Editor’s note: This is a chapter from Search Engine Journal’s Illustrated Guide to Link Building. It seems like the concept of link reclamation is constantly in flux. More and more link builders are skewing toward technical SEO and our ideas on SEO continue to evolve. Still, for link builders starting out, link reclamation has always been a hard phase to navigate — partly because the “rules” for how a website should be built can be confusing when crossing the lines between …
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A new negative SEO attack method has been discovered. What makes this exploit especially bad is that it is virtually impossible to detect the attacker. There is no way to recover if the attacking website is unknown. So far, Google is remaining silent on how they intend to proceed to close this exploit in how Google ranks and de-ranks web pages. It is noteworthy that this exploit has been observed but not tested and verified. If this exploit is real, …
Google rolled out another broad core algorithm update this week. It was confirmed on Twitter that this algorithm update was released on Monday, April 16th. On Monday, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we routinely do throughout the year. For background and advice about these, see our tweet from last month: https://t.co/uPlEdSu6xp — Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 20, 2018 You may recall that Google released a similar algorithm update early last month. Shortly afterward it was explained that …
Let’s discuss TAR. Not the negative tar in nicotine or the stuff that fills cracks on roads, but rather the positive TAR that is the foundation of successful businesses: Without these three elements, a business is basically a copy of its competitors, multiplying choices for prospective clients. When TAR is present, prospects become emotionally engaged, which leads to loyalty. As for the other businesses that lack TAR, they dilute the choices, creating tougher decisions for prospects who don’t want to …
SEO is always getting more challenging. Machine learning and RankBrain are among the biggest challenges. However, one of the biggest frustrations is the lack of keyword-level data from Google. Today, we work with less data than ever from Google, which makes it hard to do our jobs well. Google started taking away keyword-level data in September 2013. Keywords became “(not provided)”. We all just had to get used to it. Without access to the same keyword data, we had to …
Anchor text is the text used in the links to your site. It used to be that if you acquire enough links with the appropriate keywords in the anchor text that your site will begin to rank for those keywords. But at some point websites experienced penalizations for having statistically unnatural ratios of anchor text links. What is the best practice for the use of anchor text today? Industry Standard Guidance for Anchor Text There is no industry standard on …
Are you looking for the best product review plugins for WordPress? If you regularly add detailed product reviews on your website, then you can use a product review plugin to make them more SEO friendly. In this article, we have hand-picked the best product review plugins for WordPress. Why Use Product Review Plugin in WordPress? What do you do when you want to buy something? If you are like most people, then you probably check out product reviews to compare …
Google’s John Mueller offered excellent advice to web publishers on how to recover from a manual penalty. He highlighted two common mistakes that publishers make and offered solutions on how to submit a succesful reconsideration request. Two Reasons Why Reconsideration Requests Fail John Mueller suggested two reasons why reconsideration requests fail. 1. Inability to see the problem 2. Failure to solve all problems Takeaway 1: Inability to Identify Site Problems It is common to be able to see what’s wrong …
A few months back I discovered a shocking bug in how Google handles XML sitemaps, which enabled brand new sites to rank for competitive shopping terms by hijacking the equity from legitimate sites. I reported this issue to Google, and they have now fixed the issue, and paid me a bug bounty. However, since I published my write up of the issue, a number of SEO professionals have contacted me worrying that they may have been a victim of such …
HTTPS has, for the most part, become the “poster boy” of cyber security, thanks in part to Google naming it as a ranking signal and then pushing for it further through changes in the Chrome browser. But as we know, cyber security doesn’t stop at HTTPS, and HTTPS does not mean that you have a secure website. In my first post for Search Engine Journal, I wrote about how Google could introduce passive scanning elements in one of its future, more advanced …
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