The Google Rating Guidelines first leaked by Pot Pie Girl are absolutely worth a half day of reading for any SEO. The document details how manual raters rate sites. It is important to remember that these are what manual raters are asked to look for. Machine learning algorithms like Panda are completely separate, but both [...]

Continue reading: Highlights from the Leaked 2011 Google Rating Guidelines.

Brian Chappell has an excellent post on 7 Google Plus Data Points That Could Change SEO. In a sea of repetitive reviews, it is the first intelligent thought on how Google+ could change SEO that I’ve seen. I’ve also been thinking about how Google+ changes SEO and wanted to expand on Chappell’s post with a [...]

Continue reading: More on How Google Plus Changes SEO.

In the previous query forensics post on how Google handles synonyms, we discovered that a page can rank with a synonym without even appearing in the text under the right conditions. The great news is that you can see in Google which queries are returning synonyms and use this information to find synonyms that can [...]

Continue reading: Query Forensics: Choosing the Right Synonyms for Long-Tail Key Phrases.

I was definitely curious about Google+, but I am definitely not in the OMG-must-get-invite crowd and I wasn’t too worried about getting an invite. You see, Google+ is a social network and they don’t really want it to be exclusive, but they are trying to generate false scarcity to get the type of early adopter [...]

Continue reading: Google+ Launch Strategy Features Classic Persuasion Techniques.

Google uses synonyms for query expansion in most if not all queries. As an SEO, understanding when and how synonym-based query expansion works in Google is a fundamental yet poorly understood skill for any decent SEO. In this first instalment of my query forensics series, we look at a number of related queries and draw [...]

Continue reading: Query Forensics: Beginning Look at Synonyms in Google.

Google quickly responded to Bing’s showing social media citations next to search results with their own thrown-together version that shows who shared a particular Google News story in Universal SERPs. Next to some Google News stories you now get a “Shared By” link that you can follow to see some of the people who have [...]

Continue reading: Twitter Citations According to Google? There’s a Query String for That.