Google decided earlier this week to change the way it provides local business listings. When searching for local business info, previously you would have seen this: You got a little map with a list of nearby local businesses matching your search. Since this map consistently showed up above regular search results, some businesses could rank […]
If they still seem somewhat of a mystery, I recommend the “How Internet Search Engines Work” article over at howStuffWorks.com. Although the engines deliberately keep some parts of their operation secret, the basics of how they work are public knowledge. And some of this information can be used to determine how search engine-friendly your website […]
We haven’t put out a reaction to Google Instant, that has some in our industry pulling their hair out and others sitting back and laughing. Some think it’s the death of SEO while others think it will be ultimately discarded as a failed experiment. The reality is somewhere in between. Until it’s been around for […]
Google is now allowing businesses who have registered with Google Places (formerly Google Local Business Center) to respond to negative reviews that appear with a business listed on Google Maps. This is good news as it allows for dialog enabling businesses to represent themselves. A business owner can now answer their detractor’s complaints (and hopefully […]
By now you may have heard of Google’s latest update, dubbed “Caffeine.” It’s been on the horizon since the end of last year but now is fully propagated throughout Google’s system. You may have also heard that it can affect your website’s ranking unless you do something to counter that. Well I’m glad to tell […]
Last Friday, before the big Memorial Day weekend, Google released its list of the 1,000 most-visited websites. Guess who is the #1 website, reaching over 35% of internet users? Facebook.com. It shouldn’t be a surprise to any business, Facebook has twice in the last several months seen more visitors than even Google, which is the […]
Google officially acknowledged the relevancy (pun intended) of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, last year and now Google has gone and audited itself. Google has made its “SEO Report Card” available to the public. It appears to have only evaluated itself on some basic criteria, but it’s fascinating how poorly they score in several key […]
A fairly accepted advanced practice within the SEO community called PageRank Sculpting has been undone by Google. I won’t get into all of the details but the important thing to remember is that if your site was making use of PageRank Sculpting (or your SEO experts said they were) then you better find out how […]
As posted in a lot of other places, Google has very publicly announced that it is no longer censoring Google searches in China and is prepared to leave the country if the Chinese government doesn’t like it. Most people in the US seem to be hailing the move as a victory in human rights in […]
Earlier this year we commented on an upcoming update to Google’s rules for ranking websites codenamed “Caffeine.” This update actually changes how Google analyzes web pages significantly but current rankings, for the most part, should remain stable per our tests in the Developer Preview. Google is now launching Caffeine starting with 1 data center by […]