SeoProblog

Even though link building has been a trade for more than a decade, it’s clear that there is still an enormous amount of confusion around it. Every so often, there is a large kerfuffle. Some of these controversies and arguments arise simply from a necessity to fill a content void, but some of them arise from genuine concern and confusion: “Don’t ask for links!” “Stick a fork in it, guest posting is done!” “Try to avoid link building!” SEO is an everchanging industry; what worked yesterday might not work today. Google’s personnel doesn’t always help the cause. In fact, they often add fuel to the fire. That’s why I want to play the role of “link building myth-buster” today. I’ve spent over ten years in link building, and I’ve seen it all. I was around for Penguin, and every iteration since. I was around for the launch of Hummingbird. And I was even around for the  Matt Cutts videos . So, if you’re still confused about link building, read through to have ten of the...

On Monday, September 16,  Google announced  that they would be restricting review stars in SERPs to specific schemas and would stop displaying reviews that they deemed to be "self-serving." It wasn't clear at the time when this change would be happening, or if it had already happened. Across our daily MozCast tracking set, we measured a drop the morning of September 16 (in sync with the announcement) followed by a continued drop the next day ... The purple bar shows the new "normal" in our data set (so far). This represents a two-day relative drop of nearly 14% (13.8%). It definitely appears that Google dropped review snippets from page-1 SERPs across the roughly 48-hour period around their announcement (note that measurements are only taken once per day, so we can't pinpoint changes beyond 24-hour periods). Review drops by category When we broke this two-day drop out into 20 industry categories (roughly corresponding to Google Ads), the results ...

Calculating individual page speed performance metrics can help you to understand how efficiently your site is running as a whole. Since Google uses the speed of a site (frequently measured by and referred to as  PageSpeed ) as  one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages , it's important to have that insight down to the page level. One of the pain points in website performance optimization, however, is the lack of ability to easily run page speed performance evaluations en masse. There are plenty of great tools like  PageSpeed Insights  or the  Lighthouse Chrome plugin  that can help you understand more about the performance of an individual page, but these tools are not readily configured to help you gather insights for multiple URLs — and running individual reports for hundreds or even thousands of pages isn’t exactly feasible or efficient. In September 2018, I set out to find a way to gather sitewide performance metrics and ended up with...