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In Wake Of Penguin, Could You Be Sued For Linking To Others?

May 15, 2012 at 9:59am ET by Greg Finn

Many webmasters have been desperately trying to fix poor SEO work done to a site thanks to the recent Penguin update targeting webspam and the bad link warnings sent from Google. The only current way to discredit a link is to have it removed as reverse nofollow functionality for webmasters simply doesn't exist. One recent example of a link removal request was particularly concerning as it claimed that the webmaster was partaking in illegal action against the company. A recent example from IT blog pskl.us brought to light a harsh tactic for a link removal. A company had cont [...]

What Is Search Engine Ranking Authority?

May 10, 2012 at 9:48am ET by Tom Schmitz

Next month, I will speak at SMX Advanced as a member of the authority panel, so it makes sense to discuss authority in my column this month. Authority is a term that has been around as long as I can remember, probably longer than the term search engine optimization itself. That is because classic SEO divides itself into four quadrants based on on-site vs. off-site and relevance vs. authority. Relevance refers to how well a documents match a search query. Authority is ranking strength. Before Google, most search engines could find relevant documents, but they struggled with ranking them i [...]

Two Weeks In, Google Talks Penguin Update, Ways To Recover & Negative SEO

May 10, 2012 at 9:00am ET by Danny Sullivan

It's been about two weeks since Google launched its Penguin Update. Google's happy the new spam-fighting algorithm is improving things as intended. But some hurt by it are still wondering how to recover, and there remain concerns about "negative SEO" as a threat. I caught up with Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web spam team, on these and some related questions. Penguin: "A Success" The goal of any algorithm update is to improve search results. So how's Penguin been for Google? "It's been a success from our standpoint," Cutts said. What About Those Weird Results? Of course, soon after [...]

7 Real Mobile Duplicate Content SEO Issues

Apr 30, 2012 at 12:14pm ET by Bryson Meunier

Ask someone who’s new to mobile SEO about it and they’re almost sure to tell you that mobile sites are duplicate content. The fear is that having the same content on two URLs will do the same thing it does in traditional SEO and split link equity and social shares, making it more difficult for either page to rank. In reality, with Google’s Old Possum/Skip Redirect update in December, user agent redirection is all that’s necessary for mobile sites to rank ahead of desktop sites in smartphone search, even if it’s the same content formatted differently. With canonical tags back to [...]

Google Launches “Penguin Update” Targeting Webspam In Search Results

Apr 24, 2012 at 5:46pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Google has announced that it is releasing a new search algorithm that it hopes will better catch people who spam its search results or purposely do things to rank better that are against Google's publishers guidelines. Going live today, Google says the "Penguin Update" will impact about 3% of search queries. From the company's posts on the Inside Search and Google Webmaster Central blogs: In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality guidelines. This alg [...]

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