Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.
Sixty privacy policies folded into one, cross-product targeting, and Google+ signals quietly moving into search. The real story is not privacy — it's what comes next for SEO.
Webmaster Tools finally shows sitemap data broken down by content type in a single view — and the sitemap test feature saves you the ten-minute wait for a crawl.
Log into your Google account, open the ad settings page, and see what Google thinks you are. Mostly accurate — with a few odd mismatches, and a new unified privacy policy due.
Top Search Queries now averages only the best position a URL reached for each search — and it looks like personalised results are being factored in for the first time.
Analyse terabytes with a single API call — that's Google's pitch for BigQuery. A quick look at what it is, what it isn't, and whether it can be useful for SEO work.
Google+ Pages are here, and they're not just another Facebook Pages. A chat with a Google specialist on admin limits, custom URLs, APIs — and what half an hour of setup might be worth.
A user on the Webmaster forum swore his 301s weren't working. Turned out to be a silent redirect loop with a named anchor — a good reminder to watch internal links too.
A German group has released a DDoS tool exploiting a weakness in SSL — the same SSL Google has just hidden behind to justify stripping referrer keywords. Convenient timing.
Yahoo is on the block again, with Google rumoured among the buyers. With Microsoft already running search and ads, it's hard to see what Google would actually be buying.