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Might a twang or a drawl influence the search results you see at Google? If you’re prone to calling an elevator a lift, and tend to speak the Queen’s English in an accent similar to hers, you might see different search results than if you grew up in the Bronx or in New Orleans. If [...]

The post The Noise Becomes the Signal – Voice Queries and Accent Scores appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

Chris Ferdinandi wrote a good summary of the responsive site vs. separate mobile site debate in Content Parity on the Web:

The gentleman I was chatting with mentioned that for mobile users, he intended to share about 50 percent less content and reduce the steps in their checkout process to make it more efficient. I think that’s a great idea, but I don’t think it should be limited to the mobile site.

If 50 percent less information is the right amount of information people need to...

A WebmasterWorld thread has a webmaster sharing a notification message he received via Google Webmaster Tool. The interesting part is that this notification is very specific that although the site has a penalty...

Can using Google’s link disavow tool help remove penalties? Yes, the company says. But when it comes to manual penalties, disavowing links alone isn’t enough. With algorithmic penalties, there may be a time delay involved. Below, more about how both methods work.

Over the past few days, I’ve encountered a couple of cases where people are confused about how the link disavow tool works to remove penalties. So, I figured a clarification post was in order. Here’s the situation, all of which I...

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has a nice uptick in chatter this weekend starting around Saturday but staying strong throughout Sunday on ranking changes and traffic changes...

A couple of days ago, Mike Blumenthal of Understanding Google Places & Local Search asked a pretty timely question with the post Google Local: Are Mobile Signals Actively used in Ranking Local Results? Mike mentioned a post I wrote about Google research on using driving directions as a local search ranking signal.

Mike can [...]

The post Category Relevant Search Results, Query Suggestions, and Advertisements Based on Location? appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

In Why You Won’t See My Child (Or Even His Name) On Facebook Caitlin Shetterly explains why she and her husband never post anything identifiable about their son online. My wife and I have some guidelines around the kind of stuff we post about our daughters too, albeit much less strict. This part got to me, though:

One of my favorite poems is called “Les Fenêtres” (“Windows”), by the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire. In it, Baudelaire writes about looking out his own window and...

Gales Gone Wild, apart from being a great headline, is also a very interesting post by Timothy Egan on the changing role of weather sites and channels:

The scourge of 24-hour news, in which stuff that isn’t important gets its own countdown clock, is now doing to the weather what it did to public affairs and the stock market. It’s making us all a little jumpy and anxious, with a twisted view of the normal rhythms of the seasons.

Phrases like “meteorological thugs” and “cable...