Brian Clark says, “Imagine. Imagine a world without search engines … It’s easy if you try. No more surprise Google updates. No more worrying about XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and content analysis and optimization. And perhaps most importantly, no more keyword research. That last one means you’re going to have to go old-school to figure out the language of your audience to reflect it back to them. It’s going to take a lot more work. You didn’t think you were going to get out of that one, did you? “. Forget SEO Copyblogger  [...]

Tom Capper says, “A little over two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at SearchLove San Diego. My presentation, Does Google Still Need Links, looked at the available evidence on how and to what extent Google is using links as a ranking factor in 2017, including the piece of research that I’m sharing here today. One of the main points of my presentation was to argue that while links still do represent a useful source of information for Google’s ranking algorithm, Google now has many other sources, most of which they would never have dreamed of back when PageRank was conceived as... [...]

Michael Cottam says, “When Penguin 4.0 launched in September 2016, the story from Gary Illyes of Google was that Penguin now just devalued spammy links, rather than penalizing a site by adjusting the site’s ranking downward, AKA a penalty. Apparently for Penguin there is now “less need” for a disavow, according to a Facebook discussion between Gary Illyes and Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land back in September. He suggested that webmasters can help Google find spammy sites by disavowing links they know are bad. He also mentioned that manual actions still happen — and... [...]

Dave Davies says, “There are plenty of good reasons to make your mobile site fast, and Google just reminded us of them with their new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed. Among them: Improving conversion rate and increasing profit, as 40 percent of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Customer retention, as 79 percent of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same site again. But is SEO one of those reasons? Will businesses that optimize their Google page speed score to 100/100 on mobile... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Since yesterday morning, the SEO industry has been watching an unconfirmed Google ranking update that seems to target more of the link quality aspects of the overall algorithm. Many are calling this the Fred Update, a name we’re also adopting. That came from Google’s Gary Illyes, who has jokingly suggested that all updates be named “Fred.” It’s sticking with this one. We’ve seen more chatter and reports of changes from within the “black hat” SEO community, which generally means that this is a spam algorithm update around links. Last time we reported... [...]

Sonia Simone says, “This year on Copyblogger, each month has a theme — and in March, it’s search engine optimization. That’s great news for some of you, and terrible news for others. If you’d rather eat a bug than think about SEO, you and I have much in common. On Monday, I wrote about some solid SEO advice that won’t have you contemplating a heaping bowlful of breakfast crickets. I also gave you some simple, “you-can-totally-do-this” suggestions on Copyblogger FM. And on The Digital Entrepreneur, Sean Jackson and Jessica Frick talked with SEO wizard Eric Enge about how search... [...]

Felicia Crawford says, “Back in 2015, we had an epiphany. Every day, via every channel, you — our readers, subscribers, community members, and social followers — would ask us really good questions. (You’re an incredibly intelligent, friendly, inquisitive bunch, you know that? It’s humbling.) A lot of those questions were about how to accomplish your SEO goals, and it got us thinking. Moz is an educational resource, it’s true, but we also offer a suite of tools (both free and paid) that can help you achieve those goals. Why not provide a space for those two things to... [...]

Brian Sutter says, “Good, bad or indifferent – 2016 is over. And while 2017 is well underway, I recommend content marketers take one good look back before they go. The past is the past, after all. And there’s plenty of lessons from 2016 that we can apply going forward. 1. We’re getting better at this. Good news first: The big story of content marketing in 2016 is that content marketers were considerably more effective than they were even one year earlier, with 62 percent of B2B content marketers and 63 percent of B2C content marketers report that they were “somewhat more successful”... [...]

Sonia Simone says, “Hey there, content geniuses — it’s March, and that means we have new prompts for our Content Excellence Challenge. This is a yearlong community exercise in getting better at what we do … and more productive, so we can do more of it. (Or even accomplish something crazy like having a life.) So, let’s do this. The March Creativity Prompt This month, we’re going to focus on actually doing our keyword research”. 2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The March Prompts Copyblogger  [...]

MOZ team says, “You may be tempted to publish that newest round of answers you’ve gotten from industry experts, but hold off — there’s a better way. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains why expert roundups just aren’t the best use of your time and effort, and how to pivot your strategy to create similar content that’ll make the juice worth the squeeze”. Better Alternatives to “Expert Roundup”-Style Content – Whiteboard Friday MOZ  [...]