MOZ team says, “It’s no secret that Google keeps a lot of secrets. From keyword data to link data to traffic data (and surely more), there’s a lot that we could benefit from — if they’d only share it! Since that’s not likely to happen anytime soon, Rand takes us through various ways to access that all-important data in this week’s Whiteboard Friday“. Recovering the Data Google Has Hidden Away – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Kelsey Libert says, “Some content is designed to “go viral,” while other times a piece of content intended to stay among friends takes the Internet by storm. But whether planned or unplanned, rapidly-shared content has several commonalities. One of the key factors is that the content creates a strong emotional response in viewers. Through our research on viral emotions, we’ve found that certain emotions are better than others at driving people to view and share content. In other words, creating the right emotional response is extremely important to getting your content widely shared.... [...]

Anna Korolekh says, “When I joined the PSD2HTML team in November 2014, the site had been suffering from a manual penalty related to spammy backlinks for over a year. They’d tried everything to promote a recovery, but nothing worked. They were ready to admit defeat. The penalty resulted in the loss of over 80% of their organic traffic. The story of how this happened is very interesting. PSD2HTML was one of the first companies to market PSD to HTML conversions in 2005. At the peak of their success, they transitioned to an SEO company. In 2013, our relationship with a well-known agency... [...]

Joy Hawkins says, “Local SEO can be confusing for those businesses that don’t have a physical store for customers to walk into. Unlike businesses with a brick-and-mortar storefront, service-area businesses (or SABs) go out to meet with their customers, as opposed to their customers coming to see them. This often results in them servicing multiple cities, which can be problematic—the #1 ranking factor in local SEO is the physical address of the business. In addition, business owners are also usually concerned about privacy, as many of them use their home address and can’t utilize some... [...]

Jennifer Slegg says, “If you’re a webmaster, you probably received one of those infamous “Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files on example.com” warning letters that Google sent out to seemingly every SEO and webmaster. This was a brand new alert from Google, although we have been hearing from the search engine about the need to ensure all resources are unblocked—including both JavaScript and CSS. There was definite confusion around these letters, supported by some of the reporting in Google Search Console. Here’s what you need to know about Google’s desire to see these... [...]

Lindsay Kolowich says, “Search ranking is a critical component of any inbound marketing strategy. When it comes to designing and writing content for your website, it’s important to have search engine optimization top-of-mind. After all, the top three results on a search query get 61% of all search clicks — and 75% of search engine users never scroll past the first page of search results. If you find yourself struggling to gain exposure in search engines, it could be because your website isn’t optimized for search. Want to increase your website traffic via organic search?... [...]

Ben Davis says, “I apologise for lumping all SEOs together in the headline, some are good and some are still bad, but as the layman or ‘content person’ knows, there are a lot of opinions out there. If you came via the blog homepage, the header image on this post showed Jupiter, Mercury and Io from Roman myth. Myth is a word that crops up a fair bit in SEO, such is the knowledge of the ‘inner workings’ of the Google ‘algorithm’. Here are three of the oft-debated opinions that are still out there. Myth One? 302 redirects do not pass link equity I wrote a... [...]

Marcus Tober says, “For a long time search experts and content marketers have understood that search engines use the number and variety of backlinks to a page as a quality signal that has an impact on rankings.  So how important are they now? In Searchmetrics’ annual study of the characteristics of pages with a high Google ranking and the key factors that correlate with (or are more likely to appear on) these pages, we found that relevant, quality content is now more important than ever. But what about backlinks? The logic goes that if a lot of other websites point to a page, then... [...]

Ben Davis says, “We’ve been looking at some analysis of search performance in the lead up to Black Friday. Electrical retailer Currys has had its strategy licked for some time, whereas Amazon has the odd improvement it could make to its usually omnipresent site. Both sites show a consistent (and year-round) landing page is important for brands capitalising on annual events. The opportunity Firstly, it’s worth noting the scale of the opportunity on Black Friday. Last year, Amazon sold 5.5m items, a record. And across the UK, Google trends shows how established the day became last... [...]

MOZ team says, “It’s a fact of life: we get better at what we do with time. Do you use that to your advantage when it comes to your site’s content? Whether you’re riding the wave of a successful post or improving what you’ve done before, republishing is something that should be on your mind and your to-do list. And what’s more, Google will actually reward you for doing it! In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the how and why of republishing, helping you set goals for yourself and your content“. Why Google Rewards Re-Publishing – Whiteboard Friday MOZ... [...]