Jennifer Slegg says, “For many SEOs, a glimpse at the Google’s Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines is akin to looking into Google’s ranking algorithm. While they don’t give the secret sauce to rank number one on Google, they do offer some incredible insight into what Google views as quality – and not-so-quality – and the types of pages they want to serve at the top of their search results. Last week, Google made the unprecedented move of releasing the entire Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines, following an analysis of a leaked copy obtained by The SEM Post. While Google released... [...]

Gianluca Fiorelli says, “Whenever Google announces something as important as a new algorithm, I always try to hold off on writing about it immediately, to let the dust settle, digest the news and the posts that talk about it, investigate, and then, finally, draw conclusions. I did so in the case of Hummingbird. I do it now for RankBrain. In the case of RankBrain, this is even more correct, because — let’s be honest — we know next to nothing about how RankBrain works. The only things that Google has said publicly are in the video Bloomberg published and the few things unnamed Googlers... [...]

Paddy Moogan says, “Content marketing is hard. The problem is that the process looks easy. You brainstorm some ideas, choose one that you like, design and build it, do some outreach and you get traffic, links and social shares. Job done. It’s a bit like link building, where someone may say, “Just build great content and the links will come.” Unfortunately, it’s very rarely that straightforward. Yes, sometimes you can get lucky and something will fly with little effort. But anyone that says that content marketing is easy has probably never done it over and over again.... [...]

Jay Leary says, “Stating the obvious here, but content is a massively important part of any inbound marketing campaign. The problem that most of us run into — and I know this well from years of SEO consulting with publishers — is that even “good” content can fade from view without a share, link, or conversion. Engaging an audience isn’t as simple as clicking “publish.” So, how do we avoid making phantom content a habit? For Moz, timely data has been a big part of the answer. Over the years, we’ve built internal tools like1Metric to guide our work.... [...]

Christopher Jan Benitez says, “In the world of post-Penguins and post-Pandas, the phrase “SEO automation” sounds taboo. It is easy to think of this term as “black hat” when tools like SeNukeXcr and XRumer help webmasters build hundreds of backlinks and attract thousands of visitors with a few clicks of a button. You do not have to do the legwork for building links and drive traffic because these tools will do the laborious work for you. In essence, this is the idea of what SEO automation does – taking away the guesswork from intricate SEO tactics to produce results. However,... [...]

MOZ team says, “When it comes to the link building process, there’s a lot to keep track of — and that process today is pretty different from what it was a few short years ago. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand scores 20 different attributes that can influence a link’s value based on whether or not they still matter in 2015/2016“. 20 Attributes that Influence a Link’s Value – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Ronell Smith says, “When the client asked to “go mute” during our monthly client call, there was no reason to sound the alarm. After all, being able to talk through what they’ve heard as a team, in private, was normal. But when the always-skeptical global marketing director said the COO (who has been in the room for the 10 minutes of analytics discussion) wants to take the discussion offline for a bit, but wants you to hold on, I knew things had likely gone off the rails. “Thanks for holding, you guys,” says the head of marketing upon taking the phone off mute... [...]

Jayson Demers says, “Your company’s reputation plays a large role in local organic search rankings. For example, if your company is listed in every major local business directory and you’re mentioned on local news sources regularly, and if great user reviews of your business dot the web, you’ll likely rank higher than if just the reverse occurs: You’re rarely mentioned and your reviews are poor. Every business gets a bad review now and then, and some businesses naturally have trouble attracting reviews from their customers. But, with local SEO becoming more important and more influential,... [...]

Simon Penson says, ““How do I know if my content campaign is going to work?” This question is the one I get asked more than any other at present, and for good reason; creating hit content, consistently, is one of the biggest challenges in marketing. I’m certainly not going to pretend that every piece of content I’ve ever been involved in has been a hit. In fact, the opposite is probably closer to the truth — but failure teaches you much more, and allows you to iterate faster. The result of that heartache and frustration is a process I want to share with you today, one that’s... [...]

Chance Hoggan says, “Many people who do business online spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to rise to the top of Google. They often become so obsessed with this goal, in fact, all other goals, like actually making money and keeping existing clients/customers happy, fall by the wayside. They go to sleep thinking about SEO. They dream about SEO. And they wake up thinking about SEO. These same SEO obsessed people often devote a large portion of their day reading forums, free ezines, blog posts, and so called “expert” articles. They take SEO webinars from “experts”... [...]