Category: SEO News

December has been a bad month in Google for adult webmasters. John Mueller dropped a bombshell on blackhatters and adult webmasters (often 1 in the same) by letting everyone know that just because your website features adult content doesn mean it is excluded from Google Search guidelines:

“I understand that some people might say ‘oh, well, everyone in my niche is doing it the wrong way therefore I also need to do it that way.’ And I don’t know. It might be that there are individuals in special niches where our systems just aren’t picking up the abusive or problematic techniques well enough.”

The adult industry tends to be the most innovative when it comes to marketing and the use of technology. With technology comes many, many products and with marketing comes a seemingly unlimited amount of variety in aestetics. This leads to major volume in adult niches which lead to tremendous amounts of websites being created that Google needs to regulate and keep from exploiting the flaws in their search engine’s ranking system.

To throw gas on the fire, Mueller also announced that rich snippets are longer allowed on adult websites:

“It’s more that our systems recognize: oh this is an adult website, and it wants to show these rich results types, but since it’s an adult website we just won’t show them. So it’s not like it will be demoted or anything.”

Not all search engines allow adult content and in a industry that may be pioneers in innovation also greatly suffer when there is a lack of it. Long term content value is hard when content volume is created at such a rate that it is in the adult entertainment. Because of all this adult webmasters need as much help as maximizing their search potential making it a difficult niche to perform well in.

Will Google continue to crackdown on Adult websites? Most likely as it is a niche that is usually a “test bed” for blackhat methodology and pushing the limits to see what is possble to do in Google Search.

I will actually put the most important point in the title since I will tell you right now that Apple has NOT officially announced a new search engine. It is a rumor for now but, to be fair, a rumor with some basis for existing in the first place.

This basis mainly comes from Apple’s new iOS 14 program which allows iPhone users to search topics that they choose themselves that also can be displayed on the screen without a third-party search engine (i.e. Google) Quite an interesting feature that could possibly lay the groundwork for Apple to release a new search engine.

A Financial Times report (subscription required for full report) claims Apple has been further motived to ramp up activity in releasing the search engine is Google’s recent antitrust lawsuit. This is clearly speculation but a good point as far as timing for release goes.

More food for thought against Apple releasing a search engine comes from this article on using keyword traffic data that shows why Apple is not releasing a new search engine from a new perspective.

What it most likely seems is that it’s not a search engine but instead Apple is working on trying to improve AI and it’s Siri technology.

Of course, if Apple actually does release a search engine it would be quite interesting to see how it competes with Google’s and probably do wonders for Apple’s stock price.

After first being launched on December 3rd, Google’s December 2020 core update completed on December 16th which was announced via Google’s twitter feed.

Google’s December 2020 core update has been the biggest update in a while. Significantly more impactful than an earlier core update Google ran back in May this year which affected a wide scope of site types. We have seen extensive coverage all month long from multiple search engine news publishers.

So, what does Google want? How can a site rank well in this current search environment?

What has become apparent is that useful and unbiased, context-focused content seems to thrive even in business oriented searches made up primarily of sites that need to promote their brand and their message. If you are looking for a service or product by searching in a search engine the results may contain sites that aggregate content related to the service or product you are looking for rather than being made up of only individual companies who actually sell you said service or product. This is why so many directories like Yelp, Homeadvisor, and Upcity continue to rank well in Google.

Whether or not this December 2020 core update has had any effect on directory sites hasn’t been completely determined but because many still maintain a 1st page ranking so it’s clear they haven’t been negatively affected overall.

Content > Backlinks

It’s still early but backlinks are being weighed less it seems.  Content is being weighed more.  This is not anything surprising.  Since 2014, when Matt Cutts of Google first spoke on links losing value over time, we’ve officially known links have been losing importance in Google’s algorithm. Any veteran SEO who has been in this game for the last 10 years has first hand experience when it comes to links losing strength in Google.  My Facebook page ranking at the top for my core keywords in my city is some proof of this. It has some social shares with nofollow links behind each one so you could argue that the page has hardly any links at all and none that Google officially recognize to pass authority (dofollow) but it does have a healthy amount of content related to SEO. My official website (what you’re on now) has better backlinks but that doesn’t matter with this update at least.  Examples of this can be seen in many cases by anyone who is familiar with looking at backlink profiles.

So far this core update has definitely changed the landscape of search but the core of search seems to be showing the same 1st page batch of sites for their respective keywords relieving SEOs everywhere including me.  It means the foundations are still here and there is a right way to do SEO to get constant and stable (somewhat) rankings.

With a New Year right around the corner it’s good to look back this year and see a “snapshot” of the state of search engines in 2019 and where search engine optimization is headed in 2020 and beyond.

Here are 3 very interesting facts about the power that search engines have when it comes to business growth based on 2019 data:

75% of users don’t even scroll past the first page of the SERPs. (source)

First page presence is vital when it comes to search engines. When attracting new business you need every positive signal you can muster and a first page presence in a major search engine like Google speaks volumes to visitors.

