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…]

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…]

As you might recall, I made a strategic decision last month to split this website into two separate websites. This website will continue to be my blog, here on BillHartzer.com, while my other website will have mostly services pages. I’ve owned Hartzer.com since July 1999, and now it’s Hartzer Consulting’s home. [Read more…]

Google has always been adamant about the fact that paying for Google AdWords ads will not boost your site’s organic search engine rankings. Google’s AdWords database is not shared with their organic search algorithm or any of the databases connected to it. So, I do believe Google when they say that paying for Google AdWords ads won’t boost your organic search engine rankings. But what about paying for other promotions, paying for traffic in other ways? Will that boost organic search engine rankings? Yes, it will, you can actually pay for organic search engine rankings. [Read more…]

Performing a full SEO Audit of your website on a regular basis, perhaps at least once every six months, is key to maintaining your web presence and maintaining your organic search engine rankings. It has been a while since I personally performed a highly technical SEO Audit of my own web site, which I just completed. There were several things that I checked, and each of these are detailed here. [Read more…]

This year I had a great time speaking about on-page and off-page SEO at the Rocks Digital Marketing Conference here in Dallas. I’ve spoken before at this conference, and it’s always a great to be able to present to a hometown crowd. [Read more…]

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…]

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?

[Read more…]