Apr 28, 2020 | fundamentals
This article was published on Monday, September 27, 2004. It is an interview with the founder of Copyscape, Gideon Greenspan. Copyscape was a brand new service in 2004 and not well known yet. As a publisher concerned by plagiarism I had found Copyscape to be a useful...
Mar 29, 2020 | fundamentals
The following is a popular article from Wednesday July 20, 2005. I’m republishing it because it was popular and useful when originally published. But also it’s good to understand where SEO comes from historically so that modern practices can learn from it...
Mar 2, 2019 | fundamentals
The following is an old article originally published Monday August 1, 2005. It was about being realistic about the quality of your content. The “hand check” in the title is a reference to having a banned site manually evaluated by a human at Google or...
Sep 13, 2017 | search algorithms
You’re not alone if you fail to see the distinction between a ranking factor and a factor that was used to train the algorithm. However, this inability to comprehend the distinction has caused a lot of misinformation about how CTR is used in search algorithms. I...
Jul 21, 2017 | fundamentals
Theories about Fred and Phantom Have Been Discredited All the theories about “Fred/Phantom” were wrong. This is a fact. Those were not updates at all and they had zero to do with finding “quality” issues with websites. This has been confirmed...
Jun 20, 2017 | search algorithms
This article addresses the mystery of search results that don’t make sense, such as top ranked sites with obviously paid links seemingly powering their rankings. Some top ranked pages have weak backlinks and sometimes only a partial keyword match on the page....
Apr 24, 2017 | search algorithms
The SEO community generally perceives Google updates as targeting metrics of low quality. Anytime a change occurs in Google’s algorithm, the change is understood through the lens of what kinds of sites lost ranking. This is a less than ideal way to understand...
Apr 12, 2017 | fundamentals, search algorithms
This article addresses shaky SEO strategies that are promoted as important but are outdated. But more importantly, this article will show how some ideas are true or not. Building a better SEO BS Detector will show you how to be more discerning of what you are told to...
Feb 27, 2017 | fundamentals, small business
It’s good to be aware of what competitors are doing but there are situations, particularly in competitive niches like real estate or personal injury, when the competition is simply doing what everyone else is doing. Doing what everyone else is doing is not...
Feb 7, 2017 | small business
There are four areas that local small business owners need to focus on in order to assure they are receiving their fair share of business. Top four tips for increasing local sales: Communicating your geographic information with your website Promote your website...
