Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.
A small task I do often enough that writing it down once seemed easier than explaining it each time — how to grant a second user access to a Google Analytics account.
Migrating a website, whatever the reason, is never trivial. Fail to plan, and link equity and page authority go with it — the seven steps I follow to avoid it.
Algorithms have been polished for a decade, but the basic component of online reputation hasn't really changed — link building. Where to get links, and how not to damage the site.
A SEO Mofo post on how to spam a competitor's SERP opened my eyes. A couple of guidelines — your DNS wildcard and your robots.txt — that mitigate the damage of a query-spam attack.
The Search Queries report now carries three percentile columns — impressions, CTR and average position — colour-coded in green and red. Is Google slowly building a ranking suite?
Because I always repeat myself to people about to build a new website, here are the top eight rules I'd like them to respect — summarised in one place.
After the Yahoo! merge, Bing quietly shipped a neat feature — expanded results that push seven matches plus three from the same brand. Smarter and less invasive than Big G's 'top 7'.
HTML5 brings article, section, header, footer, aside — a vocabulary that finally tells a spider what matters on a page. A look at what this means for SEO as the spec matures.
Matt Cutts says plain-text URLs don't count as links. And yet Google Alerts keeps sending them back as matches — a small observation that opens the door to some extra thinking.
After weeks of watching thirteen PDFs dance around the SERPs, the conclusions: document properties, keyword density, real headers and keyword proximity — in roughly that order.