy of Slideshare. [Read more…]
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…]
You already know that links to your web pages are very important, but you may be overlooking something. Too often, the links for the home page aren’t in place. You want the search engines to know that your home page is the core foundation of your website. That is why the process of getting your internal linking correct is vital. The first step here is to link to your real home page. [Read more…]
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, isn’t dead. In fact, SEO, optimizing your website for the search engines and search in general, continues to be alive and well–and has gotten a lot harder over the past few years. So maybe that’s why we’ve heard so many people declare that SEO is dead. Technical SEO, with all of the technical changes, requirements, updates, and issues like mobile friendliness, responsive design, AMP pages, and page load speed, has become a complex web that is increasingly difficult to navigate. Should you hire an SEO Consultant or an SEO Agency?
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…]
I ran across an interesting conversation on Twitter, started by Ashley and her tweet: “Sign my petition to get all SEOs to stop using the term “link juice”.”
Do you think that the term “link juice” is gross? Does it relay un-professionalism in the SEO community? Well, let’s first take a look at a definition of “link juice” and what it means, according to Woorank: [Read more…]
About one year ago, last August 2014, I moved this site from HTTP to HTTPs, and several weeks afterwards I updated the status of traffic, page views, and time on site. Several weeks after moving I some pretty good results, which I believe was a result of my moving from HTTP to HTTPs. A year later, let’s look at what I’ve accomplished over the past year, and if we can tell if it was worth it to move. [Read more…]
As a US Brand Ambassador for Majestic.com, you probably already know that I’m a big fan of their product, and use it on a daily basis. And as I use it, I am always coming up with new, innovative ways to use the Majestic data. It’s not just about seeing what links are pointing to your website. You can, for example, use Majestic to analyze your disavow file before you submit it. Here is why you would want to do that, and how to review your disavow file. [Read more…]
Wow, how times have changed. The search engine optimization industry has changed. And I bet it will continue to change and evolve as it has been over the years. Did you know that half of the search engine optimization techniques that were used only 5 years ago (maybe even 3 years ago) are now considered to be spam? Most of those SEO techniques are now listed in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as being unacceptable. The are grounds for an algorithmic penalty or even worse: a manual penalty from Google. [Read more…]
As you probably know by now, one of the search engine optimization services that I am heavily involved in is cleaning up low quality links to websites. If your website has been hit by any of the Google Penguin algorithm updates, then most likely you have links pointing to your website from a low quality directory. One of those low quality link directories is shown below, in a screen shot.
One directory owner, though, is cashing in on link removals. That directory owner is charging $975, nearly $1,000 dollars, to remove all the links to a website in his 1800 directories. And he charges $5 a link. [Read more…]
Today, as I was browsing the web for some Super Bowl XLIX Advertising insights to post here on my blog, I came across one of the advertisers’ websites, Papa John’s. While looking at the Alexa What’s Hot page this afternoon to see what everyone on the web is viewing right now, I noticed something interesting: the entry for Papa John’s home page includes an index.html file in the URL. [Read more…]
There is nothing about Negative SEO in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Are you surprised? Well, I am, and I am not. After a review of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, from what I can tell, there are no actual references to the practice of Negative SEO. The guidelines all point to issues related to your website–but there are no references about doing something to your competitor’s websites that would cause their website to lose search engine rankings or get penalized.
I was talking last night with Brian Reagan from the Better Business Bureau in Dallas, and he asked me if there is anything in the Google Webmaster Guidelines regarding Negative SEO. If there were references to Negative SEO, then the BBB could theoretically point these out to their member companies reminding them of it. But, after a thorough review of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, I do not see any specific reference to Negative SEO, and I don’t see any references that would even remotely insinuate that there could be a manual action placed upon your website for doing something to your competitor’s website–such as Negative SEO. [Read more…]
The Google cache date on most web sites have now been updated, after having not being updated for over a month. This is a rather significant update, I think, as normally the Google cache date is typically updated on a regular basis. But in the past few weeks, it had not been updated in over a month. [Read more…]
It appears that many Google cache dates are showing that they are about a month old. This is odd behavior, as typically for most websites that are active, the Google cache date in the search results will only be a few days old. Or, it typically would be updated either the previous day or within the past few days. [Read more…]
Over the weekend, it was confirmed that Google has updated their Google Penguin algorithm. Or, at least while I write this, Google apparently is still in the process of updating it. So, if your website was previously hit by the Google Penguin algorithm, then there is a chance that your site may recover if you’ve truly cleaned up your site’s links. [Read more…]
According to many SEOs in the industry, who are trusted sources, the Google Penguin algorithm is being updated as I write this post. There are reports that some are seeing organic ranking increases as high as 30 to 40 places from previous rankings. As you might recall, John Mueller from Google reportedly said that there would be a Penguin refresh by the end of the year. [Read more…]
