Grow Your Business throw Out of Digital Marketing

Search Engine Land was misidentified by Google’s system as being hacked and was removed from Google’s search results early Friday morning. Google has resolved the issue and Search Engine Land should return to the Google index shortly. What happened?   A Google spokesperson said “This was a case where our system misidentified the site as being hacked.” Since it was very early in the morning, and I personally do not have access to Google Search Console for Search Engine Land, I was unable to find out the cause of the issue. In its response, Google told us, “[A] message informing the site owner that we believed the site was hacked would have been made available within Search Console, as well as an option to request a review. … However, as we discovered the error before a review request was made, we reversed the action,” The normal process would be that someone with verified access to Google Search Console would see the hacked message and request a review. Then Google would return the ...

For anyone who’s been involved in SEO for longer than a few months, you’ll know that you’re dealing with a rapidly changing environment. Not only are we dealing with algorithms that change daily but it’s compounded with SERP layout changes and often dramatic shifts in device usage. You’re hopefully already well-underway with your holiday SEO efforts for 2018, but SEO in 2019 and beyond is going to be very different than the Google you’re optimizing for today. As we mentioned above, there are three core areas of change we need to keep our eyes on: Algorithms SERP layouts Devices So, let’s look at them one-by-one and what you need to be thinking of as you prep for the holidays, which are just 15 short months away. Algorithms In 2019 If there is a constant in SEO, it’s change. Constant change. Google updates their algorithms on an almost daily basis and with machine learning, this is sure to accelerate with the barrier to change and testing dropped to near-zero. Without a doubt, the focus...

Here we are at the end of October and you’re realizing your SEO is not in shape for the holidays. Whether that’s because you are just now understanding that your SEO strategy isn’t going to yield the results you want before the holidays, or if you’ve just procrastinated – you’re looking for some techniques that will generate short-term wins. Fortunately, they exist. A couple of years ago I wrote a similar piece on last-minute SEO tips for the holidays. That left readers with about three weeks to make use of them. This year we’re getting a slightly earlier start, so let’s dive in with 5 things you can do right now to get started on making more money during this peak time of year. Titles and descriptions in the SERPs I’m going to start with the only tip that I’ll be repeating from my previous article and that’s titles and descriptions. I’m repeating it for two reasons: It’s easily the most straight-forward thing you can do with tremendous impact. There have been changes in how to approac...

Links, even within a website, show relationships between content. They transfer value and importance between pages. Even more importantly, internal links define your website’s structure. They help users to navigate and search engines to understand your website. A healthy internal linking strategy makes it easier for your pages to be indexed and to rank, as well as increasing click-through rates and conversion rates for visitors who can find what they are looking for. Before we start looking at three ways to boost your SERP rankings, let’s take a look at some of the basic principles of internal linking: The more links a page receives, the more value Google gives it. Just like external links indicate an overall value with regard to other pages on the web, internal links help Google determine the importance of a page with regard to the other pages on your website. Internal links are so important that Google now considers that 1000 is a “reasonable number” of links per page. Don’t forget ...

One of the more powerful subsets of Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used these days in SEO is machine learning, which deals specifically with the training of algorithms, or understanding how and why algorithms work. But machine learning is only as good as the data it is operating on. Part of what makes a great use case for machine learning is having large amounts of very precise data. Without this precision however, model guidance gets murky, and often leads to erroneous (and costly) conclusions. Are you using the right data? You can’t just take Google ranking data, which is effectively the output of a black box, feed it into some sort of machine learning, and automatically get positive results. This white paper from Market Brew shows you how to drive better SEO results with AI and precision data. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “ Implementing Artificial Intelligence to Attack SEO .”

If a search engine’s crawler can’t find your content to index, it’s not going to rank. It’s also not a good signal, but, most importantly, if a search engine can’t find something, a user may not be able to either. That’s why tools that mimic the actions of a search engine’s crawler can be very useful. You can find all sorts of problems using these crawlers, problems that can drastically impact how well your site performs in search engines. They can also help you, as a link builder, to determine which sites deserve your attention. Link building is never a magic bullet. Links take a lot of hard work, and it can be useless to build links to a site that suffers from terrible SEO. For this article, I’ve looked at four crawlers: two are web-based and two are desktop versions. I’ve done a very light analysis of each in order to show you how they can be used to help when you’re building links, but they have many, many more uses. I’ll go through uses for link outreach and also for making sure ...