SEO Blog

What a week it’s been in the news. Kate Middleton had nude photos splashed across French newstands, violent protests erupted after an anti-Islamic film debuted its trailer online and Apple released their highly anticipated iPhone 5 to a rabid preorder reception. As always, a good news week means a fascinating insight into search, so this […]

We got a question this week from Steve Abey that’s about targeting users in search by their location. Steve asked: “I have a business site targeting Australia and a separate one for the NZ market. Most content is similar, but customised a little specific for each. In the eyes of Google is it better to […]

There’s been a lot of buzz in SEO circles over the last week about a patent granted to Google on August 14th that could cause some serious headaches for webmasters and SEO’s. The patent covers a system that governs how Google’s algorithm might respond when it detects a website is engaging in webspam to manipulate […]

Taking the stage at SES San Francisco, Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts announced that Penguin 2.0 is on it’s way, describing the update as a “jarring and jolting” update that webmasters “don’t want”. Likening the Penguin-refining process to the same ones used by Google during the Panda updates, Cutts warned that it’s still early […]

While it doesn’t get any better than poking fun at companies using spammy backlinks to boost their rankings, there’s something even more gratifying about catching them in the act buying followers or likes for their social media profiles. But social fakery can be a lot harder to spot than spammy backlinks, so this week we’ll […]

9 AM on Monday I got a call from smartcompany for a story on Google’s DMCA ranking change. In case you haven’t heard, Google announced over the weekend that it would now consider the amount of “valid copyright removal notices” it receives for a site. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a nasty piece […]

Ah the 2012 London Olympics. You’ve given us everything. Flying knee KO‘s in a female soccer match, professional photographers confused by the concept of a lenscap, sympathetic head-first athletics falls, excellent faceplants from gymnasts and an insanely painful-looking dive that we couldn’t help but laugh at. Oh and those actual sporting events none of us […]

So what’s going on with Facebook and these crazy click fraud numbers? Music digital sales platform company Limited Run posted to their Facebook page some interesting findings that call into question the legitimacy of Facebook’s advertising products. From their original post: “A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, […]

The confusion about Google’s latest round of unnatural link warnings is getting more bizarre by the minute. After sending out the warnings and getting hit with a wave of criticism concerning how vague and confusing the warning were, Google’s head of Webspam Matt Cutts took to Danny Sullivan’s excellent story on the confusion and left […]

Over the weekend we received an alert from Google that no webmaster wants to see: Google’s bots found hundreds of 404 errors that had sprung up overnight! Luckily our Google Webmaster Tools account alerted us to the issue, which was caused by a faulty plugin, allowing us to act quickly on a fix before too […]