Recently I’ve seen several interesting conversations about ad blocking, and I wanted to remind people about a great offering called Google Contributor. With Google Contributor, you contribute a certain amount of money each month. That subscription means that you see fewer ads on the web, and you support the sites that you visit with your […]
#google seo
18 posts
24 Sept 2015
1 Apr 2015
This was an April Fool’s joke. I’ve been working really hard with some friends on a project to handle SEO automatically. Now we’re ready to take the wraps off it over at seo.ninja. One of the ideas that helped the World Wide Web succeed was that it separated presentation and content. You could write your […]
23 Jan 2015
Earlier this month I did a talk at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill about lessons learned from the early days of Google. The video is now online and watchable, or you can watch it on YouTube: We did the talk in a pretty large room, and the camera at the back of […]
3 Jul 2014
I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. […]
20 Jan 2014
Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company. Back in the day, guest […]
21 Nov 2013
A few years ago, I asked on my blog what people would like from Google’s free webmaster tools. It’s pretty cool to re-read that post now, because we’ve delivered on a lot of peoples’ requests. At this point, our webmaster console will alert you to manual webspam actions that will directly affect your site. We’ve […]
21 Aug 2013
A couple friends have recently had security scares with their Gmail account where they were worried that their accounts might have been hacked. I was emailing one of them about how to make sure that your account is safe, and I realized it might be handy to post this on my blog as well. Here’s […]
18 Jun 2013
Folks at Google get cold-call emails out of the blue just like everybody else. Here’s an email that a colleague of mine got recently: I was on your website www.google.com and wanted to shoot you a quick note. I think I can make a few changes (aesthetically and/or SEO – wise) to make your site […]
23 May 2013
We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies […]
13 May 2013
We just recently taped a new round of webmaster videos, and I thought this video deserved a full-fledged blog post. This is my rough estimate (as of early May 2013) of what search engine optimizers (SEOs) and webmasters should expect in the next few months: Bear in mind that this is a very rough estimate, […]
Over the years I’ve written a lot of blog posts to debunk misconceptions or claims that weren’t true. Sometimes I publish the blogs posts but often I don’t. This is a pretty typical example post. Someone claimed that Google was evil for removing a particular domain, when in fact the domain had been removed from […]
3 May 2013
Recently someone on twitter complained that Chrome was labeling their site as malware: http://Dvorak.org site blocked by Chrome browser after I wrote negative commentary about Google. I took a few minutes to compose a reply, so I’ll go ahead and post it here: Just to summarize: Chrome’s warning is correct. Your blog is hacked and […]
17 Nov 2012
I spoke at PubCon 2012 last month in Las Vegas. A couple people have asked for my slides, so here they are: Several of the slides have links to additional information, in case you’re interested. We announced the disavow links tool during my session so that’s what a lot of the slides are about.
7 Sept 2012
I’m planning to record some new webmaster questions next week. I made a Google Moderator page where you can submit topics and vote for different questions. Please ask your questions in on the Google Moderator page, not in the comments here. When the comments are in Moderator, people can vote them up and down.
28 Aug 2012
Recently a newspaper contacted me. Their PageRank had dropped from 7 to 3, and they wanted to know why. They genuinely didn’t seem know what the issue was, so I took some time to write them an in-depth reply. Part of the motivation for my blog is to provide information in more scalable ways, so […]
7 Aug 2012
You should read Mat Honan’s heartbreaking tale of a hack attack and the ensuing discussion on Techmeme. Much of the story is about Amazon or Apple’s security practices, but I would still advise everyone to turn on Google’s two-factor authentication to make your Gmail account safer and less likely to get hacked. Two-factor authentication means […]
2 Aug 2012
One of the most tenacious blackhat webspam techniques we continue to see is hacked sites. I wanted to remind site owners that our free “Fetch as Google” tool can be a really helpful way to see whether you’ve successfully cleaned up a hacked site. For example, recently a well-known musician’s website was hacked. The management […]
27 Apr 2012
Beyond clear-cut blackhat webspam, the second-biggest category of spam that Google deals with is hacked sites. The most common reaction we hear from webmasters is “The problem is with the Google search. There is nothing wrong with our website.” That’s a real quote from an email one site owner recently sent us. Sadly, it turns […]