Antony Maina says, “Over the years, there has been so much debate about how links, both outbound and inbound, can affect a website’s Google ranking. So it’s not surprising that recently another question has been making the rounds.What’s the SEO Impact of Linking to Wikipedia Pages?Recently, Jon Tromans, a Twitter user, asked webmaster trends analyst at Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) John Mueller whether websites can be penalized for linking to Wikipedia, the well-known online, community edited encyclopedia.While some people might not think that Troman’s concern is a valid one, remember... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “In the good old days, “exact” meant exact. Then things got fuzzier. Now they’re about to get downright blurry.On Friday afternoon, Google announced another change to the way exact match targeting works in AdWords. Matching for close variants — plurals, typos, abbreviations, adverbs and so on —  will be broadened to include variations in word order and function words in the coming months. With this change, Google may ignore word order and function words when determining whether an ad should trigger for an exact match keyword.Google introduced close variants... [...]

Jeremy Gottlieb says, “SEO — you know, that thing you do whereby everyone and their mother will find your site on the web. Easy, right? “Can you SEO this page for me?” or “We’re about to launch a webinar. Can you SEO-ify it, please?” I’m sure most of you reading this can probably relate to these types of questions and the ensuing pressure from bosses or clients. If you’re lucky, you work in a realm where there’s plenty of search volume to chase, featured snippets to occupy, and answer boxes to solve. But what about those who work in the low-search volume niches typically... [...]

Janet Driscoll Miller says, “I often teach classes on SEO, and I start my presentations off by talking about keywords. When it comes to organic search, keywords form the foundation of all of our SEO efforts. What search queries do we want our websites to show up for in search results? Everything in SEO really ties back to this fundamental pillar.The importance of effective keyword research is certainly not lost on marketers. In a November 2016 survey, Ascend2 found that keyword research was one of the top SEO tactics, but more than a third of respondents indicated that it was a difficult... [...]

Barb Palser says, “The Accelerated Mobile Pages project has some big numbers on the scoreboard: More than 860,000 domains are publishing over 35 million AMPs per week, according to stats shared by Google at a recent AMP developer conference, where the company also announced the expansion of AMP to more than a billion additional users in China and Japan. AMP already represents 7 percent of top US publishers’ web traffic, according to Adobe.As the light, fast-loading mobile format is embraced by leading social platforms, e-commerce sites and content publishers, some digital managers are... [...]

Matt Lawson says, “Communicating in the digital age has never been easier. Yet for every single message we send — no matter how simple — we’re required to make an amazing number of decisions. Which medium should I use? Email? Text? Instant message? A phone call (gasp)?And beyond the decision of which medium to use, there are infinite tics and nuances in each and every interaction. Should I use a greeting? What punctuation or capitalization should I use? No exclamation points? Too many? “You” or “u?” Emojis?Those little choices that we all make around each seemingly simple... [...]

Barry Levine says, “You know that any report on bad bots is not going to be optimistic when it starts with a comparison to Pearl Harbor.In fact, the fourth annual “Bad Bot Report” from anti-bot service Distil Networks is downright depressing. It continues to document the onslaught of hostile bots that are swarming over websites, login pages and anything else that pokes up its head online.Pearl Harbor is mentioned because, early on the morning of December 7, 1941, a young radar operator saw a huge blip coming toward the naval base. But, because the tech was new and it was difficult to... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “In the good old days, “exact” meant exact. Then things got fuzzier. Now they’re about to get downright blurry.On Friday afternoon, Google announced another change to the way exact match targeting works in AdWords. Matching for close variants — plurals, typos, abbreviations, adverbs and so on —  will be broadened to include variations in word order and function words in the coming months. With this change, Google may ignore word order and function words when determining whether an ad should trigger for an exact match keyword.Google introduced close variants... [...]

Brian Childs says, “There’s a huge difference between making money from selling SEO and actually making a living — or making a difference, for that matter. A new marketing agency will quickly discover that surviving on $1,000 contracts is challenging. It takes time to learn the client and their customers, and poorly written contracts can lead to scope creep and dissatisfied clients.It’s common for agencies to look for ways to streamline operations to assist with scaling their business, but one area you don’t want to streamline is the proposal research process. I actually... [...]

MOZ team says, “Is it better to rank higher in a single position frequently, or to own more of the SERP real estate consistently? The answer may vary. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand presents four questions you should ask to determine whether this strategy could work for you, shares some high-profile success cases, and explores the best ways to go about ranking more than one site at a time”.Ranking Multiple Domains to Own More SERP Real EstateMOZ [...]