The importance of anchor text with respect to a linking strategy cannot be overstated. Back-links are a huge part of the search engine algorithm. When initiating a linking campaign, it is vital that external sites link using the appropriate keywords and terms in the anchor text. Almost always, linking candidates will use the company name as anchor […]
Category: <span>SEO</span>
The debate between absolute links and relative links continues to live on in the SEO world. The individual significance of each has been contested, but it is widely regarded that absolute links provide better SEO value on the whole than relative links. Many believe that absolute links have less potential for getting messed up when search engines […]
SEO is not an exact science. This becomes apparent when trying to incorporate both SEO and branding into a strategy. This process is finicky to say the least. On the one side, SEO deals with the placement of keywords and phrases. On the other side, branding deals with company loyalty and culture. Incorporating both sides dilutes the […]
When assessing page structure and layout, there is a subtle, yet strategic way to use images in an SEO-friendly manner (beyond ALT tags) that improves your search rank while allowing you to integrate the necessary marketing message(s). Confused? Let’s look at an example: Suppose you operate a travel site and you want to optimize a given page for […]
For a long time, reciprocal links have remained at the forefront of most inbound linking strategies. This is going to have to change. Google now discounts all reciprocal links. The algorithm has been altered to identify the exchange of links by two parties for the purpose of increasing their number of inbound links. The concept of reciprocal […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video today explaining the difference in how Google handles 404 and 410 error status codes. Both 404 and 410s are errors for a web page or document not being available, however a 410 is defined as “gone” forever. So 410s are more of an explicit response […]
It seems like Google is testing making those video results a bit less rich by removing the video thumbnail image and replacing it with a small, gray, play button followed by the time of the video. Craig Gilhooly posted a screen shot of the new user interface test on Twitter. Here is a picture: Here […]
Working on the big brand, white-hat side of SEO for the last decade or so, I’ve seen plenty of flash-in-the-pan link building strategies come and go on the other side of the fence: content spinning, blog rings, mass directory submissions, forum spamming, domain acquisition, microsite spam & redirection, 302 hijacking, widget command and control anchors, […]
It may be the case that some sites impacted by Google’s Penguin update may not be as impacted as the next. Meaning, Google’s algorithms may apply a different degree of the Penguin update (which may feel like a penalty) to one site over another. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted on Twitter a […]
Google has announced they’ve added “more precise” data for the Index Status reports in Google Webmaster Tools. Specifically, Google is now reporting each indexed URLs for each protocol, specifically both for HTTP and HTTPS, as well as for verified subdirectories. Google said this change “makes it easy for you to monitor different sections of your […]
