On June 3rd, 2019, Google started rolling out a broad update to the ranking algorithm, named the June 2019 Core Update. They announced this over the weekend, and on June 2nd, 2019, there were temporary outages of Google services (Gmail, YouTube, Google Search, Google Cloud) across the world in various locations. Maybe they needed to […]
Google Announces June 2019 Core Update
Should You Pay For a Wikipedia Article?
This is a question I see every week in SEO forums. Should you pay to have someone create a Wikipedia page for your company? Many online marketers believe that having a Wikipedia article will help boost your SEO. My advice is, unless you are a national or international company, hold off on that. Wikipedia has […]
Can You Do SEO Without Paid Tools?
Today I’m answering a great question that I saw in an SEO forum, “Can you do SEO without paid SEO tools?” When we say, “paid SEO software”, it refers to tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz Pro, Majestic, Mangools, and many others. I believe that you can do SEO without any tools except for Google itself. […]
Did the Google Search Quality Raters Visit Your Site?
What are the Google Quality Search Rater Guidelines? They are a checklist given to Google independent contractors, who are tasked with scoring the search results that Google returns for certain search phrases. If you want to see the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, there’s a link here. They were last updated publicly on July 20, 2018. […]
“We Have 100 Google Reviews, But We’re Not in the 3-Pack Map?”
Published March 10th, 2019
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I saw an interesting question recently: a mattress company with over 100 Google reviews wants to know why they don’t come up in the 3 pack map. When they search for mattress company related keywords close to their location, the Google 3 pack map shows businesses farther away. These other companies have far less Google […]
Should You Change the Publish Date of a Post for SEO?
Today’s question is, “What criteria does Google look at when they are trying to figure out the last time a blog post or article was updated?” “I have some blog posts that need updating. Some need a few tweaks. Others need major overhauls.” “But I need to know what they are looking for when reconsidering […]
Why Google Rewrites Your Titles and Descriptions in Search Results
Published January 31st, 2019
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In certain cases, Google will rewrite your title tags and meta descriptions in search results. We look at some reasons the Google algorithm will choose to do this.
“How Much SEO Boost Does a Mobile-Friendly Site Give You?”
Published January 18th, 2019
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I want to talk about a thread I saw in one of the Reddit SEO channels, a question about the ROI of a mobile-friendly website. This is a paraphrase of what the original poster asked, but it went something like this. “Our website is not mobile-friendly right now. If we make our website mobile-friendly, how […]
A Tale of Two Companies
Today, I’m going to tell you the story of two companies. Company A and Company B were both founded in the same year, and sold a similar product line. Both companies went trade shows, built a distributor network, and were making sales calls every day. Each company had a decent looking website when they launched, […]
Using HARO for SEO Backlinks
Google has said publicly that two of the most important SEO ranking factors are the content of your website and the link profile of your website. Links from other websites to yours have been as a proxy for site authority and relevance by search engines for many years. In order for incoming links to have […]