Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.
From October, no SSL certificate means no more Facebook app. An economic hit for hobbyist devs — and frankly, no great loss for the pile of useless apps already around.
If a 'Sorry, your account has been disabled' appears, the trouble is just beginning — Gmail, Reader, Docs, AdWords, all gone at once. A few things you should already back up.
Until now, a landing page policy violation hid behind a Quality Score of 1/10. AdWords now says 'Site suspended' in plain terms — a small but welcome relief for PPC managers.
Everyone has had their two cents on Google Panda. What nobody seems to have noticed is Bing — 20 of 20 of my sites show the same kind of indexation drop on the very same days.
Webmaster Tools now proposes DNS as the default verification, and sitelinks got their own breakdown page. Small changes — but they say something about where GWT is heading.
Why don't people share what they know? Knowledge-is-power, lack of trust, lack of time — a few reasons, plus an SEO analysis of mine at the end as a small counter-example.
Google can now classify a page as basic, intermediate or advanced. Nobody calls readability a ranking signal — but when we talk about quality of content, how could it not?
Since Google dropped trademark protection on brand keywords, the real winner has been Google itself — cashing in the bid inflation. Now the Court of Justice may reverse it.
Excel won't count words in a cell out of the box. A formula built on LEN, TRIM and SUBSTITUTE to compute keyword density without touching VBA — useful on a meta title tag.