CategorySEO

A good post from Databox outlining a ton of SEO myths.

The only one I’d quibble with is #40 – about hosting a blog on a subdomain (or even another domain). In the article they state that hosting a blog on a subdomain is a bad idea.

I’d simply counter this by saying that it hasn’t hurt HubSpot’s blog.

btw we covered this in depth in episode 157 of HubShots.

Interesting to read through the speculation on this thread, related to the negative organic impact that examine.com has recently experienced. The post from Kamal (co-founder of Examine) is useful reading. These things happen. I’m somewhat heartened that Danny has replied here, but not overly hopeful. This situation is unfortunately a reality in the organic search space. It happens all the...

Oh the lols. This article in the NYT laments the oversupply of podcasts that launch and then fade. As noted on Twitter, it reads like an onion article. Here’s the thought in question: In 2016, Morgan Mandriota and Lester Lee, two freelance writers looking to grow their personal brands, decided to start a podcast. They called it “The Advice Podcast” and put about as much energy into...

Linking through to Shaun Anderson’s excellent link building post (updated yet again), because… well, it’s worth reading.

A good post from Moz covering some featured snippet testing they conducted. Featured snippets are predominantly paragraph snippets, although other formats (list and tables) are increasing. Here’s a quick takeaway for you: Key findings: Featured snippet paragraph lengths The optimal length of a featured snippet paragraph is roughly 40 to 50 words, or around 300 characters. Lots more to learn...

I predict there’s going to be lots of prediction posts… Seriously though, amongst the click bait guff there’s a few good ones. Here’s one from Rand for instance. #8 is on the money in my opinion: #8: 2017 will be the year Google admits publicly they use engagement data as an input to their ranking systems, not just for training/learning The implications are clear: User...

Thought provoking article by Larry Kim about how Google may (or may not) use web site dwell time as an indirect ranking signal. Summary: there’s some correlation items, and personal viewpoints added, but nothing is concrete. That’s not to say it isn’t actionable – just thinking about how to improve your site engagement, and then implementing improvements, can only be a...

A useful list from Joy Hawkins on some common local seo misconceptions. #4 is still the main misconception: that posting on Google+ will improve your rankings. This is no longer the case. I say ‘no longer’ because it is true that in the early days of G+ there was a benefit to updating your G+ profile. And that continued for a certain extent with G+ Authorship. But those days are long...

An interesting find by Bill Slawski of a newly published Google patent: A newly published Google patent application describes technology that would modify scoring and ranking of query results using biometric indicators of user satisfaction or negative engagement with a search result. In other words; Google would track how satisfied or unsatisfied someone might be with search results, and using...