The New SEO is About Creativity
* Sometimes you need someone to tell you what you think. I write so much and often I’m tempted to write longer articles than necessary. Content size seems to be a quality and ranking factor in recent years so that…
How to Spot a Fake Link Removal Request
Are your links unnatural or do they grow on trees? When Google invented “unnatural links” by simply deciding that some links are unnatural while others are not they also created the problem of large scale “negative SEO“. Then they professed…
Hey Google! Sunset Your Unnatural Oral Action or I’ll Nofollow You
* Do you remember the days when “manual action” was something desirable and NSFW? Listening to Google spokespeople turns more bizarre with the years. They have come up with their own language to hide the sour facts of penalties faulty…
Content Creation Can’t Cure Cancer
* Summary: Content is not a one size fits all solution, especially for small business owners who can’t afford to become publishers. When does content actually make sense and how? What else can small businesses do that don’t have a…
Case Study: The Value of a Blog Post
Sometimes when I tell business owners how much I charge for blog posts they tell me that it’s expensive. Of course it’s not. Why? Creating content vs link building At the same time they would gladly throw that same…
Free Traffic vs Gatekeeper Traffic
* Usually I prefer to speak about visitors not traffic as in people visiting your site. Why? The term traffic is too fuzzy. It fails to really explain what is going on on the Web. It’s a misleading metaphor when…
Where Did All The Search Traffic Go?
* BuzzFeed reports that “Traffic from Google to digital publishers dropped 30% over the past eight months.” based on traffic statistics from over 200 major media properties, among them BuzzFeed Time Huffington Post Rolling Stone Sports Illustrated Overall social media…
The SEO Acronym Definition and How to Use Humor to Get it
What Does the SEO Acronym Mean Actually? Even in 2022 many people will still wonder what the SEO acronym means. I can’t blame them. SEO or Search Engine Optimization as most people refer to it is still hard to fathom…
Dangerous Links: Why & How Google Wants to Abolish Hypertext
* Are links unnatural or even dangerous like some SEO experts repeat after Google? The Web is built upon so called hypertext. Why is hypertext called hyper? It’s not because of all the hypes we witness on the Internet. The…
The Best Free Feed Readers for Windows, Mac and Linux
As I am probably not the only one to look for a feed reader I decided to share my list of those I think are the best ones. Most people until 2013 used Google Reader for RSS (and Atom) feeds…
Billions of Sites Subject to Manual Penalty by Google
Google recently released an “interactive infographic” titled “how search works“. I ignored it until Barry Schwartz convinced me to take a second look. The infographic starts with the number of “30 trillion individual pages” Google has in its index. Later…
What’s Your Message?
The perhaps most important question when you publish is “what’s your message?” or in layman’s terms: what do you want to say? The problem with the ongoing “content is king” and “content marketing” hype is that it focuses on the…
Why Short Posts Beat Long Form Content
* In recent years a new kind of debate has been taking place online. It’s about content length. The longer the better it seems. Why? The main point of the content length debate is that – let me summarize it…
How Link Building Really Works in 2022
* I won’t write a lot about link building in 2022. I did for many years and attempted to expand the concept usually. I questioned the premise of manual link building as in “inserting links to your site on other…
The Inconvenient Truth about SEO
One fine day my online friends Patrick Altoft and AJ Kohn were mad at Smashing Magazine for not getting SEO. Why? The popular Web design blog published an incisive piece misrepresenting search engine optimization under the ominous headline “the inconvenient…
Are You Really a Content Marketer or Just an SEO?
After the so called Google Penguin update many people in the SEO industry embraced content marketing. So far so good. In a way SEO was always about content. Why not name the game accordingly? Yes, true. Yet some of them…
How to Use the Google Disavow Tool for NOT Against Negative SEO
* Google first created the problem of so called “negative SEO“ by taking “manual action” on links webmasters have no control over. Instead of just discounting “unnatural links” pointing to a site Google will make you responsible for them even…
Do Social Media Conversation, Engagement & Sales Suck?
* Some self-proclaimed social media experts try to get noticed by questioning the obvious! They declare all the social media best practices we take for granted to be nonsense or choose to ignore them. Do social media really suck when…
Readability Advice: Lorem Ipsum Yourself! Design Content!
* One of the most important things on the Web is readability. Despite that to this day many webmasters, bloggers and even web designers neglect it. One day I asked a blogger to improve his post readability. Why? Otherwise my…
Web Design by Itself is Worthless
It’s strange how when you want to sell blogging, social media or SEO services you have to explain and prove ROI (Return On Investment) at every step. At the same time I rarely witness debates about the ROI of Web…
