Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.
After two years in London agencies: SEO is not a discipline in isolation. Bureaucracy kills projects as surely as a bad backlink profile, and the ROI follows the flexibility.
Once you've decided a mobile version is worth it, the real work starts. A practical checklist — page size, sitemap, navigation, images, XHTML Mobile and a separate subdomain.
Notes from a Google London training on mobile: smartphone sales already past the PC, 15% of queries from mobile, and figures that should convince anyone still on the fence.
Hover on the magnifying glass, see the page before clicking — Instant Preview changes what searchers judge. The impact on design, copy, rank, PPC, and Flash-heavy sites.
Import some data from a CSV, try to sort it, and Excel starts protesting about the blank rows. A very simple trick in five steps to wipe them out — same on Mac and Windows.
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.