Managing multiple GMB accounts is a tricky beast. I shared a few tips on SearchEngineLand for how we do it. See How To Scale Google My Business Support for Enterprises Like a Boss. TL:DR version: Hire people who know what they’re doing Have an escalation path Use an agile project management tool Create a knowledge base and keep it up to date Calendar everything so you know when you hit up GMB support and when you need to do it…
The SEM Post and Search Engine Land are both reporting that Thumbtack.com has experienced a seemingly complete recovery after receiving a manual link hammer to the head from Google (they don’t like the term “penalty”) which rendered the site all but invisible in Google’s SERPs. Jennifer Slegg goes into great detail speculating as to what Thumbtack may or may not have done to earn their get out jail free card so I am not going to dig into this one too…
It’s kind of big news in the Local SEO biz that Thumbtack.com* has received a manual action penalty from Google for unnatural linkbuilding. If you study Thumbtack’s backlink profile or read some of the articles on the subject, you can see that perhaps parts of their backlink strategy may have gotten them into trouble, which is really too bad because the start-up had been quite effective at using PR to drive both national and local links and generate buzz. I am…
When SEO Roundtable reported that Google had fixed a problem with the Local algorithm, I checked some of the local directories that I had earlier reported had been doorwayed and lo and behold: So Google taketh away and Google giveth back…for now…
UPDATE June 1, 2015: FALSE ALARM! May 23rd is a day that shall live in Local SEO infamy… (Click to enlarge) Seeing this across several U.S.-based local directory sites. Not across the board, but more than a few. See Did Local Directories Get Hit By Google’s Doorway Page Algo? to see how directory rankings may have taken a hit a few weeks ago.
If SEMRush data is directionally correct, this may be a reason why Yelp is looking to sell. Should rebrand as Yikes! pic.twitter.com/UqplA4ZLSq — Andrew Shotland (@localseoguide) May 11, 2015 Perhaps SEMRush is still updating but if its organic search traffic graphs are even close to accurate it looks like May is the month that Google took care of all Local family business: YellowPages.com Superpages FourSquare DexKnows CitySearch InsiderPages Merchant Circle Manta Barry Schwartz noted a Google Webmaster Forums thread on…
Part 6 in the SEO Death Series While we love Local SEO, a good portion of our clients are large non-local sites with a lot of technical SEO challenges. Today I’d like to talk about the dreaded Virtual Canonical Loop, an obscure technical issue that will absolutely kill your organic traffic, regardless of how big/small your site is. Here’s how it works. You have a URL that canonicalizes to another, say https://www.site.com canonicalizes to http:www.site.com. So in the source of…
Update 4/11/15: According to a little birdie who spoke with Gary Iyles at the BrightonSEO conference, Gary “guaranteed” pack rankings won’t be affected. Guess we shall see… Google’s pending Mobile-Friendly algo update has become the Apple Watch of SEO – I can’t look at my Twitter feed without a blur of “How to get ready for Mobilegeddon” posts streaming by, so I might as well jump on in. Jennifer Slegg over at the SEMPost reports that Gary Iyles, a Google Webmaster…
Today Google published “An update on doorway pages”. The post implies that Google will soon be updating its algorithm to weed out offending doorway pages from the SERPs: Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change. While sites with spammy set ups such as multiple exact match domains that link to the same landing page are likely the targets (get ready for more Lawyer leads SEOs!), Google’s well-intended algorithm updates often go too…
At the beginning of every new engagement we ask clients for access to their Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Adwords data, Bing Webmaster Tools and any other analytics they have. 95% of the time, the client does not have Bing Webmaster Tools set up and 50% of the time they don’t want to go through the (very minor) hassle of setting it up. Most clients are pretty focused on Google of course, but in some cases Bing can still drive…