How and When to Diversify Your Anchor Text

Though the Google Penguin update wasn’t technically the over-optimization that spokesperson Matt Cutts hinted might be coming, the algorithm change definitely had an impact on today’s anchor text optimization best practices.

To understand what this means and why this matters, it’s important that you first understand how anchor text is used in Google’s ranking algorithms.

Google, Bing & Yahoo Tracking the 2012 Presidential Election Results

All three of the major U.S. search engines are catering to Americans’ insatiable need for election data today, alongside a few get out the vote initiatives and helpful voter resources.

Dislike Timeline? Facebook Testing New Layout

The wizards of smart at Facebook are testing an new layout for Timeline. This version features a single column for posts, instead of the two columns. The user timeline would still be divided into two columns, but all of your status updates, photos, and other items posted to your timeline would be featured in a wide column on the left. Modules like “photos,” “friends,” “likes,” and any open-graph apps like Spotify and Instagram would appear in a narrower column on the right.

Deconstructing The Google EMD Update

Well, it’s official – no more free lunch for EMD, now that the Google EMD Update has launched. It worked well, for a long time. A whole industry of exact match domain tools and brokers came up. Huge premium prices for good names just went through the roof when it was a real “money keyword.”

For quite a while, it was possible to rank in the TOP3 with literally no backlinks, compared to non EMDs, often after only a few days in literally every niche you can dream of.

Exact Match Domains (AKA Keyword Domains) are, in general, domain names that exactly match the keyword a website wants to compete for. For example, if a website wants to rank for the term [minor weather report], an exact match domain would be [MinorWeatherReport.com].

Foursquare Takes On Yelp With New Homepage Search Box

Perhaps it was always inevitable that Foursquare would shift its emphasis from location-based social networking to local search. Indeed, the site has been moving in this direction for quite some time, and very self-consciously for the better part of the past year. 

This afternoon the company is rolling out a new PC homepage for users who aren’t logged in: it prominently features a search box. In doing so Foursquare takes aim at Yelp as its chief rival in the local space. And in some ways the move completes Foursquare’s evolution from a more narrow and novelty oriented friend finder, game and check-in app to a genuine local search utility with much broader “mainstream” ambitions and appeal.

5 Important Post-Penguin Guest Post Prospecting Questions

Several months have passed since Google announced its game-changing Penguin algorithm update back in April of this year. In terms over overall site impact, most SEOs noticed an immediate impact in rankings as a result of Penguin, however, only the ones who tried to get away with SEO shortcuts (like deliberate keyword stuffing, spamming, and link exchange schemes) rather than legitimate link building methods experienced truly negative impacts.

But regardless of whether you have ever practiced any of the shortcuts above, there are several considerations that any SEO professional with any kind of link building strategy can benefit from to ensure that your site performs well with post-Penguin Google bots.

6 Steps on How to Cash-In on the New SEO

Author Rank. Panda. Penguin. Mobile. Google+. If you think about it, these things were not on most SEO and online content marketer radars in the early 2011. But in just a year’s time, they have become major components of Web marketing.