Finally, after years of asking for it, Google now let site owners know about manually applied penalties.This information is easily available now through the Google Webmaster Tools site at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools under ‘Search Traffic->Manual Actions’.  Apparently 2% of sites have a manual action against them.

For background Google has two types of penalties, algorithmic penalties are in their ranking algorithm and are automatically applied and removed as necessary – this includes the Panda and Penguin updates along with a whole host of other penalties. Manual penalties are applied by someone in Google after they have reviewed your site, and can only be removed by someone at Google.… Read the rest

The latest Google update has come and gone. That must mean that it is time to start debating the future of SEO — or rather, what new thing is going to mean the death of SEO this year. Anyone who has been in the industry for more than a year can recall the cyclical arguments of how SEO is dying and in the process of being replaced by something else. What that something else is changes from directories to portals to mobile to social media to some other factor.

For those out of the loop, SEO stands for search engine optimization.… Read the rest

While there is confusion about whether the upcoming update to Penguin is 4 or 2.0, there is no doubt that a major update is around the corner.  Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, announced that it was coming back in March and, if rumors are to believed, it is still on schedule to go live any day.

Penguin 1 rolled out on April 24, 2012 and affected 3.1% of search queries. By any measure this had a significant impact on various websites and specific industries.  Cutts has gone on record saying that this update to Penguin (which they refer to internally as Penguin 2.0 but the SEO community counts as Penguin 4) will be “more comprehensive and go deeper” than the original Penguin.… Read the rest

Based off the schema at http://schema.org/AggregateRating adding rating numbers to your wordpress posts is a matter of changing the field ‘Ratings Vote Text:‘ on the Ratings Templates admin page to:

Once this is loaded use Google’s rich text snippet checking tool at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets to test it… Read the rest

Yes. As seen with the recent Build My Rank fiasco you can buy BMR links and point them to your competitors sites and you will kill their site, and as they didn’t pay for them will not be able to remove the links, and won’t be able to file for reinclusion. Good bye competition, hello higher rankings!

Your mileage may vary. Don’t expect this to work for Wikipedia but it will for some smaller outfits.

Google has to address this as they have now created a huge loophole in their algorithms. There are several linking networks out there, BMR is just one.… Read the rest

The Sycara SEO tool is great for quick site audits and the results for the time invested are outstanding. The steps for a quick one hour audit are:

1. Login to your Sycara account.
2. Add your site to the Sycara system using the ‘Add Site’ menu option – supply the site name and site URL and hit save.
3. When the ‘Next Steps’ options appear click ‘Visit Site Dashboard’
4. Gather your list of top keywords and turn them in a CSV format on one line i.e. diamond watch, gold ring.
5. Under ‘Site Settings’ -> ‘Map Keywords’ click the down arrow on the blue bar and select ‘Add Keywords’ – cut and paste your CSV keyword string here.