Top SEM Tips

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