GSQi Blog

When The Hammer Falls – Analyzing Lyrics in the Google SERPs and Its Impact on Traffic [Case Study]

Summary: In the fall of 2014, both Bing and Google began surfacing song lyrics directly in the search engine results pages (SERPS). Since users could now find lyrics immediately in the SERPs, many wondered what would happen to lyrics websites that provided the same information, but required a click through to view the lyrics. This … Read more

Insidious Thin Content on Large-Scale Websites and Its Impact on Google Panda

If you’ve read some of my case studies in the past, then you know Panda can be a real pain the neck for large-scale websites. For example, publishers, ecommerce retailers, directories, and other websites that often have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of pages indexed. When sites grow that large, with many … Read more

Panda Analysis Using Google Analytics Segments – How To Isolate Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet Traffic From Google

In previous posts about Panda analysis, I’ve mentioned the importance of understanding the content that users are visiting from Google organic. Since Google is measuring user engagement, hunting down those top landing pages can often reveal serious content quality problems. In addition, I’ve written about understanding the devices being used to access your site from … Read more

Penguin 3.0 Analysis – Penguin Tremors, Recoveries, Fresh Hits, and Crossing Algorithms

Oct 17, 2014 was an important date for many SEOs, webmasters, and business owners. Penguin, which we’ve been waiting over an entire year for, started to roll out. Google’s Gary Illyes explained at SMX East that Penguin 3.0 was imminent, that it would be a “delight” for webmasters, that it would be a new algorithm, … Read more

Panda 4.1 Analysis and Findings – Affiliate Marketing, Keyword Stuffing, Security Warnings, and Deception Prevalent

On Tuesday, September 23, Google began rolling out a new Panda update. Pierre Far from Google announced the update on Google+ (on Thursday) and explained that some new signals have been added to Panda (based on user and webmaster feedback). The latter point is worth its own blog post, but that’s the not the focus … Read more

How To Check If Google Analytics Is Firing On Android Devices Using Remote Debugging With Chrome [Tutorial]

We all know that having a strong analytics setup is important. Marketing without measurement is a risky proposition for sure. But in a multi-device world, it’s not as easy to make sure your setup is accurately tracking what you need – or tracking at all. And if your analytics code isn’t firing properly across smartphones, … Read more

Panda Update on Friday September 5, 2014

My last blog post explained that Panda is now running in near-real-time and what that means for webmasters and business owners. Well, that was perfect timing as Panda just made another trip around the web as kids head back to school and the NFL kicks in. I’ve seen multiple Panda clients see recovery starting on … Read more