The Penguin algorithm, introduced to combat poor quality sites, has had many websites bracing themselves for ranking changes since its release in April of 2012. So it stood to reason that a release dubbed ‘Penguin 2.0’ would have as many, if not more, significant changes than any of the previous releases. However, despite Matt Cutts’ […]
Category Archives: Google
Some time ago already, Google made a few changes to its user interface. One of the things that changed was the way you tell the search engine that you only want to see pages from South Africa in your search. Now personally, I would think that if you’re searching www.google.co.za, then by default, you should […]
The updates which Google release for their algorithms, Panda and Penguin, are often considered a cause for some alarm for SEO agencies and businesses that source much of their business online. The effects of the update can range from the barely noticeable to the utterly catastrophic. Especially, if Google suddenly decides they’re not fans of […]
Earlier this year we wrote about how search engine Bing has released a link disavow tool for those websites trying to optimise around their algorithm. It was a bold step in the fight against web-spammers, although seemingly redundant from Bing. Given Bing’s ranking practices, people didn’t really take much notice. What they really wanted to […]
It’s been an issue that’s plagued the Google webmaster forums for the better part of this year but finally, this month, Matt Cutts (head of webspam at Google) announced that a link disavow tool is now available to all website owners using Google Webmaster Tools, giving users the ability to tell Google to ignore specific […]
Getting articles on Google’s News search engine can be quite tricky for any website with a news section. If your site isn’t a well established publisher of news articles like the various industry and online newspaper sites, Google is often likely to completely ignore your news posts. And even known news sites always have to […]
Google is constantly working on its algorithms. They slightly tweak the weight of certain ranking factors, they add new ones and then carefully examine the results of the data refresh. But even with these highly sophisticated algorithms there are still many low-quality websites that rank very well by manipulating certain ranking factors. One that has […]
The various spellings of words and their numerous synonyms has always been an important factor in the SEO’s keyphrase strategy. And as anyone trying to optimise their content around numerous keywords will know, it can be a difficult task, with the added risk that Google might see it as manipulative. But as Google endeavours, with […]
The first page of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is the holy grail of a valuable web presence. Even more so if it’s for a popular industry keyword. Websites, in some industries, can spend thousands each year optimising their pages, just to maintain their rank. And with each slip down the rankings, traffic can […]
They’re the most heavily discussed of all of Google’s algorithms, which is why updates for the Penguin and Panda algorithm tend to make webmasters quite anxious. And when they wake up to check their rankings, only to find them violently shaken by the update, they’re essentially left to guess as to what exactly the new […]