Ex-Googlers Explain Why They Won't Give Up The Secrets To Ranking In Google

Ex-Googlers Explain Why They Won't Give Up The Secrets To Ranking In Google I spotted a thread at Black Hat World asking why have we not seen a case where a former Google employee who worked in search quality sell their knowledge or publish the secret sauce on what it would take to rank well quickly and get rich fast. Or why haven't these former Googlers done it for themselves, exploit their knowledge to rank well in Google and make a quick buck? I...

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Google's Matt Cutts: Content Clarity Over Technical Content

Google's Matt Cutts: Content Clarity Over Technical Content There is an excellent video from Google's Matt Cutts on the question Should I focus on clarity or jargon when writing content? The short answer is focus on clarity over jargon. Matt explains that in most cases, having content that most people understand is way more important that having all the scientific and technical jargon about the topic you are covering. If you can't explain the...

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Google's Matt Cutts Stops By WebmasterWorld After Three Years Of Silence

Google's Matt Cutts Stops By WebmasterWorld After Three Years Of Silence The last time Matt Cutts of Google posted something at WebmasterWorld was over three years ago on January 4, 2011. He broke his silence there yesterday posting in a private member-only WebmasterWorld thread. Why does this matter? I am not sure but he was the infamous GoogleGuy at WebmasterWorld for years and years. Not posting there, which was like a home to Cutts, for...

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Signs Of More Google Algorithm Updates Early This Week

Signs Of More Google Algorithm Updates Early This Week We reported about a possible Google update around February 13th and I do believe there was something rather large on that date - but now there is more chatter about a possible update early this week, this past Sunday and Monday at Google. The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has a lot of discussion from webmasters about a possible update. Here are some recent comments: Has anybody noticed a...

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Google February Update: Possibly A Google Panda Refresh?

Google February Update: Possibly A Google Panda Refresh? There is a tremendous amount of chatter going on about Google updating over the past couple days or so at WebmasterWorld. On February 6th we had the Page Layout algorithm update but that didn't cause much of a fuss in the SEO forums. But something over the past couple days is. Moderator, Travelin Cat, said: I'm following about 25 client sites and all but 3 had a huge jump in traffic on...

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Google's Page Layout Algorithm Updated For Third Time

Google's Page Layout Algorithm Updated For Third Time Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they have pushed out a refresh to the Google Page Layout algorithm on or around February 6th. He did not specify how much this impacted the search results but based on my analysis of the SEO community, it had a very small impact on most SEOs. This would be the third update to the page layout algorithm. Since it is just a refresh, it...

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Is Google Misleading Us? If So, How?

Is Google Misleading Us? If So, How? You've all seen it, parking signs that are so confusing that sometimes you wonder, is the local government trying to mislead you... Webmasters are asking themselves the same questions about Google. With all the blog posts, videos, guidelines, is Google setting SEOs and webmasters up for disaster one way or another? Last year, we asked you if you felt Google was lying to you and only 10% said no. The rest,...

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Google To Bring It On German Link Spammers

Google To Bring It On German Link Spammers  Yesterday, Google posted a stern warning on the German Google Webmaster blog telling webmasters that you will be penalized for unnatural links. Matt Cutts then Tweeted the same warning saying "A reminder (in German) that paid links that pass PageRank violate our guidelines." This comes the week after Google took action on a French link network, where Matt also dropped a hint on German link networks...

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Google Sends Manual Actions For Rich Snippet Spam & Spammy Structured Markup

Google Sends Manual Actions For Rich Snippet Spam & Spammy Structured Markup Rich snippet spam has been an issue since rich snippets came out and eventually added a report rich snippet spam tool. Then Google dropped the amount of rich snippets showing in the search results recently. It seems like Google is now sending out notifications to those who have been spammy with their rich snippets. One webmaster posted a notification he received in...

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DMOZ Drops Over 1 Million Sites From Directory?

DMOZ Drops Over 1 Million Sites From Directory? Did you notice that DMOZ, one of the oldest and largest human crafted web directories, has removed over 1 million sites and 10,000 editors from their directory? A DigitalPoint Forum thread first noticed it. If you look at the live site now, you will see 4,261,763 sites, 89,252 editors and over 1,019,865 categories in the footer. But if you go to the Way Back Machine archive you will see 5,310,345...

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Can You Rank In Google Without Content?

Can You Rank In Google Without Content? A WebmasterWorld thread has a webmaster who has a site that doesn't have any real content. It is basically statistical downloads and specifications downloadable as PDFs or Zip files. Can you rank web pages with no content at all in Google? A good example of a page that ranks without having the exact words on it is the Adobe Reader page which ranks for [click here]. But what about a page with almost...

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