2016 has been dubbed “The Year of Audience Targeting in PPC” by Acquisio, and with good reason. Up until recently, PPC advertisers have had two weapons in their arsenal: search and social. Search is, by definition, an expression of intent: users are telling you exactly what they’re looking for. When search advertisers choose the right […]
How Google Handles Rankings for Sites That Go Offline
The question came up whether rankings or a site’s reputation would be affected by being offline for a period of time. How does site being offline affect its reputation. Does it have long term negative effects on site reputation? Aaseesh Marina from Google, one of the hosts of the English/Hindi office hours, responded, and details […]
Why SEOs Shouldn’t Trust All Algo Weather Reports & Winner/Loser Lists
There was a pretty active discussion on Twitter earlier today about the accuracy of the so-called “algo winner and loser” lists that many companies publish based on their data…. and how accurate that is. And with sites normally reporting on only the top handful of sites – 10-20 – it is hard to get a […]
Google PageRank Will Probably Never Update Again
Someone asked a question about PageRank in today’s Webmaster Hangout. While we had a surprise PageRank update in 2013, which was a surprise update when Google fixed something else, there hasn’t been any change since then. But people still ask about it. A couple things to note. Google does use and update PageRank internally for […]
Why Choosing a Fast and Reliable Webhost Matters
Google is constantly rolling out updates to its search algorithm to improve the quality of the sites that appear within search engine results pages (SERPs). These changes often spark turmoil within the SEO community, outraging some and prompting others to find new best practices that fit the bill and make the sites that they manage […]
PPC: When To Automate And When Not To Automate
There are countless ways, either on PPC bid management platforms or AdWords itself, that you can choose to hand over ever-increasing amounts of control to an automated tool. The question is, when should you succumb to this bejeweled siren of temptation and when should you hold out and do it manually? Overview Google, it has […]
Real Time Penguin Changes & The Role of Links in the Algo
In part of today’s Google Webmaster Hangout, an interesting question came up about why Google decided to go to a real-time Penguin, if it was to appease webmasters who were penalized with the recovery time, or if it was simply the way Penguin evolved with the ability to analyze links on the fly, which then […]
Why Google Decided to Delay Penguin Until the New Year
We learned yesterday that Google would be delaying the upcoming real time Penguin update until the new year. In today’s Google Webmaster Hangout, John Mueller had a few more details behind Google’s decision to delay the long-awaited Penguin update until the new year, and it came down to technical reasons and the holidays. We just […]
Twitter Adds New Retweet With Comment Feature
One of the pain points about retweeting was the inability to add a comment to the retweet, unless you happened to be using one of the 3rd party tools that allows it. But Twitter has now made this practice standard. Now, when someone clicks the retweet link, they see an option come up for a […]
Google Adds New Book Carousel Feature to Search Results
Google made some changes to knowledge graphs for book titles in January that when you clicked on the “people also searched for” within the knowledge graph, it would show a book carousel. Google is now expanding on that and is now showing the carousel directly in the search results for book related searches. I was […]