Christi Olson says, “Google announced they now let you search using sequences of two or three special characters, something many coders do when looking for programming help in search. So now you can go to Google and search for technical queries such as [== vs ===] and [+=].Google gave the example, if you’re searching for the meaning of [c++17], you will get results for the well-known programming language instead of c17, which brings up a Boeing airplane.Google also made it better for organization and product names that include punctuation. So for companies name She++ and Notepad++, Google... [...]

MOZ team says, “They say history repeats itself. In the case of the great 301 vs 302 vs rel=canonical debate, it repeats itself about every three months. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Dr. Pete explains how bots and humans experience pages differently depending on which solution you use, why it matters, and how each choice may be treated by Google”.Aren’t 301s, 302s, and Canonicals All Basically the Same?MOZ [...]

Eric Enge says, “If you follow the world of Google and search at all, you’ve heard about Google’s intent to switch to a mobile-first index. In this post, I’m going to briefly review the main points we know about Google’s plans for this new index, but I’m going to go further and detail what we found in a mobile-specific crawl we did of one website.Based on this data, I’ll also talk about the implications of the switch and some of the challenges that Google faces with this process.Key points about a mobile-first indexIf you’ve already read about Google’s impending switch... [...]

Christi Olson says, “As disruptive technologies reshape the digital marketing landscape, advertisers are scrambling to stay relevant and top of mind with consumers. In this shifting landscape, paid search continues to evolve outside of the traditional search format as an omnipresent influencer throughout the entire consumer decision journey.For years, search marketers have obsessed over bottom-of-the-funnel activity for its seemingly higher CTRs and conversion rates, in part fueled by last-click attribution. I’ve certainly been guilty of obsessing about conversions and bottom-of-the-funnel... [...]

Julie Joyce says, “Why are we so afraid of links?Back in the old days of SEO, we loved any link if it was free, even if it was from a spammy scraper site or the lowest-quality directory you’ve ever seen. If we did nothing to get that link, it was a great link. People assumed that all links were beneficial — and that even “bad” links were completely harmless, with no potential to cause damage.Then we started to get scared… and we nofollowed links. We performed loads of link analysis and reached out to sites that we thought were spammy and asked to have our links removed. Oh,... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “Any SEO worth their sustainably harvested pink Himalayan salt knows that Google offers a variety of advanced search operators – special commands that take you above and beyond regular text searches. Learning search operators is a bit like learning chess, though. It’s easy to memorize how each piece moves, but that’s about 1% of your path toward mastery. I know that the pointy-hat guy in chess moves diagonally, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to take on Kasparov or Deep Blue.Instead of just listing all of the operators and telling you what... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, wrote a blog post explaining how SEOs and webmasters can handle site outages or closures that last for a day or longer. This is when a webmaster intentionally takes down the site for maintenance, site moves, religious reasons or other reasons.John offers three options:Block the cart functionality from Google and your users.Always show an interstitial or pop-up saying your site is offline today.Switch the whole website off for a period of time.Each option can be handled differently, but the easiest option seems... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “In a rare move, Google confirmed that a publisher named Natural News was penalized and deindexed by the major search engine over Google webmaster guidelines violations. In fact, Google’s John Mueller specifically said the site was using sneaky mobile redirect, and once that is “cleaned up, the site can submit a reconsideration request through Search Console.”It seems like they did clean it up and submitted a reconsideration request through Search Console, because the site is now back in the Google index. A site command now returns the home page and 440,000 other... [...]

Wesley Young says, “New businesses need all the help they can get to attract customers, generate revenue and establish themselves to compete with existing companies. And for brick-and-mortar storefronts, being found on Google Maps is key to driving traffic to the business.Due to the economic explosion in the Plano and Frisco suburbs of Dallas, opening of new local stores is rampant. New commercial developments are being built and filled with shops within a matter of months. This growth also provides the ability to make some interesting Google Map search observations, as comparisons can be... [...]

Kerry Jones says, “Do your link building results look something like this?– Start doing outreach– Get links– Stop doing outreach– No more linksEveryone talks about the long-term benefits of using content marketing as part of a link building strategy. But without the right type of content, your experience may be that you stop earning links as soon as you stop doing outreach.In this sense, you have to keep putting gas in the car for it to keep running (marketing “gas” = time, effort, and resources). But what if there was a way to fill up the car once, and that... [...]