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.

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.

First, the release of Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine that crawls the web to calculate the answers to questions. And now Yahoo!’s announcement that they’re going to can the links and just throw out the answers because that’s what searchers want. Bold? yes. Interesting? sure. Successful? not a chance. The problem with both Wolfram [...]

Continue reading: Wolfram Alpha and Yahoo!: Destined for Failure.

In case you didn’t know the importance of server speed, have a careful look at the time spent downloading a page and the crawl rate in this screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools. Google Crawl Rate

Continue reading: The Importance of Server Speed.