Industry News

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...

There’s certainly a lot of hand-wringing going on about Facebook Home. And although there is some truth to articles like Facebook Home — My Personal Hell and Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy, I feel like making this story’s headlines about how boring Facebook is and how it’s just another step towards evil corporations owning all our data is missing out on what’s really important about this announcement. The much more interesting question is this: How does...

Even though the mere thought of giving up coffee and switching to tea makes me break out in a cold sweat, I really enjoyed Teresa Brazen’s The tea, leadership, loyalty axis. It’s a good reminder about the importance of being mindful and present:

These days, people who aren’t checking their phones, email, or doing some other kind of work in their head while in conversation with others really stand out. Have you noticed how good it feels to be around these anomalies? How often are your...

When you search at Google, in addition to search results, Google often returns a set of search suggestions that might be related to your query. Last month, I wrote about how some of those suggested query refinements might be created follow a method invented in part by Ori Allon, in the post How Google is [...]

The post Google Patent Granted on Fresh Related Search Suggestions appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

Today finds me blogging from Australia, where I had the privilege of keynoting SMX Sydney and participating in a site clinic (wearing an SMX lab coat, which is always fun). While looking through the show’s program guide, I discovered that I was also supposed to be on a panel today! The description read something like this: Bill Hunt and Rand Fishkin will give away their best tips for advanced marketers, and take questions from the audience. 60 minutes

Well, crap.

For the last 6 years of...