Industry News

It’s been big news recently about major brands and Google penalties, and the floodgates feel open on people spotting even more brands possibly hit out there. Some new crackdown by Google? No. It’s the rise of hyperactive attention in this area, and that’s turning into a problem. Hence this open letter, on how we’re planning to address “public penalty reports” here at Search Engine Land. In Summary: Penalties Aren’t Always Newsworthy

The TL;DR is this. We’re not going to be writing about...

Great article by Zach Holman on startup growth, hiring, and culture:

I think a number of startups end up reaching some type of blindness as they grow and reach success. They are the same companies whose founders are college dropouts, but now that they’re a hundred employees they decide to follow Google’s model and recruit exclusively from top five-ranked schools. They are the same companies that hire a monoculture, not realizing that their success stemmed in part from the oddball founding...

On April 9th, 2009, many people developed an interest in speeding up their websites, after reading a post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog – Using site speed in web search ranking.



On the same day, Google’s Matt Cutts published Google...

A new update has been made to the Google webmaster guidelines document, which describes you should not block the Google ads destination URL with your robots.txt file.
The new text is under...

There is a tremendous amount of chatter going on about Google updating over the past couple days or so at WebmasterWorld.

On February 6th we had the Page Layout algorithm update but that didn't cause much of a fuss in the SEO forums. But something over the past couple days is...

Yesterday, Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, posted a long video describing what the typical day is like for a Google spam fighter...

Make no mistake. Plenty of sites — big brands included — willingly do things in an attempt to rank better on Google that go past SEO tactics that Google itself considers acceptable. However, there’s also no better poster child for how complicated and confusing Google’s rules can be than the fact that Google has had to punish itself with penalties over and over again.

Below, a look back on times when Google took action against itself. FYI, this is a companion piece to our related story on...

The other day, Google's Matt Cutts posted a video answering if poor grammar in comments hurts the page's rankings. In short, the answer is no - bad or poor grammar does not hurt your rankings if done in comments...