If your website used to rank high, but has slipped over time, ask yourself this question. Are you so caught up in running your business, it is difficult find time to improve your website? You and your team are on the road, going to trade shows, doing business development, handling sales calls, managing customer support, […]
SEO Takes Time: Stay the Course
Should You Use Google Entity Stacks for SEO?
The short answer is NO. “Google Stacks” aka “Google Entity Stacks” or “Google Authority Stacks” are a link-building tactic that leverage Google properties to build relevance and information about your brand, content, and keywords. These “stacks” use interlinking Google properties like Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, custom Google Maps, and Google Sites to try […]
How to Trigger Featured Snippets in Google
Featured Snippets are highlighted text, video, or text and image content at the top of the page in selected search results. Some digital marketers also refer to the Featured Snippet as “Position Zero” because it sits at the top of the organic search results. Snippets that are informational text are displayed with slightly larger text […]
Talking Google’s Long Term Thinking on The WP Minute
Recently my colleague Matt Medeiros, invited me to contribute a piece to his new project, The WP Minute. I wanted to share some observations on the long term direction that Google has had for it’s organic ranking algorithm. Specifically, I wanted to look at statements that the then-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, made in 2008 […]
How to Remove Old URLs from Search Results
Occasionally, you may change some pages on your website, eliminate pages altogether, or migrate to a new website platform altogether. You may notice that Google still has old URLs that no longer exist in the search results. How do you get the new web addresses indexed, and make the old outdated web addresses disappear from […]
Core Web Vitals and Their New Role in SEO
Analysis of Core Web Vitals and how the June 2021 rollout will affect SEO. Looking at Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, Cumulative Layout Shift and how to improve each.
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 […]
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 […]