SEO: General

Last month, Google released a video detailing best practices for hiring an SEO company, and it is positioned to become the go-to guide for hiring an SEO. After all, who better to tell companies what they should look for in an SEO than the operators of the world’s most popular …

When it comes to being unlinkable, there’s a lot more to consider besides boring content, poor quality writing and low-end design. Of the many issues that could cause users not to want to link to your content, here are four major ones that I see all the time: intrusive intersitials, gated content, …

Disclaimer: I’m sharing my experience below without making any claims. I’m simply sharing my observations in hopes the SEO industry might be able to further test with me. Remember, correlation does not imply causation.  I’m fascinated by Answer Boxes. You know, these things: While Answer Boxes go back several years, they …

Technical and content audits have been the backbone of SEO for many years, and while they play a valuable role, their scope has expanded as search has evolved. Audits now cover much more than purely technical factors such as indexation, status codes and broken links. To stay relevant, audits have broadened …

Google’s recent freeze on granting defamation removal requests has thawed a little. Even so, the company’s actions around harmful and dishonest items attacking the reputations of individuals and organizations continue to be mystifyingly inconsistent. In this column, I’ll share some facts and thoughts on how defamation victims should proceed given …

In April of last year, Search Engine Land contributor Paul Shapiro wrote a brilliant post on Calculating Internal PageRank. The post outlined a method to look at a website’s internal linking in order to determine the importance of pages within the website. This is amazingly powerful, but I think Paul’s concept …

There is a never-ending issue all SEOs must face: fighting for budget. I’ve found this to be especially true when it comes to link building. SEO, although technical in nature, can be explained in real-world measures to upper management. There’s data, traffic levels, technical configurations and on-site elements directly in …

Often when we think about the holidays, we envision panicked crowds on Black Friday, Cyber Monday desk shoppers and last-minute gifters filling their cart on Christmas Eve. We think about the winter holiday season. That’s no surprise, since last year, the winter holidays accounted for over $658 billion in sales, …

Why are we so afraid of links? Back in the old days of SEO, we loved any link if it was free, even if it was from a spammy scraper site or the lowest-quality directory you’ve ever seen. If we did nothing to get that link, it was a great …

Google’s rollout of artificial intelligence has many in the search engine optimization ( SEO) industry dumbfounded. Optimization tactics that have worked for years are quickly becoming obsolete or changing. Why is that? And is it possible to find a predictable optimization equation like in the old days? Here’s the inside …