Jacob Baadsgaard says, “Have you ever opened up a paid search report and felt a jolt of fear? Maybe your new campaign wasn’t performing well. Maybe you’d inexplicably spent a ton on AdWords and had nothing to show for it. Maybe it was just more bad news in a losing fight for profitability. Regardless of your particular situation, if you’ve been in paid search for long, you’ve probably had that gut-wrenching feeling at some point. Turns out, there’s more to that feeling than you might have thought. After a series of rather extraordinary events, it’s become clear to me that there... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Here’s another nugget of information learned from the A conversation with Google’s Gary Illyes (part 1) podcast at Marketing Land, our sister site: Penguin is coined a “web spam” algorithm, but it indeed focuses mostly on “link spam.” Google has continually told webmasters that this is a web spam algorithm, but every webmaster and SEO focuses mostly around links. Google’s Gary Illyes said their focus is right, that they should be mostly concerned with the links when tackling Penguin issues. Gary Illyes made a point to clarify that it isn’t just the link,... [...]

Amanda Zantal-Wiener says, “These days, it seems like most marketing jobs require at least a basic knowledge of search engine optimization. Even writers need to know about it — gone are the days, it seems, of simply composing with words. We have to know how to rank, build links, and yield traffic. But many of us aren’t sure where to begin. And that, says HubSpot Senior Acquisition Manager Matt Barby, is due to the deluge of information available on SEO. “The problem is that most of it is either ill-informed or just factually incorrect,” he explains. Luckily, because... [...]

Glenn Gabe says, “In part one of this series, I covered a number of important points about Google’s quality updates (aka Phantom). I tried to provide a solid foundation for understanding what Phantom is and how it works, explaining its history, its path since 2015 and how it rolls out. In part two, I’m going to dive deeper by providing examples of “low-quality user engagement” that I’ve seen on sites affected by Phantom. I’ve analyzed and helped many companies that have been impacted by Google’s quality updates since May of 2015, and I’ve seen many types of quality problems... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “In A conversation with Google’s Gary Illyes (part 1) podcast at Marketing Land, our sister site, Gary Illyes told us that Google is looking at ways to measure brand awareness in search. Gary Illyes said this when we asked about how Google sources featured snippets with Google Home voice assistant. Gary explained that measuring brand mentions, without links, is hard, but the user experience team at Google is looking at ways to do this. In context, Danny Sullivan asked Gary what publishers get out of Google Home saying the name of the site. Is there any ranking benefit... [...]

Greg Gifford says, “Is it just me, or does it really seem lately like every marketer is looking for a silver bullet when it comes to SEO? Even though nothing even close to a silver bullet exists, the search is always on for the “one big thing” that can really jump a site up in the rankings. It’s time for another installment of Greg’s Soapbox. Stop trying to look for silver content bullets! Stop trying to be lazy or look for shortcuts! If you put in the time and do things correctly, you’ll win in the long run. It’s fall conference season, and I’ve sat in on countless sessions... [...]

Felicia Crawford says, “All across the Internet, comments sections are disappearing. From your high-profile news sites to those that share the online marketing space, more and more sites are banishing that unassuming little text box at the bottom of a post. And frankly, it’s not hard to understand why. First, you have your good ol’-fashioned spam comments. These are the commenters that hold dear the idea that those nofollowed comment links are valuable”. We Fought the Comment Spam (and the Comment Spam Didn’t Win) MOZ  [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “In the A conversation with Google’s Gary Illyes (part 1) podcast at Marketing Land, our sister site, we learned that Google adds labels to your links. These labels can add classifications or attributes to the link, including whether the link is a footer link, whether it’s impacted by the latest Penguin update, whether it’s disavowed or other categorizations. A link can have multiple labels that make up the value and meaning of that link, which ultimately helps Google determine how to rank the related documents on the web. Google’s manual actions team may look... [...]

Miriam Ellis says, “2017 may well be the year of testimonials and reviews in local SEO. As our industry continues to grow, we have studied surveys indicating that some 92% of consumers now read online reviews and that 68% of these cite positive reviews as a significant trust factor. We’ve gone through a meaningful overhaul of Google’s schema review/testimonial guidelines while finding that major players like Yelp will publicly shame guideline-breakers. We’ve seen a major publication post a controversial piece suggesting that website testimonials pages are useless, drawing thoughtful... [...]

Lydia Jorden says, “The ability to track digital efforts to in-store visits can be the single most difficult challenge a local business conquers. Since the beginning of time (local search time), marketers have been working to find opportunities to understand how digital efforts drive in-store visits. The challenge we marketers face is that if we are not paying for advertising, it is difficult to uncover ROI and make a case for investing in local search optimization. Proving value of local listing optimization efforts for a brick-and-mortar location is really limited to the boundaries that... [...]