Search Engine Journal

Targeting featured snippets is not a new SEO strategy.For several years now, SEO professionals have shared common best practices used to earn these coveted paragraph, list, or table results.But Google has unveiled a handful of new updates to featured snippets in the past couple of years, which affect which content is selected and how the snippets appear in the search [...]

The first step in fighting a negative SEO campaign is just knowing that you’ve been hit with one.Once you’ve identified that you’re the victim of a negative campaign, you can take steps to remedy the situation; it doesn’t have to be a death sentence for your business.That being said, identifying a negative campaign may be harder than it seems.This article [...]

Google shared a three-step guide on hiring an SEO for businesses who may be doing so for the first time.This advice was provided in the latest episode of Google’s Search for Beginners series on YouTube, which is an extended version of the advice provided in the previous episode.See: Google Recommends Hiring SEOs in New ‘Search for Beginners’ VideoThe benefit of [...]

Google may be cracking down on sites that publish guest posts. There are several reports of unnatural outbound link penalties.Outbound Link PenaltyAn outbound link penalty is a manual action against a website. In this case the publisher relates that Google may have stopped PageRank from flowing from his website.Related: 10 Bad Links That Can Get You Penalized by GoogleGuest Post [...]

Selling on Amazon’s Vendor Central, where you sell your products directly to Amazon, has always been a coveted option for brands and manufacturers wanting their products on Amazon.com.One of the downsides of the Vendor Central platform has been how little data you can access as a Vendor.Getting access to information about sell-through and customer demographics was available but at a [...]

Google is updating its image search results pages with icons indicating what type of content the images lead to.If an image surfaced in search results comes from a product page, a recipe, or a video, Google will highlight it with a special icon.Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, shared the following example on Twitter:As shown in the example, you can mouse-over [...]

Read on to learn the core rules of Google PageRank, its history, and how it impacts SEO.The post Google PageRank, Simplified: A Guide for SEO Beginners via @beanstalkim appeared first on Search Engine Journal. Source link

Editor’s note: “Ask an SEO” is a weekly column by technical SEO experts Shelly Fagin, Ryan Jones, Adam Riemer, and Tony Wright. Come up with your hardest SEO question and fill out our form. You might see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!This week for Ask An SEO, we have a question from Ed in Memphis. He asks:“Are blog comments useless for link building?”If [...]

Bill Slawski wrote about a Google patent that seems to explain what happened in the poorly named Medic update. Bill said that the scope is wider than just medical sites. The patent may show why some sites can’t rank.Caveat About PatentsIt’s important to note that Google does not often confirm whether an algorithm described in a patent is in use.  [...]

Google is sending email notifications via Search Console to alert site owners about spikes in search traffic for specific pages.“Your page is trending up,” the email reads, followed by a number indicating the page’s average daily clicks over the past few days.To illustrate the significance of that number, Google’s email alert will note the percent increase in daily clicks compared [...]