There is a destructive trend across the Blackhat world right now which is going to cause a lot of problems for people. Mixed signals on the causes of penalized sites and case studies on sites using Blackhat techniques which seemingly didn't get hit are challenging what we've learned from Penguin 2.1 so far. Don't fall into the trap, most of the sites that used spam to rank and seemingly passed by Penguin 2.1 were very young sites. I have young sites [...]
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Down to business, the recent updates have been a win for Google as many blackhat sites were penalized. Google's continued dedication to penalizing sites they believe are violating their TOS is starting to payoff if you discount the huge collateral damage. It was quite a sight to observe such widespread damage, I've not seen an update this hard hitting before, it was the web equivalent of the atomic bomb. So why am I so excited? Well, I'll let Jeff Goldblum explain... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkWeMvrNiOM In many [...]
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Over the past 10 years of my online career I've seen many methods and opinions come and go. Yet it seems that the same questions crop up after every Google update; Is SEO dead? Is linkbuilding dead? Is Blackhat dead? And while working with various companies and contracts these are questions we have to repetitively ask ourselves often in order to stay viable. Businesses and entrepreneurs have a lot invested in their websites, not just money, but time and effort too. When working in [...]
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According to Matt Cutts there was a data refresh and update to Penguin which Google is now internally referring to as Penguin 2.0. This new iteration Google admitted in a February webmaster hangout video that Penguin runs more regularly than stated, I believe it runs every one to two months judging by some of the videos from Google and events they speak at. You can find Matt Cutts post here. So what does this mean for SEO? Well first we should look [...]
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