XML Sitemaps – Moz Blog Post
I did a post for the Moz main blog on XML sitemaps, all the ways people do them wrong, and how to use them to diagnose indexation issues.
Read the full post here.
Outside of the 3-Pack, How Does Google Find Local Results?
Here’s an interesting case of Google’s local organic algorithm failing to produce the right results, and it tells us a bunch about how they’re trying to produce those local results in the organic results outside of the 3-pack.
I’m sitting here near Sunriver, Oregon, and I search for “restaurants near me”. The 3-pack looks pretty good…it’s got the pushpin very accurately located for me (within yards, in fact, despite the fact that I’m on a PC connected via my cable internet provider, not my cellphone with GPS).
Continue reading Outside of the 3-Pack, How Does Google Find Local Results?
Continue reading Outside of the 3-Pack, How Does Google Find Local Results? Google Algorithmic Penalties DO Still Exist
Despite Google’s claims that as of Penguin 4.0 last fall, they just ignore the bad links, here’s concrete evidence to the contrary.
This is the traffic from one of my clients’ sites. On March 2nd, I submitted a pretty major disavow file to undo some really bad ancient history. And no, they did NOT have a manual penalty showing in Search Console.
Helping Combat Fake News
There seems to be a faction out there who’s trying hard convince the world that the Holocaust never happened–using SEO to make the Holocaust-denial websites rank highly for the search term is the holocaust real. You can help combat this, if you like, by doing what I just did here…link to that BBC article with the anchor text “is the holocaust real”.
The Technical SEO Renaissance: a brilliant post from Mike King
My friend Mike King an ex rapper turned Super SEO Nerd is one of the most technically skilled hard-core SEO people I know. Continue reading The Technical SEO Renaissance: a brilliant post from Mike King
.htaccess Wizard for SEO
My friend Aleyda Solis just published this super useful .htaccess tool for generating many of the common .htaccess rules needed for SEO: things like redirecting non-slash-ending URLs to the ones ending in slashes; redirecting from the non-www subdomain to the www one; redirecting http to https; even the code for the custom 404 error handler.
SEO vs. UX Tradeoffs – Moz Whiteboard Friday
Rand Fishkin of Moz does an excellent job of explaining some of the conflicts and tradeoffs (and synergy) between user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO):
SMX Advanced: Panda, Penguin, RankBrain, and AMP
In this year’s keynote at SMX Advanced, Gary Illyes from Google shed light on a number of topics surrounding Google search.
Panda updates: the updates still happen very slowly, and it takes months to roll out each update. It’s not real-time yet, but apparently the update process is continuous. Continue reading SMX Advanced: Panda, Penguin, RankBrain, and AMP
Google Places API Quietly Divorces Google+
I unfortunately have to report that my Google+ My Business Page Finder tool no longer shows the Google+ page for the business in its search results.
Why not?
Because the Google Places API, which used to show the Google+ page in its response, now returns a Google Maps page instead.
I haven’t seen any announcement of this, but the docs on the Place Details Request have been changed. Continue reading Google Places API Quietly Divorces Google+
Lesson of the day: never assume a damn thing
On my website, I display a map of where my clients are, all over the world. Mostly because I like messing around with Google Maps via the Maps Javascript API–it’s really powerful and you can do some really cool things with it.
All of a sudden, my map went wonky. The markers would all show, but no background map or imagery would show at all!
I spent HOURS today trolling through StackOverflow, forums, etc., and finally discovered the problem.
Continue reading Lesson of the day: never assume a damn thing