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 […]
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SEO
Google December 2020 Core Update Rolls Out
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 […]
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 […]
High Impressions, Low Clicks and Few Leads: How To Fix It?
Published November 11th, 2019 4 Comments on High Impressions, Low Clicks and Few Leads: How To Fix It?What if you have a page on your website getting a ton of impressions in Google Search Console, but you aren’t getting much business from that page? A question we recently came across deals with this dilemma. The page is focused on business objectives, (like a services page), and the page receive more impressions than […]
Google BERT Update: Understanding Search Queries More Effectively
Published October 29th, 2019 No Comments on Google BERT Update: Understanding Search Queries More EffectivelyGoogle announced on October 25th, 2019 that they are rolling out a new update to their algorithm, named BERT. BERT is an acronym for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. The “transformers” are words that change the context or a sentence or search query. The “encoder representations” are subtle concepts and meanings in natural language that […]
Did Your Keyword Rankings Drop? Rethinking The Ranking Algorithm
Published October 23rd, 2019 3 Comments on Did Your Keyword Rankings Drop? Rethinking The Ranking AlgorithmWhen your rankings suddenly drop in Google, do you immediately think it was an algorithm change? Or that you got a Google penalty? The reality is, Google is starting to figure out what the majority of people want to find when they type in a given search query. This is why the Google representatives say […]