Content scrapers refer to marketers who try to pass off existing content as their own on their site. If you have a blog where you publish high-quality posts at a consistent basis for years, there’s a great chance that somebody is scraping your content.
We may be well into the 2nd quarter of the year, but January 20, 2014 is a day which will live in infamy. This was the day that Google’s SEO and webspam aficionado, Matt Cutts dropped some comments that rocked the guest blogosphere. Fires were set, cannons roared, and chaos reigned. Digital marketers ran headlong out of their corner office windows in order to avoid the disparaging fallout to follow…
Luckily, they were on the first floor, but never mind that.
The point is the entire industry shifted, and further developments have only gotten juicier. Whereas it was once fairly simple to avoid being penalized or dropped from Google indexes, now there are a new set of standards to abide by within an entire genre of link building. Let’s begin our examination with a sobering view of what Google’s go-to SEO guru actually had to say on the subject of guest blogging. [Read more…]
When Google condemns something publicly, or makes a sweeping statement like “guest blogging is dead,” anybody who’s got an interest in Internet culture tends to sit up and pay attention. Google’s decisions and changes throughout the years have been driving forces in the blogging world, so you can imagine that the purported death of guest blogging has both professional and casual bloggers alike bracing for sweeping changes.
So What’s the Story? [Read more…]
I think search is a seriously exciting place to be right now. 2012 has seen some of the most aggressive Google algorithm updates of all time; a lot of SEOs were hit hard, and as each update was released some form of mini-riot followed. But while anger towards Matt Cutts (Googles human shield) ensued, I couldnt help but feel that SEO was returning to the open field that it once was. SEOs dropped out in favour of other things, they decided that Google was on a mission to destroy organic rankings and that Google owed them for all of those useless links and cookie cut content they had created; a quick look at any of the comments on SEroundtable shows that SEOs are just giving up.
But for me, SEO now more than ever is about hording knowledge, its about grabbing as much as you can and stuffing it into your brain so that you can develop – through management or being hands on – the perfect user/search focused website. So that is what Im bringing to you today, knowledge bursting new school SEO best practices that will make you smarter than the next guy. [Read more…]
One of the reasons I love working online and running a website is that it lets me mind my own business. Ive never been one for office politics and I hate the idea of having a boss so Ive never been particularly partial to working your typical office job. As such then, I also dont appreciate it when my work as a blogger starts to turn political and the whole thing starts to degrade into something like a schoolyard shouting match. Isnt that the kind of thing lots of us are trying to avoid?
Unfortunately though where theres money to be made there will always be those willing to resort to unscrupulous methods, and to try to blow out our candle to make theirs blow brighter. This is where negative SEO comes in which is the point at which bloggers stop concentrating on themselves and on offering a great site, and instead start thinking about how they can get ahead by taking down the competition and getting their sites penalized. Find yourself a victim then and you can see your website drop from the top spot in the SERPs to page eight and even see your content and design ruined. Its unsettling, its unfair and it can potentially cost you a lot of money. [Read more…]
Google SEO expert Matt Cutts spoke at WordCamp San Francisco 2009, and the video i available over at the WordPress Publishing Blog. Why would they publish it? Well, it might have something to do with this:
WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Great praise indeed, and true at that. Launching a site using WordPress (or any other SEO friendly platform for that matter) is a good idea if you want to rank well in the search engines. If you’re interested you might want to check out Matt Cutts’ slides from the presentation as well.
Google’s Matt Cutts writing on his personal blog offers up three tips for company blogging.
His best tip is #2:
Don’t trash talk a competitor.
Your product should be strong enough that you don’t have to diss a competing company. Back in 2002, an article in the Boston Herald showed up about another search engine. The article claimed that “The entire XXXXXXXXX Catalog is updated every 9 to 11 days.” I knew for a fact that wasn’t true and at first I wanted to rip that claim to shreds like a bulldog. But (with the advice of some wiser Googlers), I decided to take the high road instead of picking a fight. In fact, claims like that motivated Google to be fresher and faster. Now I believe Google has the freshest index of any of the major web search engines.
What advice would you give someone blogging for/about their own company or employer?
