Recently, I discovered a technique for reclaiming RSS feeds for link building purposes. Many RSS feed usernames on Feedburner, for example, are available to be claimed. Claiming an old username and attaching it to the RSS feed, there’s a good likelihood of you being able to take advantage of links pointing to the feeds. Some RSS Feeds also have traffic and clicks associated with them, which is a bonus. I have been testing this on a few websites, and it seems to be a promising new SEO technique for those who are looking for something new and who understand the risks. [Read more…]

By Bill Hartzer, March 5, 2020 at 9:33am CST.

Google Webmasters produced a video about hiring an SEO specialist. In the video, they give some good tips about what you should look for when hiring an SEO. For example, they suggest that you shouldn’t hire an SEO that give you bad advice or recommends bad shortcuts, and SEOs that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. That’s all great. But in the video, they seem to suggest that companies looking to hire an SEO should ask them to provide a technical audit of the website. Even before they’re hired. Should an SEO provide a technical audit, for free, to a website even before they’re hired? Absolutely not. Here’s why. [Read more…]

A while back I uncovered a new type of undetectable negative SEO, which involved the canonical tag. Search Engine Journal covered it in a post here. I thought that as a result of bringing it out in the open that Google would somehow fix the problem. However, based on a conversation I had today with a victim of canonical tag negative SEO, it appears that recent changes that Google’s made may have further exacerbated the problem. [Read more…]

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…]