When it became apparent that the eventual Penguin 3.0 update was going to be a long time coming – more than a year went by before it finally updated – many people were thinking that they should have just started a brand new site rather than cleaning up and waiting for an eventual update. And […]
Can you Penalize a Website by 301 Redirecting Another Banned Site To It for Negative SEO?
It is something that has become a bit more common over the last year… someone burns a website and gets it penalized in Google. And instead of cleaning it up, they try and wield it for negative SEO by 301 redirecting it to a competitor they feel is doing better than them in the search […]
Google’s Recommendations for Gaining Links That Could Seem Suspicious
Sometimes there is an opportunity to get a great link from the traffic and exposure perspective, but you know that in the eyes of Google it could be seen as spammy. Or you want to have a link but for whatever reason, the link cannot be made a no-follow link. While some webmasters have been […]
Penguin 3.0 is Continuing to Rollout & Still Too Late to Disavow
We saw many Penguin fluctuations happen over this weekend, and we knew that Penguin would be ongoing over several weeks. But John Mueller from Google has confirmed that the Penguin update is still ongoing in a Webmaster Office Hours this week. In the latest Google Webmaster Hangouts, he was asked about whether Penguin is still […]
What If You Didn’t Recover From A Penguin Attack
For over a year we all waited. Impatiently mind you … but we waited nonetheless. Knowing that with a Penguin-based penalty (or devaluation if you prefer) victims had no hope of relief until the next regardless of their actions, it was a very very long wait. And then the Penguin refresh began and the results […]
Google Adds Mobile Usability Errors to Webmaster Tools
With the importance Google is placing on sites being mobile friendly, their latest feature added to Google Webmaster Tools will be a big help for those webmasters who might not understand all the nuances of mobile-friendly design. Webmasters can now see mobile usability errors in Google Webmaster Tools and the number of pages affected by […]
Google Expands Flash Warnings to Mobile Users in Other Languages
Earlier this month, Google began rolling out their warnings to mobile users if a site uses Flash internationally. They are now expanding this warning feature to many more countries and languages. Google announced the changes on multiple international Google Webmaster Central blogs today, including German, Portuguese, and French. This is one of the many changes […]
Disable Google’s Site Search in Search Results With Meta Tag
If you don’t want Google to include a site search box within the listing for your website in the Google search results, Google has added a new tag to disable the functionality. Spotted by Menashe Avramov, you simply add <meta name=”google” content=”nositelinkssearchbox” /> They have also added information about the new tag to their “Meta […]
Blocking Googlebot from CSS & JavaScript Can Hurt Google Rankings
Many webmasters block Googlebot from crawling both CSS and JavaScript for ranking purposes to try and combat things such as the page layout algorithm. But Google has been advising webmasters not block Googlebot from crawling either, and it has now officially been added to Google’s technical guidelines that blocking CSS and JavaScript so can hurt a website’s […]
Google’s Pirate Update Increases Visibility of Smaller Torrent Sites
Google recently made a change to their algorithm designed to demote major sites hosting pirated content, but the algorithm has a secondary side effect – bringing more visibility to smaller torrent sites that had been previously buried in the search results due to the more popular sites ranking so well. The new algo takes the […]