With so many sites autogenerating sitemaps, we don’t hear a lot about custom sitemaps or sitemaps where only a part of a site is on it. In yesterday’s keynote with Stone Temple, Gary Illyes from Google brought up an interesting aspect with sitemaps and how Google prioritizes crawling. If you use a sitemap that is […]
Google: Don’t Nofollow Your Own Internal Links
Are you nofollowing internal links on your site? If so, you might want to remove them unless you have a pretty good reason to be using it. Recently, nofollowing internal links gained traction as many webmasters who received a recent outbound link manual action decided to nofollow every link on their sites, including internal links […]
How Google Sees Links from Other Languages & Countries
Google has talked a bit previously about the value (or lack thereof) of links when they are coming from other countries or languages, even for links that are coming from countries or languages the website doesn’t target or service. The question came up again in yesterday’s Google webmaster office hours with John Mueller. Here is […]
Major Bit.ly Outage: Bit.ly & Many Custom URL Shorteners Not Loading
Using Bit.ly or attempting to access a bit.ly URL? Bit.ly shortened links have not been working for over an hour this morning. This means any tweets, emails, or other marketing where you used a bit.ly URL shortner will not load for users, and will instead be greeted, eventually, with a timed out message. The outage […]
Google Penalizes Japanese Link Network
On the Japanese Webmaster blog today, Google announced that they have penalized a Japanese link network for violating webmaster guidelines. They haven’t detailed which link network was penalized but I expect that information will be publicly available soon after penalized SEOs start talking about being hit with manual actions from this link network removal. この一環として、Google […]
No PageRank Loss When 301 or 302 Redirect to HTTPS
One of the concerns that people have had over switching to HTTPS is whether there would be any PageRank loss, even a small amount, by redirecting all pages from the HTTP version to the HTTPS version. After all, no one wants to make the switch for the tiny ranking boost (which acts as more of […]
France Wants to Ban Linking to Any Site Without Permission
If you want to link to a website in France, you would need to get explicit permission from the rights holder”, if two Parliament Members in France are successful in their proposal amendment. The idea was proposed but rejected by the Legislative Commission, but it is brought back again. Socialist Karine Berger and Valérie Rabault […]
“SEO” Be Damned, It’s Time Give Your URLs An Upgrade
Web marketers have known for years that the words we use in page URLs were factored into the search algorithm. There has always been a debate as to how much of a factor these words contribute, but the general consensus is between a little and not much. In fact, for years SEOs cautioned against changing […]
The Penguin Algorithm: An Issue of Ethics
On April 24th, 2012 Matt Cutts, the head of Webspam at Google, announced they would be releasing the first “Penguin Algorithm”. Although the focus these days is mostly about links many people forget Penguin was not released to only target link spam, it was also created to target “…sites that we believe are violating Google’s […]
Bit.ly & Viglink Quietly Adding Their Own Affiliate Cookies on Shortened Links
If you use Bit.ly for your URL shortener, or you are clicking on a Bit.ly link, you should be aware that those shortened links are now a vehicle to drop Viglink affiliate cookies on the unsuspecting , and most people likely won’t even notice it is happening. The change seems to have happened in February […]