UPDATE: I had always (wrongly) thought that Google wouldn't index pages that were blocked in robots.txt. But John Mueller clarified this for me (thank you John): robots.txt will control the crawling BUT NOT the indexing. Good explanation of that is here: ---------------- Google is now sometimes indexing pages DESPITE explicitly being blocked in robots.txt: Continue Reading ››

Despite Google's claims that as of Penguin 4.0 last fall, they just ignore the bad links, here's concrete evidence to the contrary. This is the traffic from one of my clients' sites. On March 2nd, I submitted a pretty major disavow file to undo some really bad ancient history. And no, they did … Continue Reading ››

My friend Mike King an ex rapper turned Super SEO Nerd is one of the most technically skilled hard-core SEO people I know. He published this brilliant article on Moz this week on the role of technical SEO in today's search marketing world.

My friend Aleyda Solis just published this super useful .htaccess tool for generating many of the common .htaccess rules needed for SEO: things like redirecting non-slash-ending URLs to the ones ending in slashes; redirecting from the non-www subdomain to the www one; redirecting http to https; even the code for the custom … Continue Reading ››

On my website, I display a map of where my clients are, all over the world. Mostly because I like messing around with Google Maps via the Maps Javascript API--it's really powerful and you can do some really cool things with it.

All of a sudden, my map went wonky. The markers would all show, … Continue Reading ››

There appears to have been a Penguin data update either yesterday or early today. What makes me so sure? Well, I set up a little Penguin trap. I built a one-page site, tuned for a nonsense term, and built about a dozen links to that page with the nonsense term as anchor text. Then, I waited … Continue Reading ››

Google Webmaster Tools newly-announced Search Analytics brings with it a rescue from the dreaded [not provided] debacle of the past 3 1/2 years.

Google's talking about "more precise data" etc. in the new Search Analytics report--referring to the massive data issues in the old Top Queries and Top Pages reports in Webmaster Tools, … Continue Reading ››

Google is now showing a little pulldown to the right of the website URL in their search results. When you click the pulldown, you get a synopsis of the company or organization.

In the admittedly limited testing … Continue Reading ››