Starting around the end of April Google rolled out not one, but two updates aimed at cleaning up their index.  The second update, code named “Penguin” seems to have had the largest impact to many sites.

While Google insists this update targeted about 3% of all search queries, I’ve heard from many site owners who were impacted and read hundreds of other stories of sites that were ranking at or near the top of the page which suddenly lost a bunch of important rankings.

Continue reading “Google’s Penguin Update – How to Recover if You Have Lost Rankings” »

Has this happened to you? You are searching on Google for your site only to find that you cannot find it? In this article we look at some things you can do to find out if you have been penalized or this is just a bug in Google

Yes it is true, Google does make mistakes. In fact, we recently went through this so know what you are going through! This site disappeared from Google for about 24 hours. It was there on Sunday, but gone Monday. Gladly, it was back on Tuesday. But it was a stressful 24 hours to say the least.

After all, we are a search engine optimization company. How would it look to our current and future clients if they searched for us and couldn’t find us? So let’s look at what happened and how you can use our experience to help you determine if you’ve been banned by Google or the search engine just hiccuped on your site.

Continue reading “Help! My Site has Disappeared from Google!” »

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past 5 months or so, you’ve probably heard of/been affected by the update codenamed “Panda”.

It all started at the end of February when Google started giving users the ability to “flag” poor sites with a Chrome browser extension.  They did this as a way to begin beta-testing a new update.  They wanted to see if the algorithm they developed found the same sites to be poor as regular users.  They found their algo was quite accurate.  Then, in April, using that user data and other indicators, they began rolling out the new algorithm which affected about 12% of the world’s websites.

Since those updates, Panda, as it has been named, has been refined a couple times, with the most recent change happening in Mid-June.  At that time, some sites have seen improvements however most webmasters are still reporting that they haven’t recovered since the first updates.

Some sites I’ve been working with have seen recovery, but not until changes were made.  This article explains how I came to my conclusions.

Continue reading “Google’s Panda Update Months Later – What’s Changed?” »

Unless you have been living under a rock these past few months you have no doubt noticed that google has moved in a local direction for many searches – especially those with a local qualifier. What Google has done is incorporate “Places” into search results – attempting to help people find businesses in their area that provide the product or service they are searching for.

For example, if you search for “pizza” plus your local area you will get a list of pizza places around you.  If you do this search on your mobile device you’ll even get them sorted by geography, with the search giant utilizing your location to help refine your results.  As you can see, a places listing can be quite beneficial to a merchant.

Continue reading “Google Places – Should I Claim my Place?” »

We are asked questions like “What is Link Building” or “Why is Link Building Important”?

The answers to these questions are very similar yet very different.

To start with let’s look at what link building is and what link building isn’t.

You see, we’ve been researching link building for many years and have watched the value of link building change and morph from something which is purely ranking related to something which is more tactical in nature.

You see, up until recently, Google used linking as a ranking factor.  In fact they probably still use linking as a factor however its value as one of those many hundreds of linking factors has diminished.

Continue reading “What is Link Building” »