- The Magical Black Box
Google's mission statement is "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."That mission is so profound & so important the associated court documents in their antitrust cases must be withheld from public consumptio…
- 24 Sep 23, 12:43am -
- AI-Driven Search
I just dusted off the login here to realize I hadn't posted in about a half-year & figured it was time to write another one. ;)Yandex Source Code LeakSome of Yandex's old source code was leaked, and few cared about the ranking factors shared in the…
- 19 Feb 23, 3:05pm -
- New Google Ad Labeling
TechCrunch recently highlighted how Google is changing their ad labeling on mobile devices. A few big changes include:ad label removed from individual ad unitswhere the unit-level label was instead becomes a favicona "Sponsored" label above ads…
- 15 Oct 22, 5:56pm -
- Google Helpful Content Update
Granular PandaReading the tea leaves on the pre-announced Google "helpful content" update rolling out next week & over the next couple weeks in the English language, it sounds like a second and perhaps more granular version of Panda which can take i…
- 19 Aug 22, 1:15am -
- Automating Ourselves Out of Existence
Time has grown more scarce after having a child, so I rarely blog anymore. Though I thought it probably made sense to make at least a quarterly(ish) post so people know I still exist. One of the big things I have been noticing over the past year or…
- 23 May 22, 8:22am -
- Engineering Search Outcomes
Kent Walker promotes public policies which advantage the Google monopoly. His role doing that means he has to write some really bad hot takes that lack context or intentionally & dishonestly redirect attention away from core issues - that's his job.…
- 19 Jan 22, 4:49am -
- Jasper.ai Review
Background / IntroOne of my longtime friends who was Internet marketing long before I was hit me up on Skype about a week ago praising Jasper.ai. I have to think long and hard about any other time he has really pitched or recommended something like…
- 30 Apr 21, 8:46am -
- SEMrush IPO (SEMR)
On Wednesday SEMrush priced their IPO at $14 a share & listed Thursday. There have been many marketing and online advertising companies which are publicly traded, but few that were so focused specifically on SEO while having a sizeable market cap. A…
- 27 Mar 21, 9:19am -
- The Wrong People Won
Chasing New MarketsMy initial attraction toward SEO and the web was largely that it was like a new and parallel world that bypassed many traditional gatekeepers. I wrote an ebook which originally had inconsistent formatting and it was riddled with…
- 27 Jan 21, 8:01pm -
- Apple Search
Google, Google, GoogleFor well over a decade Google has dominated search to where most stories in the search sphere were about Google or something on the periphery. In 2019 Google generated $134.81 billion in ad revenues.When Verizon bought core Y…
- 27 Aug 20, 10:43pm -
- Overcoming Webmaster Depression
This year is a rather easy year to be depressed. ;)COVID-19, fearmongering media, polarized hyper-charged social media, mass unemployment, lockdowns that killed exercise routines and social connections, loss of hope / purpose / meaning, a guy who st…
- 13 Aug 20, 4:17am -
- Declining Visitor Values
Late Funnel SEO ProfitsBefore the Panda update SEOs could easily focus almost all their energies on late funnel high-intent searches which were easy to monetize without needing to put a ton of effort into brand building or earlier funnel information…
- 7 Jul 20, 10:21am -
- How to Read Google Algorithm Updates
Links = RankOld Google (pre-Panda) was to some degree largely the following: links = rank.Once you had enough links to a site you could literally pour content into a site like water and have the domain's aggregate link authority help anything on th…
- 24 May 20, 2:24am -
- Easy for You
To Teach, One Must LearnOne of the benefits of writing is it forces you to structure your thoughts. If you are doing something to pass a test rote memorization can work, but if you are trying to teach someone else and care it forces you to know wit…
- 13 May 20, 3:21pm -
- New Age Cloaking
Historically cloaking was considered bad because a consumer would click expecting a particular piece of content or user experience while being delivered an experience which differed dramatically. As publishers have become more aggressive with paywal…
- 12 May 20, 1:34am -
- Managing Algorithmic Volatility
