In an apparent attempt to become more welcoming and persuade tentative users, Google Plus has dropped its famous “real name” restriction. While still encouraging people to honestly represent themselves by using their true identity on the social network, Google has now allowed users to choose just about any name they’d like.
When Google’s Penguin algorithm first went live nearly four years ago, sites that were engaging in black hat link schemes saw massive reductions in search rank and traffic that ended up being very difficult to recover from.
It’s been approximately one month since the Google Penguin release shook up the internet with its controversial updates to several key ranking algorithms, which were intended to reduce the visibility of webspam but apparently dragged a lot of worthwhile websites and blogs down along with it.
Meta descriptions are one of the most important onpage SEO elements, with webmasters often spending large amounts of time thinking about, researching, and testing different variations to find the most effective description for each page of their site.
Google released a webspam update (now officially referred to as the “Penguin Update”) last week which has a lot of website developers, bloggers, search engine optimization (SEO) marketers, and owners wondering what happened to their page rankings.
According to a Sunday report from the Wall Street Journal, Google is developing a new suite of services and tools aimed squarely at small business marketers. The new service, which was once known as Business Builder, could be launched as soon as July, according to a “person familiar with the matter.”
Google’s new quality guidelines may have you feeling a little frustrated, especially if you trade in rich content that can take a few moments for users to load, even on a 4G connection.
Who were the big winners and losers last month in search market share? According to a a new press release from the analysts at comScore, Google made major gains and came out on top with a gain of about half a percentage point.
Linking is a big part of your SEO strategy. Search engines can both see and acknowledge the links you put on your site, along with links to your site from other sources. While it sees them all, it only acknowledges or recognizes the dofollow links. For those links with the added nofollow tag, it ignores the link.