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 (Google?s human shield) ensued, I couldn?t 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, it?s 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 I?m 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. I?ve never been one for office politics and I hate the idea of having a ?boss? so I?ve never been particularly partial to working your typical office job. As such then, I also don?t 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. Isn?t that the kind of thing lots of us are trying to avoid?
Unfortunately though where there?s 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. It?s unsettling, it?s unfair and it can potentially cost you a lot of money. [Read more…]
