Industry News

Google announced a change to the nofollow link attribute yesterday and with that announcement, Googlers spent the next day responding to questions about it on Twitter. I will go through what changed according to the announcement and then cover almost all of the responses from Google (removing duplicates) so you get a full perspective of this change.

Google has updated the Google search quality raters guidelines handbook on September 5, 2019. That is 16-weeks after it last updated the guidelines, which was on May 16, 2019 and before that, it was about 10-months since Google updated that document.

More Diversity in Search Results

Earlier this year, we were told that Google was making an effort to make the search results we see more diverse, by showing us fewer results from the same domains in response to a query. Search Engine Land...

I am seeing new signs of yet another Google search ranking update starting late yesterday, September 4th, through today, September 5th. There is some early chatter in both the WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World forums. There are also some tools that are showing the change as well, not all of the tools because it might be too early for them to pick up on the changes yet.

This month we had two unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm updates, one around August 17th and the other around August 29th. Google began penalizing domain leasing portions of sites, and also slammed a popular SEO with a link penalty.

The evergreen GoogleBot is now running

Links are still an important part of ranking well in search. While I believe engagement signals are what ultimately get you to the top of a search result, links are usually necessary to get on the first page.

In the rush to measure everything, I find many are inadvertently limiting their opportunities. They fail to grasp the invisible attribution model of link acquisition, which is both asymmetrical and asynchronous.

The result? Short-term investments in content that are quickly deemed...

There are signs of a Google search ranking update touching down late August 28th through August 29th. There is both forum chatter within the SEO industry and the rank checking tools also. It is hard to say if this is a big update at this point, it started off pretty mellow but I will watch the chatter and keep you all posted.

Google issued a warning about sites that lease out its own subdomains and subfolders so that other companies can rank their content better on leased domains. Well, now it seems Google is taking action by penalizing those sections of sites that have these leased out sections.

In the hangout with John Mueller and Martin Splitt of Google, Martin Splitt said "the two waves of indexing play less and less of a role." He added, "I wouldn't say that two waves of indexing are dead, it's definitely not. I expect eventually rendering crawling and indexing will come closer together."

This isn't exactly new, news - I covered this in 2014, but with the news around Dejan getting hit badly by a manual action, his plan is to move to a new domain and not redirect the old domain to the new. But John Mueller from Google rained on his parade, if you can call it a parade, by saying Google will find you.