Two weeks ago a client reset its bot-blocker, unintentionally blocking Googlebot. We had SEORadar monitoring the site so we quickly discovered the problem and alerted the client. Unfortunately, by the time they fixed the bot-blocker settings, they had lost about 100,000 daily visitors from Google. Of course, the first thing they asked was: How Long […]
We have a client site whose SEO often defies description, along with canonicalization. We often have to check Google’s cache of various URLs to see what in fact Google is getting, but sometimes when you view the Full Version of the cache it just rapidly reloads like a blinking strobe light. Kind of like this: […]
One of the perks of international travel is getting to see what the SERPs really look like in other countries. Check out this query for “Sams Club”* I did while in Barcelona yesterday: So Google thinks the “Barcelona” line of Sam’s Club furniture is relevant to me simply because I am in Barcelona. Note my […]
Seriously Google Search Console, why do you do this to me? I want to like (trust) you, despite the historically numerous discrepancies in your data. I’m delighted you are addressing the feature lag that SEO’s love to complain about. But seriously, can we get internally consistent URL level data? Please?
So for those of you don’t know, I have a 3-year-old daughter (her name is Harper). Here is her hand: When she was an even littler girl then she is now, she got pink eye. Bekah and I spent a bunch of time googling and calling around doctors offices and urgent cares trying to find […]
Since local spam is a hot topic around the Local SEO Sphere these days, I figured it would be fun to look at brands that are violating the Google My Business guidelines for representing your business and getting away with it. Because I mean, what’s the point of guidelines if large advertisers and brands can […]
Whoa, Dan! How did you get a time machine back to the late 90’s to show us this rockin’ GeoCities site (personally, I was an AngelFire guy)? Well, easily surprised reader you are wrong! This is slammin’ retro site is so totally tubular that it ranks on the first page of Google searches for a query bucket […]
So I do Google Opinion Rewards to earn Google Play Credits to play Final Fantasy Record Keeper. If you grew up gaming in the late 80’s early 90’s I highly recommend checking it out. Anyway, I was going through a survey this morning and after the first question of “What Types of Searches” have I […]
While procrastinating last Friday afternoon, I noticed a distress call show up in my Twitter feed: Hmm… I might talk to @AlanBleiweiss and @Marie_Haynes. They’ve got loads of experience in this world. — Rand Fishkin (@randfish) March 30, 2018 Now Marie and Alan are both fine SEOs, but I’ve got to admit when I saw […]
The chatter amongst the SEOratti is that Voice Search, AI, Machine Learning and SkyNet are a-coming and you better either get ready or prepare for extinction. If it pleases Twitter, in rebuttal, may I present Exhibit #532 in the case for Shotland’s Law (“The better something looks on the surface, the worse it looks underneath”). […]
I recall a presentation by Ted Paff, Founder of Customer Lobby, where he asked an audience of HVAC business owners, “How many of you love Uber?” Pretty much every hand went up. Then he asked “How many of you would rather use a yellow cab?” Pretty much every hand went down. “Congratulations!” he yelled, “because […]
Running Amok at the Google Plex In November I met up with Google Top Contributors from North and South America for Google’s TC Summit. Here’s ⅗ of my face with some really fantastic humans who like to help others with Google’s stuff. A little background: Google’s Top Contributor program is basically a group of hand-picked […]
(Editor’s note: This post has received some criticism that I “gamed” the outcome by using the unusual case of a two businesses with the same address and phone number. While I agree that the majority of businesses won’t have this issue, there still is a huge swath of them that do. We deal with them every […]
Many sites use bot blockers like Distil Networks to stop scrapers from stealing their data. The challenge for SEOs is that sometimes these bot blockers are not set correctly and can prevent good bots like Googlebot and BingBot from getting to the content, which can cause serious SEO issues. Distil is pretty adamant that their […]
Do I have your attention now? Sweet! I’m happy to announce that we just updated our Local SEO Ranking Factors! This year we really expanded the data set of the study. We looked at the 150 largest metro’s in the US and doubled the number of keywords we were looking at. This means the data […]
