Back in March, BBC, the world’s largest broadcast news organization, was hit with an unnatural link notification. A little more than a month later, Mozilla was hit with a manual spam update.

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Organic search engine optimization has three parts:

• Onsite optimization
• Offsite optimization
• Technical optimization

Onsite SEO includes elements like title tags and on-page content. Offsite means things like social media presence and sharing as well as inbound links. And technical optimization means things like XML sitemaps, URL structure, 404 error pages, and other web elements “under the hood.”

Fresh on the heels of Pat's announcement of the most recent Google Panda update, it looks like the other black-and-white animal-named update, known as Google Penguin, is also due for an update. More...

If you’re an avid reader of our blog, you’ve probably encountered something about the Google Panda update. If you’re not an avid reader (you should be!) or if you’re not familiar with Google Panda, it’s simply the name for a series of ranking formula updates aimed directly at sites with thin, poorly written, or duplicate content. More...

Google monitors all web traffic that flows through its search engines. By using Google Analytics, savvy web managers can gain many insights about the behavior of visitors to their website.

Google Analytics shows us:

• Where visitors click.
• How long they stay on certain pages.
• How often they accomplish conversion goals (like buying an item or submitting a request form.)
• When and why they leave the site.

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You can understand a lot about current culture by browsing top-trending searches. Google has assembled a collection of the topics we searched for the most in 2012. As we can see from these search results, 2012 has been quite a year.

Odds are good that you’re doing some shopping this time of year. And if you’re like the majority of Americans, you’re planning to do a lot of your shopping online.

This holiday season, online shopping is undergoing some changes. These changes may be subtle, but they’re likely to influence the landscape of online shopping and e-commerce for years to come.

It's no secret that Google would prefer users to click on their paid listings than on organic ones. Google is, after all, a (very profitable) business.

We've seen evidence that supports the claim about an increased prominence of paid placement in the search results pages.

Image from http://www.ppchero.com/

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In February 2012, Google first announced plans for enhanced site links on desktop search ads.

The idea was to give existing site links a shot of steroids and triple their overall size. Google planned to combine multiple site links and closely related search ads into a larger ad format. Google ran a test period and analyzed the performance of the links, and determined that the new enhanced site links work better than the original site links. They decided to roll out the new feature globally.

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Wordstream recently released an infographic titled “The War on Free Clicks” that focuses on the increasing prominence and importance of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) in Google. For someone like me who is more entrenched in organic search engine optimization, the stats included in the study are eye opening.

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