SEO: Spamming

Open Letter: Why Search Engine Land Will & Won’t Cover Someone Being Penalized By Google

It’s been big news recently about major brands and Google penalties, and the floodgates feel open on people spotting even more brands...

Danny Sullivan | Feb 14, 2014 at 9:00 am ET

5 Times Google Penalized Itself For Breaking Its Own SEO Rules

Make no mistake. Plenty of sites — big brands included — willingly do things in an attempt to rank better on Google that go past SEO...

Danny Sullivan | Feb 12, 2014 at 9:00 am ET

Google’s Latest Manual Action Penalty: Spammy Structured Markup

Google recently began sending a new manual action spam notification to webmasters for “spammy structured markup” also known as rich...

Barry Schwartz | Feb 5, 2014 at 9:05 am ET

How SEO Greed Can Ruin A Perfectly Good Linking Strategy

By now, you are likely aware of the Rap Genius “Tweet In Exchange For Anchor Text” link scheme, hencefore to be known as TieFating....

Eric Ward | Dec 27, 2013 at 4:30 pm ET

Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

Google has penalized Rap Genius for link schemes this morning. If you go to Google and search for [rap genius], rapgenius.com will not be found...

Barry Schwartz | Dec 25, 2013 at 11:42 am ET

Google Is Looking Into Rap Genius Linking Scheme Masked As Affiliate Program

Yesterday, John Marbach exposed the popular music side, Rap Genuis, for starting an “affiliate” program in order to get unnatural...

Barry Schwartz | Dec 24, 2013 at 9:00 am ET

Matt Cutts Implies Google Is Aware Of SEOs Bribing Bloggers

On Friday night, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts tweeted a link to a Gawker story named Shady Marketing Firms Are Still Quietly...

Barry Schwartz | Dec 23, 2013 at 9:30 am ET

Google’s Matt Cutts On Search Spammers: “We Want To Break Their Spirits”

In episode number 227 of This Week in Google on the TWiT network, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts answered some questions from the...

Barry Schwartz | Dec 18, 2013 at 1:18 pm ET

Google’s Matt Cutts: When Commenting On Blog Posts, Try To Use Your Real Name

In a recent video published by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts talks about are blog comments with links spam? In short, most of...

Barry Schwartz | Nov 13, 2013 at 3:34 pm ET

How To Leave Anonymous Business Reviews In Google+

For a long time, I’ve had some doctor friends complaining to me that once Google Places changed over to the new Google+ format, all their...

Cindy Krum | Nov 6, 2013 at 10:00 am ET

The Structured Data Brouhaha At SMX East: Clarifying Contentious Issues

If you attended the Structured Data Superstars session at SMX East earlier this month, you probably witnessed a very brief interchange between...

Chris Silver Smith | Oct 16, 2013 at 9:01 am ET

Google’s Matt Cutts: User Redirection Based On Location Is Not Spam

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video yesterday clearly stating the geo-location or redirecting users based on their...

Barry Schwartz | Oct 10, 2013 at 8:53 am ET

Google May Have Penalized Another Major Link Network: Ghost Rank 2.0

Google has significantly penalized another underground link network over the weekend and we believe that one of the link networks targeted by...

Barry Schwartz | Sep 24, 2013 at 9:41 am ET

Google’s Matt Cutts: Spammers Rarely Spam Using Multiple ccTLDs

In a recent video answer by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, Google said that spammers rarely use multiple or mass number of...

Barry Schwartz | Sep 16, 2013 at 1:57 pm ET

Google’s Cutts: Auto-Generated Content & Search Results In Our Index Violate Our Guidelines

In a recent video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, Matt discussed a pretty obvious spam tactic that Google will take action...

Barry Schwartz | Sep 10, 2013 at 1:00 pm ET

Demystifying Link Disavowals, Penalties & More

Findings from a recent Google Webmaster Hangout on Air (video) demystify link disavowals, penalties and more. Read on for the official word...

Jenny Halasz | Aug 19, 2013 at 9:05 am ET

Google’s Matt Cutts On Hidden Text Using Expandable Sections: “You’ll Be In Good Shape”

In the latest video answer from Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts, he answers a question about “hiding” text in...

Barry Schwartz | Jul 24, 2013 at 12:50 pm ET

Five Steps To Clean Up Your Links Like A Techie

You’ve been in business for many years. You may have done it all on your own, or you may have enlisted the aid of unscrupulous SEO...

Jenny Halasz | Jul 22, 2013 at 9:01 am ET

Google To Take Action Against Fake Search Results Injected Into Browser History

Google made a clear stance late Friday on the Google Webmaster blog that they will not tolerate webmasters pushing deceptive search results to...

Barry Schwartz | Jul 15, 2013 at 9:04 am ET

Google: That Mozilla Penalty Only Impacted One Page Out Of 22 Million

We reported yesterday that Google penalized Mozilla over user generated content. Today, we learn that it was a really, really small penalty that...

Barry Schwartz | Apr 24, 2013 at 9:36 am ET