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There appears to be a trend in Google’s actions towards publishers and the digital marketing industry that has me a bit concerned. It seems the company has become less and less transparent with publishers over the last couple years — and frankly, it has me a bit uneasy. Google transparency Now, there have always been bones of contention between Google and the SEO community; some believe that Google hates SEOs, while others believe that Google actually needs us. I was always in the camp that thought Google knew they needed the SEO community because they cannot control the end product. No matter how great the search results, the end product is still the website. If the websites returned by Google are not very usable or relevant, then people won’t use Google to find them. This has made the SEO industry an almost necessary go-between, giving Google a fairly direct method to affect site quality by getting SEOs to communicate their rules to publishers. However, in light of … [Read more...] about Google ch-ch-ch-changes. How they’re affecting publishers and SEOs

The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.Sun Tzu, The Art of War The Art of War is a book written around 500 BCE in ancient China. The author, Sun Tzu, was a military general, strategist and philosopher. As popular history would have it, the book has influenced many military operations and conquests over the years — from Japanese Samurai to France’s Napoleon Bonaparte. Today, the book continues to hold influence in various spheres of modern life. A quick Google search will reveal many tales of the book’s use in the business world. One story that sticks out is when the fledgling Snapchat resisted an acquisition by Facebook, and the CEO, Evan Spiegel, gave all of his staff copies of The Art of War as inspiration to finish the fight. Can lessons from military strategy really be used to inform our marketing and business … [Read more...] about Local SEO & The Art of War

One of the latest webmaster help videos brings up a really interesting SEO question: what happens if you get a lot of nofollow links, such as links gained for the explicit purpose of generating direct traffic. Could that negatively impact your search rankings? SEO professionals have known for quite some time that putting nofollow on the link is a great way to tell Google that you don’t want to pass PageRank for this particular link or that you somehow don’t trust the sites the link is on. So if a large number of nofollowed links are pointing at a single site, could this potentially raise a flag to Google that the site is untrustworthy for some reason? “No, typically nofollow links cannot hurt your site – so upfront, very quick answer on that point,” said Matt Cutts, Google’s Distinguished Engineer. “That said, let me just mention one weird corner case, which is if you are leaving comments on every blog in the world, even if those links might be … [Read more...] about Matt Cutts: Too Many nofollow Links Won’t Hurt Your Google Search Rankings

For local brands and companies, it can be hard to initially bridge the gap between traditional and digital marketing. Many local companies, even very successful ones, see more value in traditional marketing methods than inbound digital engagement. Recently, we’ve seen brands increase local search performance by digitizing traditional marketing methods, translating offline to online marketing. Local businesses that are struggling to understand how to make the move from traditional to digital can follow a few strategies. Use hashtags correctly In early 2015, Google and Twitter partnered in a way that allowed Google to collect information and have access to Twitter’s data stream. This means that if your local campaign is running on hashtags across various digital touchpoints (mainly Twitter), you can use this to increase the strength of your local search presence. Work on incorporating hashtags into printed and other materials to encourage your audience to take the … [Read more...] about Digitizing traditional marketing methods to compete in local search

Google’s head of search spam, has decided to publish a bunch of blog posts that were sitting in draft mode on his personal blog. He said his blog needs to cough up a hairball – hence the animated GIF used here. But, we can learn a few things when Matt Cutts coughs up hairballs. A few of the 16 blog posts he published last night contain some Google insight. Helping The Masses Versus Individuals Matt wrote a blog post named email backlog where he explains the rational about responding to individual emails requesting help versus producing videos or posting a blog post that can help hundreds or thousands. Matt explained that when he replies to one email, it helps one person. But when he produces a video, it can help tens of thousands. Matt’s point, if you don’t get a response after you email him, do not be insulted. Here is a snippet of what Matt wrote: So now I’m looking at these 150+ emails from outside Google, and I’m pondering about how much time I … [Read more...] about Google’s Matt Cutts On Spamming Cuil, Helping Masses, Debunking Evil Google & More