Back in June, Google announced changes to its advertising personalization policies with the intent of preventing unlawful discrimination for housing, employment and credit products or services in both the US and Canada. Although Google claims to have been working with the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development on these changes for “some time”, AdAge [...]
Customer reviews are thought to be an important factor in Google’s search ranking algorithm because they convey trustworthiness and also authority. We’ve previously posted about the relationship between the quantity of Google reviews and the local pin map ranking, as well as the importance of reviews for social proof. Today, though, we’re covering an often [...]
During uncertain times, marketing is often the first budget to get slashed. And right now throughout most industries, CMOs are being asked to do more (or at least, as much) with less - meaning less staff and reduced budgets. A recent Gartner survey of 260 U.S. marketing executives reported that 76% expected a decrease in [...]
Google has rolled out several local algorithm updates over the past several years. The 2014 “Pigeon” update gave a boost to local directory listings, prompting SEOs to focus on building accurate and comprehensive citations on a variety of general and industry-specific directory sites. The 2016 “Possum” update appeared to put more importance on the geolocation [...]
The much-coveted featured snippet, often referred to as “position zero” still exists, but it is now essentially position #1 on the page. In a recent change that has been confirmed by Google (see below Twitter exchange between Moz’s Pete Meyers and Google’s Danny Sullivan), a search result that appears in the featured snippet will no [...]
In the United States, federal, state and local government websites must comply with Section 508 regulations, meaning that website content must be accessible to people with disabilities. At this time there are no ADA legal standards for the websites of private sector organizations, but that does not mean that companies will not be sued for [...]
Despite often being a source of frustration to users, CAPTCHA has long been the “golden standard” to keep website form submissions relatively spam-free. Now, some privacy advocates are questioning whether CAPTCHA is still the best option. A Brief History of CAPTCHA CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. [...]
Homepage sliders and all their variations (carousels, rotating offers, parallax scrolling backgrounds and banners) are widely employed by website designers, loved by clients and pretty much universally hated by SEOs. Tons of hard data exists tying homepage sliders to negative performance and usability, but this design element is clearly not going away. So, what gives? [...]
In 2018, Google introduced a Products and Services section for Google Business Listings. Since then, it has split the two – initially offering a Services section and more recently rolling out a beta version of the Products section. We started noticing “Products (beta)” in the Google Business Listing dashboard of some clients earlier this [...]
Back in the early days of search engine optimization, some overly opportunistic parties took advantage of then-current data showing a positive correlation between the number of backlinks and Google ranking. This gave rise to automated link building, link farms, links for sale and all sorts of other spammy scenarios and gave SEO, in general, a [...]
