Industry News

Copy is one of the most important aspects of onsite Search Engine Optimization. But with Google constantly pushing new algorithm updates and changing the rules of the game, it’s really hard to keep track of what works. Moreover, it’s difficult to know whether your optimization efforts are doing more harm than good to your rankings.

Here are 13 tips that will help you write content that ranks in 2014.

Last year I, I teamed up with SEO Extraordinaire, Henrik Bondtofte to bring you the 2013...

As you may remember, Google Panda 4.0 had a major negative impact on many press release sites including the largest one, PR Newswire. In response, PR Newswire issued a press release about them cracking down on "spammers" by removing and "taking action" on low quality press releases both before they hit the feeds and going back and removing a lot of the spammy older press releases.
PR Newswire...

Yesterday, I broke the news at Search Engine Land that Google has decided to drop the images and circle counts from the authorship snippets in the Google search results.
Google's John Mueller posted...

On June 24th, all the tools tracking Google's search fluctuations began lighting up. MozCast, SearchMetrics, SERPS.com all went nuts. Algoroo seemed calm, which is interesting...

Infographics are (still) popular. Clients ask me about them all the time. I ask them to tell me about the last three infographics they remembered.

The response is generally full of stammering as they grope for an answer. Rarely do I get specifics. Even when I do they say things like 'that infographic about craft beer'. When I ask where the infographic came from? Crickets.

Can you name the brands associated with infographics? The brands that come up most often are Mint and OK Cupid....

Yesterday, Google announced they've updated their AdWords auction explanatory video after almost five years. Both videos, the original and the new one, are by Hal Varian...

Two articles on the color yellow caught my eye this week.

The first is Object of Interest: The Yellow Card — Rob Walker’s history of the yellow card as it’s used in soccer. In a 1966 World Cup game a referee apparently failed to adequately communicate a penalty warning, which resulted in the birth of the card:

As objects go, it doesn’t look like much. It’s, you know, a yellow card. But when theatrically brandished by an official, almost literally in the face of a player who has done...

Ian Bogost wrote a pretty controversial viewpoint on the Net Neutrality fight. He asks, What Do We Save When We Save the Internet? In short, he thinks it might be time to blow the whole thing up and start over, because we haven’t been very responsible with it:

Another day’s work lost to the vapors of reloads, updates, clicks, and comments. Realizing that you are hyperemployed by the cloud, that you are its unpaid intern. Wondering what you’d have accomplished if you had done anything else...

Yesterday we covered some SEO theories around blocking JavaScript & CSS triggering Panda 4.0 issues. I didn't honestly believe there was a relation, based on the example provided and very few other sites reporting the same effects but now we have a response from a Googler...