In case you had any doubts that CTR has a direct impact on Google rankings, feast your eyes on this Search Analytics data:
Then come check out my session at SMX East 😉 On Tuesday, I’m going to go over what the data truly says about ranking in local pack results. Do you need to focus on link building? Is there even such a thing as a “#1” ranking factor? What value do traditional local signals, like citations, […]
Now that Apple has switched from Bing to Google for SIRI’s web search results, I have been trying to wrap my head around the implications for our clients. In keeping with Apple’s secretive ways, it’s not exactly clear there are any. Here’s a voice query result for “outdoor seat cushions”: The results are typically […]
This is a screenshot for the search term “vegan food.” I have put red boxes around the distance from search aka proximity of each of the three results in the local pack for that search term. These businesses are in the least proximate order. And the reason why is pretty simple, proximity isn’t as important […]
Voice search is all the rage. To hear it from a marketing or search technologist, the voice search revolution is on us. Lowering barriers to access and radically changing the way we interact with devices. There is only one problem, take it away Dr. Malcolm I hate to break it to everyone, but voice search […]
I would easily take this bet. Today, tomorrow and twice on Sunday. Now, I wasn’t at MozCon, and I didn’t see Dr. Pete’s preso. Just the Twitter stream. So even knowing how Twitter and games of telephone can distort someone’s thesis, I would STILL take this bet. And the reason why is simple, people always […]
I was reading through the transcript of the excellent discussion of ranking factors by friends of the show Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling and figured now would be a good time to post the results of the survey I conducted about the trimodal local search algorithm. The question was pretty basic: When it comes to prominence, […]
The 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors, a survey of Local SEO professionals on what they think it takes to rank in local search, was just released at MozCon Local/Local U. Andrew and I both love participating in the survey, as it’s a chance to see what the Local SEO hive mind is thinking. I highly […]
I have wasted a good portion of my life clicking past this useless page. Yeah, I know, use Shortcuts, but still. It has been years since this report was useful. Why is it still around? And why is it so prominent in the UI? Instead of spending time making the side nav bounce around so you […]
Let me start out by saying I don’t really know Larry Kim. I have had a few conversations with him on Twitter. He seems like a smart, hard-working entrepreneur. I have never used his company, Wordstream, so I can’t really speak to anything about Larry or his service other than what I occasionally read on […]
It’s been a while since I did the old “Local SEO Predictions” thing, but 2016 is indeed a year of oddities. For some lengthier thoughts check out my latest column on SEL: Can SEOs Make Local Search Great Again in 2017? Or just check out this tweet by Max which pretty much says all that […]
Jen Slegg’s post on Google’s Updated Site Move Recommendations for Webmasters is timely in that we are working on multiple large domain migrations at moment – tis the season I guess. As I have often said, redesigning a website and migrating the domain at the same time is the SEO equivalent of diamond cutting. There are […]
My SEL post, When Going HTTPS Don’t Forget About Local Citations, spurred a minor tempest in a tweetstorm, when a reader asked Googler’s John Mueller and Gary Ilyes for their thoughts. As you can see below John emphasized that “you don’t lose PR with 301s”: John was likely referencing this section of my post:
Update: As usual Professor Maps found this one a while ago…#doh! Looks like we’ve got another candidate for Mike’s Summary of Recent Local Pack Tests: a set of three local “swipe-shows” of businesses in categories related to a searched brand appearing at the bottom of the SERP (Dan is calling them the “3-Headed Snake of […]
Is your store locator a crazed bastard stepchild? Some more evidence that Possum|Platypus|Patagonia|Loren Baker was the “near me” update. We just discovered that the store locator page on one of our clients’ sites was deindexed by Google about two weeks ago. There was nothing “technical” that would have caused Google to do this (i.e. no noindex […]
