In the last couple of hours, Google have announced (in a post published on both their Inside Search and Webmaster Central blogs) yet another update to their algorithm ‘targeted at webspam’ which will decrease the rankings of those sites that are seen to be violating their existing quality guidelines.
It seems to be the hot topic at the moment, but I did initially find it quite difficult to sift through all the long, in-depth instructional “How To” articles to find a simple step-by-step guide to implementing sitewide Google Authorship Markup on WordPress, so I thought I would try and offer a simple set of instructions.
The vast majority of SEO’s will be more than aware of the importance of including keywords in title tags… what I regularly notice however is that many sites fail to accomodate for longtail keywords in their titles, hoping that the content alone will do the job.
You may read the title of this post and think “OK, so this is going to be another post about why you’re a fool to practice anything other than whiter than white hat SEO, and that if you do go grey (or even black) hat then you’re setting yourself up for a fall” – It gives me great pleasure to inform you that you would be mistaken for thinking that!
In February Google announced an amendment to their algorithm which would shoehorn in local results along with those that would normally rank for some generic search terms – whilst this could theoretically make for an improved search experience, the reality is a step backwards.
A few days ago (on the 6th Feb 2012), Google released their first PageRank Toolbar update of the year… almost exactly 3 months to the day after the last one. So, whatever your stance on the relevance and importance of PageRank, I’ve taken a look into some of the probable influencing factors based on one of my own websites, using various metrics available using SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer tool, plus some of my own.
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