Share At SES Toronto I was one of three panellists talking about SEO from a decade ago to now.  I tackled the past while my fellow panellists tackled the present and future.  As always, I had so much more I wanted to say and thus this blog post. I asserted that nothing has changed and yet everything really has.  At its core, the math for calculating relevance remains very much the same but layer upon layer of sophistication has been added turning the Google ranking formula a complex creature which is likely an engineering feat of mad genius.  I feel that Google engineers are extremely intelligent in their ability to conceive of, and execute the calculations surrounding, ways and methods [...]

Share So I woke up this morning, wondering what to write about for SEO chicks this week, and wouldn’t ya know Google has launched yet another thing that no-one needs. Perfect, this post will practically write itself! The first I knew of Google starred results, was seeing the Search engine land post on the subject, so I did a quick check, and found that I still had search wiki, in fact as of writing this post, I still haven’t been moved over to the new system, and from what I’m hearing, I kind of hope that I get left out of the update all together. @Seobegincom has been keeping me updated on his initial experiences of stared results for much [...]

Share The insertion of a link from Google search suggest list in the search box directly to a website has been on then off then on again and quickly off again. I took a screen shot and lost it but one day in early November while being lazy and going to Google to get to Webmaster Tools, I noted when I got as far as “Webm” I was offered a direct link to “Web MD” in the search suggest box.  This was switched off before the end of the day I believe and life went on as normal though I was surprised the normally US-only site was coming up.  I later learned Boots had partnered with Web MD so that [...]

Share Look, we all hated the dark days when Google was uber-secretive about everything, and we cheered up when first “Googleguy” and then Matt Cutts (aka Googleguy) started giving us a few glimpses of veiled instructions. Later Matt began to give exact instructions for things that were on Google’s agenda. In other words, if Google wanted to control our actions, Matt pulled our little puppet strings and gave us specific instructions. Two examples? He specifically told us to either use nofollow or javascript for paid links so that we wouldn’t pass link juice through. He specifically told us that nofollowing our own internal links would be a good way to sculpt our link juice so that it flowed where we [...]