93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. (source)

Whether looking to make a purchase or just looking to learn, people utilize major search engines like Google regularly.

Leads from search engines have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (ex. cold-calling, direct mail, etc.) have a 1.7% close rate. (source)

It’s clear that SEO will continue to play a vital role in connecting visitors to product and services and continue to fuel business growth moving into 2020.

Happy New Year!

The SEO community is a positive space, generally speaking, but there are a few cases where SEO practioners have, to reference Star Wars, “joined the dark side” and have completely disregarded Google’s guidelines, deliberately exploiting loopholes from flaws in Google’s search engine algorithm to a very large scale for profit. Worse yet, there is even a case of one man receiving a jail sentence for extorting money from his clients through threats of negative SEO, a practice that can actually lower a website’s rankings rather than raise them.

The first real mainstream story of shady, TOS breaking practices involves the famous American department store chain, J.C. Penney hiring the SEO company SearchDEX to help them during the 2010 holiday season, the most lucrative time of year for their ecommerce website: JCPenney.com.

SearchDEX proceeded to buy and trade links to JCPenney.com on other separate websites, not related to the J.C. Penny brand to trick Google into thinking that JCPenney.com was receiving organic links from various webmasters naturally. Doing this made JCPenney.com go up in search results in Google during the holiday season. Not just on Google either. Microsoft’s Bing is affected too since they use the same methods to promote sites (and they copy Google!). Soon, and , JCPenney was on top of a lot of searches where it naturally didn’t belong.

Eventually, Google, and reportedly its algorithms, detected the strange activity (an unaturally large spike in backlinks) and immediately cut them down to unnaturally low status in the Google search results. Over the years dozens of large scale paid link networks would get shut down by Google one by one all over the world such as places like Spain, Italy, Poland, Russia, France & Germany with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s US webspam team at the time, even tweeting about one of the events involving the take down of 7 link networks in Japan.

Out of all the stories involving the SEO underworld the one that, without question, ultimately takes the cake is the case of William Stanley, a little known SEO consultant of of Dallas, TX at the time.

In early January of 2016 Stanley, a search engine optimizer, was sentenced to over three years in Federal prison for extortion. What Stanley specifically did was a mix of negative SEO and negative reputation management. This included posting fraudulent comments, creating links on “bad neighborhood” sites (pornography, gambling), and creating negative reviews if the victim didn’t pay him a certain amount of money. (click here for the full story)

Although the SEO industry is relatively new since major search engines like Google have only been around for about 20 years and are constantly developing and changing, there has been no shortage of illicit SEO practices that have made headlines time and time again.

Perhaps a whole “SEO Mafia” is hiding somewhere in the shadows 😲

Looking for professional SEO service that follows Google’s guidelines and gets results?

Disclaimer: I do not hold any cryptocurrency or any assets associated with blockchain as of writing this.

You probably heard about Rochester NY company, Kodak, utilizing blockchain technology in the form of their own cryptocurrency, similar to bitcoin.

As a prediction made my many that is seemingly coming true, blockchain technology is slowly changing the playingfield of many industries as a multiple amount of problems are tackled with an aim to solve using the underpinnings of cryptocurrency’s foundation.

The SEO industry has also been impacted by blockchain tech.

How Does Blockchain Affect Search Engine Optimization? (SEO)

Through next-generation content management systems (CMS). Currently the most popular CMS flavors are WordPress, Squarespace, and Drupal. With blockchain projects like Ethereum building powerful applications on their own decentralized network it is quickly becoming a reality that blockchain technology could change the applications SEO specialists use to ply their trade.

As a Rochester NY SEO specialist, I am excited. Decentralized platforms mean traffic streams with wider girth. Traffic streams not just limited to individual websites (Google, Facebook, etc.). It easy to specualate how one large, decentralized platform built on blockchain could encompass all authority sites traffic as it seemingly, and effortlessly incorporates all their information and applicable uses.

The Schema community has already started to work on Schema Markup for blockchain certificates and user ID profiles. Both items are still works in progress however.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can be improved by blockhchain.

Central authorities are behind your success in today’s search engine marketing, whether they be Google, Facebook, Ebay, Yelp, Youtube, Whatever.

Google is a central authority in programmatic ads, where it helps advertisers run ads on websites via the Google Display Network. Google essentially is the middleman that helps advertisers and website owners trust each other. If they already trusted each other, they would not need Google as an intermediary taking a cut of the profits. This “trust” often creates distrust among the ranks. Is Google being fair with your ad campaign, ensuring visibilty and cost are appropriate? Most likely but it is not guaranteed.

Blockchain changes this. But the technology is still experimental at this point. Imagine a marketing world where every user is genuine with 100 percent accuracy and that the website owner is only charging the advertiser for genuine clicks through to their site. This also could remove the middleman leaving just the website owner and advertiser, saving both parties a lot of money.

Blockchain could potentially change the face of digital ad marketing, threatning Google’s display network revenue, the number one source of their income.

It is an exciting time to be a digital marketer with a giant like blockchain slowy transforming the playing field.