Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.
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.
From October, no SSL certificate means no more Facebook app. An economic hit for hobbyist developers — and, frankly, no great loss for the pile of useless apps already around.
If a 'Sorry, your account has been disabled' appears, the troubles are only beginning — Gmail, Reader, Docs, AdWords, all gone at once. A few things you should already have backed up.
Everyone has had their two cents on Google Panda. What nobody seems to have noticed is Bing — 20 out 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 method, and sitelinks got their own breakdown page. Small changes — but they do 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 shared 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 be one?
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.
Meta tags, on-page, off-page — all pointless if the keywords haven't been chosen first. A theme map, a bit of methodology, and when long-tail keywords really earn their keep.
A Chrome extension lets people hide entire domains from the SERPs and ships the list back to Mountain View. Why rely on 15% of users when the Labs 'like it' button did the same?