Slip up urban dictionary

As Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum loses two primary races to rival Mitt Romney, perhaps he can console himself with, ironically, another loss. Spreading Santorum, the page defining “santorum” as a by-product of anal sex, has finally dropped from the top results on Google. The related anti-Santorum blog, however, remains. And a page from Urban Dictionary keeps the definition alive, more explicit than before. Santorum: The Definition Page The page at SpreadingSantorum.com, created by columnist Dan Savage as a protest against Santorum’s views about homosexuality, has maintained its position in the top results on Google for years. The page defines “santorum” as: The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex. To understand more of the history of the site, and how it ended up doing so well on Google (and Bing, Yahoo and Baidu), see my previous article, Should Rick Santorum’s “Google … [Read more...] about “Spreading Santorum” Drops At Google; New Site Keeps Anal Sex Definition At Number One

As we covered last week, Google’s search results for a search on “santorum” have gotten a lot cleaner recently. The change was featured on The Rachel Maddow Show last night, and Search Engine Land’s coverage got a big shout-out. The clip is below, as well as an update on all things Santorum and Google. Santorum himself is finally number one, and that SafeSearch change Google made turns out not to be so safe. Maddow Covers The Santorum Shuffle “Spreading Santorum” Drops At Google is our story from last week and provides all the background about how the “Speading Santorum” site — created as a protest years ago against Rick Santorum’s anti-homosexual views — was dropped from the top results at Google in a search for “santorum,” after being listed that way for years. Maddow covered the change (thanks for the tip, John!) in this segment on her show: Search Engine Land Gets A Cameo About two minutes in, Search … [Read more...] about Santorum’s Changing “Google Problem” — & Search Engine Land — Make The Rachel Maddow Show

For the third year in a row, Searchmetrics has published its annual Winners and Losers Report, which reveals how certain sites fared in organic search visibility on Google.com over the course of 2016. Searchmetrics’ analysis is based on the ‘SEO Visibility’ of each website, an indicator developed by Searchmetrics to measure a webpage’s performance in organic search. This is not the same as organic search ranking, but aims to give an overview of how often a website shows up in search results, based on “search volume and the position of ranking keywords” (as set out in the Searchmetrics FAQ). Based on this metric, Searchmetrics then analysed the change in websites’ SEO Visibility during the course of the year, and sorted the top 100 winners and losers by absolute change in visibility. While the results are limited to Google.com – and thus are mostly applicable to websites from the U.S. – they are an interesting insight into how the … [Read more...] about What can we learn from the winners and losers of organic search in 2016?

Jason Miller knows a thing or two about content. He’s the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Linkedin, who presented a session titled “How to Achieve Face-Melting Content Marketing ROI” at ClickZ Live NY last week. With that title, the session immediately piqued my interest and Jason did not disappoint. In case you were wondering, face melting is: “The condition in which, due to an extreme exposure to an event of epic awesomeness, horror or any other emotion on the more extreme end of the spectrum of emotions, one loses all perception of space and time including (but not limited to) a brief lapse in physical awareness. Such an emotional rush can even override pain, which in some cases may be the cause of the rush.” Source: The Urban Dictionary To put this in context, you don’t need more content; you need more EPIC and AWESOME content – aka more relevant content. According to Jason, in a recent survey, 44% of overall respondents say they would … [Read more...] about How to achieve face-melting content marketing ROI

Hreflang annotations provide an easy way for multilingual or multinational sites to indicate the relevant language/country targets of their pages. Both Google and Yandex use hreflang to serve the right page version to each market in search results. However, when doing SEO audits to international websites, I usually find hreflang implementation issues that hurt the pages’ chances of being correctly served to their relevant audience. Following are examples of the most common issues I encounter (so you can watch for them in your next audit) and how to avoid and/or fix them: 1. Nonexistent Hreflang Values Google and Yandex specify that the value of the hreflang attribute should use the ISO 639-1 format for the language and (optionally) the ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 for the region. So, for example, a page for English language speakers in the United States would have a hreflang value of “en-us,” while an alternate version targeting Spanish speakers in the U.S. would have a … [Read more...] about The Most Common Issues & How To Avoid Them