Martin MacDonald 
NEW: UPDATES WITH COMMUNITY ANALYSIS AT BOTTOM OF POST! As some of you may be aware, Yandex were allegedly the victims of a source code leak (or perhaps were hacked). Within the source code, there’s an entire list of ranking factors they use, the weighting, descriptions, internal wiki links etc. There are over 1900 individual … Read more
Site speed, PageSpeed, Core Web Vitals (CWV) or whatever you want to call it: improving the speed of websites has for a number of years been one of the most powerful tools at my disposal in working on large scale websites.
Google today (September 10th, 2019) announced some changes to their handling of nofollow. You can read all about it here. In a nutshell, we used to have the nofollow directive. Google are now moving towards a hint format. That’s important, because a directive is considered a firm command, whereas a hint, is not. We used … Read more
Here we are, less than a week after being reassured that no further queries would end up having their organic search results removed, and twitter user Geoffrey Weg has spotted another, but this time its a product – NOT an information search: Query: “Lagavulin 16” (coincidentally, my absolute favorite whisky – it’s as if they … Read more
Another day, another flip-flop from Google on the functionality and specification of nofollow… Lets look back at all the times it hasn’t changed in the last decade: Timeline January 2005: Google, Yahoo & MSN Announce NoFollow As reported in detail by Danny Sullivan (yes, now Google Search Liaison) NoFollow was introduced to combat link spam … Read more
A full 48 hours after my post on zero results serps, and how they could be a fundamental issue to online marketers, we see a great example of how they could be weaponized in the not too distant future. Case in point (and no, this isn’t a Zero Result Serp, but its hard to see … Read more
History Back in the late 90’s, we had a choice of search engines: Altavista, Infoseek, Lycos, Dogpile and probably others I have long since forgotten. Then, with little warning or fanfare, a new competitor, “Google” showed up, offering far better search results, that initially baffled SEOs (an industry that was yet to be named at … Read more
Yesterday, SEMrush released an updated version of their June 2017 ranking factors report, again placing Direct Traffic right at the top of the list – stating that its the most important ranking factor for Google. You can (and should) download it here. For those that may not be familiar with SEMrush, they provide an … Read more
…But I won’t tell you my strategy, because its proprietary… This post appeared in my FaceBook feed, and sparked some discussion: From the outset, lets be perfectly clear, there is no SEO strategy worth engaging with that you shouldn’t, or can’t share with clients. If your agency, consultant, or SEO specialist is telling you this, … Read more
So I thought this was probably worthy of its own post, but my good friend Dixon Jones left a comment on my previous post about the value of SEO studies, here it is in all its glory: Just incase anybody doesn’t know Majestic, they have for a long time operated the biggest publicly … Read more