Google Webmaster Tools fails to consistently notify people after flagging a site with malware, and this is costing people visitors, sales, and time, along with some inconvenience and embarrassment thrown in for good measure. They flag sites for malware in the search results, they flag sites at clickthrough before users get there, and they flag sites deeper into WMT after clicking the domain, but they do not consistently notify the WMT account holder on the main messages screen, and that's a big Read more [...]

At my Pubcon hosting session last November, I predicted that Google would make page load time a ranking factor in 2010. The very next day in his PubCon session, Matt Cutts made the announcement that speed as a ranking factor would be coming soon, and Google did make that happen in April of this year. No, I'm not some sort of a search heretic ;)  - It just made sense to me that since they were putting such emphasis on speed for Ad Words Quality Scores for so long, that making a factor for organic Read more [...]

According to Google Webmaster tools, an affiliate site of mine has over 26,000 links from several hundred different domains. That sounds great, doesn't it? One problem though - the majority of the links don't seem to actually exist, and I have no idea where they came from! I swear, I've been up to nothing fishy with this domain, (really!) but the vast majority of these links are coming from spammy sounding subdomains, and I can't figure out what's going on. Is someone trying to "linkspambomb" Read more [...]

"The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget." "You will though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it." Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass So, I would like to have a do-over on this old post that I wrote.  Not that I think the post was wrong or bad…I actually think quite highly of it.  But, it wasn’t really what I wanted to say given its inspiration. Here’s the Read more [...]

"All a user has to do to turn off personalized search is to add &pws=0 to the URL of a search query” Matt Cutts - SMX Advanced 2007 As easy as that was to repeat for every search, it looks like Google is finally listening to users, who would like to be able to know that their results are being altered from what others see, and would like an easy way to disable that. Shortly after personal search became "no longer optional", many different people have written about not liking it, and Read more [...]

by Lisa Williams We have a client who came to us in March to help procure a Reconsideration Request from Google. De-indexing and reconsideration at Google is not a simple feat. Google reconsideration and religion have a lot in common. Many faiths (as with many search engines) have the same premise, be good and you will be rewarded. It’s not always clear what the rules are or where you stand. Just as in religion there is no real criteria to assess (in real time and with a tracking system) Read more [...]

Even though many experienced search marketers shun the use of tools, I guess I'm still a rookie because I really enjoy them. No matter how efficient I think I can be, there's always a better way to do something when you introduce a certain level of automation. Inside Google Webmaster tools there was apparently a recent addition back in February but I just noticed, and it's really pretty slick. I saw a new menu item called gadgets at the bottom left. It took a total of maybe 90 seconds Read more [...]

When we first set up this blog, we applied for an AdSense account, but for whatever reason, we decided not to add the AdSense code to this blog, so I never did. The account is there, and I've even got the code in a widget (I think), but I never made it go live. Now, this past week, we received this e-mail from the AdSense team: Dear Scott Orth (ed. - SEMpdx Treasurer) While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Read more [...]

I don't really see how it could be true, but I found an interesting topic in our forum where Tom Hale, a local Portland PPC expert and SEMpdx member said this - "...I have a hunch best practices for Page Rank may have a relationship to best practices for Quality Score..." and I've got to say I'd be surprised. Tom also first points out that Google's answer would be "no" and that was my initial answer too, but I'm really not so sure... Read the thread Has anyone else suspected this before, Read more [...]

Google is offering us experimental views for their search results and I urge you to participate. You and I can shape the future, by participating in the process that will define how we search in the future. Why are they doing this? While some of us may prefer Google classic, there are millions upon millions of webpages are being added every single week to the Internet. If we as users are limited only to 10 results and some ads down the side, with 3 10 local results, we may ultimately abandon Read more [...]