Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.
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.
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.
Webmaster Tools now proposes DNS as the default verification, and sitelinks got their own breakdown page. Small changes — but they 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 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?
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 Google. Why rely on 15% of users when the Labs 'like it' button did the same?
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.