Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.
Facebook's much-hyped announcement turned out to be something Google did three years earlier with Google Talk. If the idea was distracting from Google+, it didn't quite land.
Yahoo Site Explorer is on its way out — the only free backlink console worth a look is going, and Microsoft's plans for what's left are gradually taking shape.
Google Analytics transformed the old benchmarking report into a newsletter. A curious choice — and a few reflections on whether the swap is really worth it.
Back in 2000 Google Directory launched to take on Yahoo's; eleven years later Google quietly retired it. A look back at why directories stopped scaling on the open web.
First it was doorway pages, then selling links, now buying them. Google's warnings in Webmaster Tools keep piling up — and the wording matters more than it seems.
Rankings are no longer enough to prove SEO is working. The whole point is free traffic — so it's analytics that tell you what's really going on.
Google extended rel=canonical to the HTTP header — so PDFs, videos and other non-HTML files can finally declare which version belongs in the index.
In SEO there is a mantra: Content is King. The time has come for it to change. A Google experiment links articles to author profiles — and the author starts to matter more.
Analytics and Webmaster Tools now talk to each other around +1, Likes and Tweets. Interesting — and a reminder of why a client's Google account access matters at pitch.