About 7 years ago I wrote about how the search relevancy algorithms were placing heavy weighting on brand-related signals after Vince & Panda on the (half correct!) presumption that this would lead to excessive industry consolidation which in turn would force Google to turn the dials in the other direction. My thesis was Google would [...] Continue reading →

The Wayback Machine has a cool new feature for looking at the historical changes of a web page. The color scale shows how much a page has changed since it was last cached & you can select between any two documents to see how a page has changed over time. You can then [...] Continue reading →

A Change to Nofollow Last month Google announced they were going to change how they treated nofollow, moving it from a directive toward a hint. As part of that they also announced the release of parallel attributes rel="sponsored" for sponsored links & rel="ugc" for user generated content in areas like forums & blog comments. [...] Continue reading →

Our keyword tool is updated periodically. We recently updated it once more. For comparison sake, the old keyword tool looked like this Whereas the new keyword tool looks like this The upsides of the new keyword tool are: fresher data from this year more granular data on ad bids vs click [...] Continue reading →

Beyond search Google controls the leading distributed ad network, the leading mobile OS, the leading web browser, the leading email client, the leading web analytics platform, the leading free video hosting site. They win a lot. And they take winnings from one market & leverage them into manipulating adjacent markets. Embrace. Extend. [...] Continue reading →

Anyone can argue about the intent of a particular action & the outcome that is derived by it. But when the outcome is known, at some point the intent is inferred if the outcome is derived from a source of power & the outcome doesn't change. Or, put another way, if a powerful entity [...] Continue reading →

When SEO Was Easy When I got started on the web over 15 years ago I created an overly broad & shallow website that had little chance of making money because it was utterly undifferentiated and crappy. In spite of my best (worst?) efforts while being a complete newbie, sometimes I would go to the [...] Continue reading →