Upon the recently announced Google update I've seen some people Tweet things likeif you are afraid of algorithm updates, you must be a crappy SEO if you are technically perfect in your SEO, updates will only help youI read those sorts of lines an…
- 10 May 20, 8:30pm -
- New Version of SEO Toolbar
Our programmer recently updated our SEO toolbar to work with the most recent version of Firefox. You can install it from here. After you install it the toolbar should automatically update on a forward basis.It is easy to toggle on or off simply by…
- 4 May 20, 6:09am -
- China Still Censoring Google, Now Globally
Google Gets Out of ChinaIn March of 2010 Google announced they would no longer censor their search results for China:earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiti…
- 28 Apr 20, 12:28pm -
- Increasing Time on Site
Changing User IntentsGoogle's search quality rater document highlights how the intent of searches can change over time for a specific keyword. A generic search for [iPhone] is likely to be related to the most recent model. A search for [President B…
- 24 Apr 20, 7:03am -
- Revenue Quality & Leverage
The coronavirus issue is likely to linger for some time.GERMANY PUBLIC HEALTH AGENCY PRESIDENT SAYS OUR ASSUMPTION IS THAT IT WILL TAKE ABOUT TWO YEARS FOR THIS PANDEMIC TO RUN ITS COURSE— Quantitative Trading (@fiquant) March 17, 2020Up to 70% o…
- 17 Mar 20, 4:07am -
- Subscription Fatigue
Subscription ManagementI have active subscriptions with about a half-dozen different news & finance sites along with about a half dozen software tools, but sometimes using a VPN or web proxy across different web browsers makes logging in to all of t…
- 8 Feb 20, 8:27am -
- Favicon SEO
Google recently copied their mobile result layout over to desktop search results. The three big pieces which changed as part of that update wereURLs: In many cases Google will now show breadcrumbs in the search results rather than showing the full…
- 19 Jan 20, 8:25am -
- Brands vs Ads
Brand, Brand, BrandAbout 7 years ago I wrote about how the search relevancy algorithms were placing heavy weighting on brand-related signals after Vince & Panda on the (half correct!) presumption that this would lead to excessive industry consolidat…
- 8 Nov 19, 8:16am -
- Internet Wayback Machine Adds Historical TextDiff
The Wayback Machine has a cool new feature for looking at the historical changes of a web page.The color scale shows how much a page has changed since it was last cached & you can select between any two documents to see how a page has changed over…
- 4 Nov 19, 11:36pm -
- Dofollow, Nofollow, Sponsored, UGC
A Change to NofollowLast month Google announced they were going to change how they treated nofollow, moving it from a directive toward a hint. As part of that they also announced the release of parallel attributes rel="sponsored" for sponsored links…
- 23 Oct 19, 10:20pm -
- New Keyword Tool
Our keyword tool is updated periodically. We recently updated it once more.For comparison sake, the old keyword tool looked like thisWhereas the new keyword tool looks like thisThe upsides of the new keyword tool are:fresher data from this ye…
- 14 Sep 19, 3:06am -
- AMP'd Up for Recaptcha
Beyond search Google controls the leading distributed ad network, the leading mobile OS, the leading web browser, the leading email client, the leading web analytics platform, the leading mapping platform, the leading free video hosting site. They w…
- 30 Jun 19, 2:47pm -
- The Fractured Web
Anyone can argue about the intent of a particular action & the outcome that is derived by it. But when the outcome is known, at some point the intent is inferred if the outcome is derived from a source of power & the outcome doesn't change. Or, put…
- 17 Apr 19, 11:09am -
- Keyword Not Provided, But it Just Clicks
When SEO Was EasyWhen I got started on the web over 15 years ago I created an overly broad & shallow website that had little chance of making money because it was utterly undifferentiated and crappy. In spite of my best (worst?) efforts while being…
- 9 Apr 19, 8:09am -
- How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone
Brian McCullough, who runs Internet History Podcast, also wrote a book named How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone which did a fantastic job of capturing the ethos of the early web and telling the backstory of so many people & projec…
- 7 Apr 19, 8:13pm -
