seo

How To Check The X-Robots-Tag For Noindex Directives (Google Tools, Chrome Extensions, and Third-party Crawlers)

Updated: April 2022 The post now contains the most current tools I use for checking the x-robots tag for noindex directives. The list includes tools directly from Google, Chrome extensions, and third-party crawling tools. —— I have previously written about the power (and danger) of the meta robots tag. It’s one line of code that … Read more

The Curious Case of The Disappearing and Reappearing Google Featured Snippet

As Halloween approaches this year, I’m gaining a better understanding of the phrase “Trick or Treat”. Over the past month, I’ve watched Google display a featured snippet for one of my blog posts (the “treat”), only to change that back to a standard snippet (“the trick”). And then back to a featured snippet (“treat”). And … Read more

Analysis and Findings From The September 2015 Google Algorithm Updates (9/2 and 9/16): Panda 4.2 Tremors, Manual Updates, The Methode Philosophy, and More

In my last post, I explained what I have seen during the extended rollout of Panda 4.2. I ended up analyzing over seven weeks of Panda data, since P4.2 is going through an extended rollout. And yes, it’s still rolling out now. More about that soon. Overall, it had been very quiet leading up to … Read more

Panda 4.2 Analysis and Findings 7 Weeks Into The Extended Rollout – A Giant Ball of Bamboo Confusion

Note: I reached out to Google last week to learn more about the current rollout of Panda 4.2, when it would be completed, and other interesting questions I had based on my analysis. But I haven’t heard anything back directly related to those questions. I will update this post if I receive more information about … Read more

Challenging Murphy’s Law – 8 Immediate SEO Checks After A CMS Migration Goes Live

CMS migrations are a necessary evil for many companies. If your current technical setup is inhibiting your business from doing what it needs to be successful, then a CMS migration could be your way out. But migrations should not be taken lightly, and especially for large-scale websites that are changing urls. Any time you change … Read more

Phantom Tremors Continue As SEOs Wait For Panda – Latest Tremor on 7/14/15

As many of you know, Phantom 2 began rolling out on April 29, 2015, just days after the mobile-friendly update was released. Phantom 2 was a big update that Google initially denied. During my analysis of the update, I saw a lot of movement across sites dealing with content quality problems. It was clear from … Read more

Phantanda – Why The SEO Nuclear Option Is Important For Sites Hit By Phantom 2 and Panda

Panda can be devastating. We all know that’s the case and it’s been documented to the nth degree since February of 2011. And now we have Phantom (AKA “The Quality Update”), which was a change to Google’s core ranking algorithm regarding how it assesses “quality”. Between the two, you can clearly see that Google is … Read more

How To Identify and Avoid Technical SEO Optical Illusions

Without a clean and crawlable website structure, you’re dead in the water SEO-wise. For example, if you don’t have a solid SEO foundation, you can end up providing serious obstacles for both users and search engines. And that’s never a good idea. And even if you have clean and crawlable structure, problems with various SEO directives can throw … Read more

More Findings From Google’s Phantom 2 Update (“The Quality Update”) – Panda Overlap, Long-Term Approach, URL Tinkering, and More

  {Update November 2015: Google rolled out a significant algorithm update on November 19, 2015 that had a strong connection to Phantom 2 from May 2015. Many sites that were impacted during Phantom 2 in May were also impacted on November 19 during Phantom 3. And a number of companies working to rectify problems saw recovery … Read more

Phantom 2 – Analyzing The Google Update That Started On April 29, 2015

{Update November 2015: Google rolled out a significant algorithm update on November 19, 2015 that had a strong connection to Phantom 2 from May 2015. Many sites that were impacted during Phantom 2 in May were also impacted on November 19 during Phantom 3. And a number of companies working to rectify problems saw recovery and … Read more

From SEO Tools To Emulation To Devices, How To Check Smartphone Rankings As Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Rolls Out

We are now ten days into the mobile-friendly algorithm rollout, and to be honest, the impact has been somewhat underwhelming. I’ve been tracking many websites across categories and countries as the algorithm rolled out and it has been interesting to how some verticals were impacted, while others experienced no change. I didn’t personally see any fluctuations until … Read more