2020 was not a typical year, at least for many of us. There was a lot going on, including COVID, worldwide social issue movements, civil unrest, and a stressful election year in the US. Most agency and business owners were facing tough challenges, due to the pandemic, supply-chain lag, market uncertainty, social upheaval, and isolation. […]
2020 Year in Review
Google December 2020 Core Update Rolls Out
For the first time since May 2020, Google announced a broad core update to their ranking algorithm. Normally, Google rolls out these large update to the ranking algorithm about every three or four months. Due to the COVID19 pandemic, in 2020, this has only been the third broad core update, the other one coming in […]
How Might Google Define “Good” Content?
Nearly every SEO article you will ever read give us the same advice. Create good content and you’ll rank higher. How might Google define “good content” for SEO? Better question, how would Google grade millions of pages that could match a search query, and decide if the content is “good”, “bad”, or “mediocre”? Also, the […]
Google “Penalties” Don’t Always Work How You Think
Why aren’t big brand websites hit with “duplicate content penalties” or other ranking demotions for technical faults? There are several reasons negative factors in SEO negative aspects don’t work in the real world how you’ve been taught. The biggest thing a website or an individual web page must do is let searcher accomplish their intended […]
Does Author Expertise Help SEO? The Truth About E-A-T
Is there a correlation between the author of an article and higher rankings? In other words, does Google “know” if a person is an expert in their subject, and rank a given article by them higher than a “non-expert” in that same field? This is a question that comes up a lot because of E-A-T […]
9 Things You Need to Know Before Hiring a Web Design Agency
Updated November 16th, 2020 2 Comments on 9 Things You Need to Know Before Hiring a Web Design AgencyChoosing a web design agency to build your website is a daunting choice. A new website is a big investment, and if you get it wrong, it can be thousands of dollars in your marketing budget gone to waste. It’s difficult to discern between all the different choices — there’s so many web agencies out […]
Google Does Not Use Webspam Reports for Manual Penalties
Many people see competitors “breaking the rules” on Google guidelines and engaging in ranking manipulation. You may be surprised to learn, when you report your competitors using the Google webspam form, they don’t automatically slap a manual penalty on your competitors. There are an estimated 1.74 billion websites in 2020 (at the time of this […]
Using Google Natural Language API to Analyze Content
You have likely heard of RankBrain, the machine learning aspect of Google’s ranking algorithm. How does a search engine extract semantic meaning from a web page? When evaluating the subject matter of a page, how does it “understand” what the content is about? There is a Google API (Application Programming Interface) that shows how their […]
Does Adding Text To E-Commerce Category Pages Help SEO?
Google representative John Mueller, when asked about optimizing e-commerce category pages, noted that if there is too much text on the page, then the algorithm may be confused whether it is an informational page or not. He suggests some text on the page may help. The caution is to not go overboard with blindly writing […]
2019 Year in Review
Around this time each year, I publish a year in review post. This is to help me reflect on what has happened and what I’ve learned. It’s also to help me look back and see what progress I’ve made. If you want to track the progress over time, check out the years in review for […]