When the first round of manual penalty notifications landed in Webmaster Tools back at the beginning of 2012, there was a mad rush to remove as many poor quality links as possible. In fact, Google recommended doing just that in the email notifications it sent out....
Over the past six years, I’ve been involved in several hundred SEO agency selection processes ranging from formal RFP (request for proposal) and pitch processes, down to more informal chats. The one thing that is becoming increasingly apparent as the industry matures...
Google has a better understanding of search queries than ever. …it’s now time to show that you have a better understanding of your buyers. The Hummingbird algorithm returns results that are more likely to represent what a user is looking for when querying Google; it’s...
Earlier this month, the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) released their Digital PR Report 2013 which had some very interesting findings, especially for us as a digital agency that offers most of the services discussed. They have put together this handy...
Regular readers of the Branded3 blog will know that we have been working with a large number of clients to try and get manual penalties removed and have done a huge amount of link clean-up. Our link clean-up team has been working for around two years looking at back...
Back in May, Matt Cutts talked about how Google was looking to use additional quality signals to help certain authority sites rank higher in a particular sector, and that they were going to also add authority as a factor into the Panda algorithm to soften the effect...
Google hands out a lot of manual penalties for unnatural links these days, but not all of them are the sort of penalties that will wipe out your website; lots are just penalties that either devalue a few unnatural links or move you down for one particular set of keywords.
Ever since Google started penalising sites for bad links, link auditing has never been a more important part of your SEO strategy. Over the past year we’ve dealt with and recovered over 40 sites suffering link-based penalties, but audited a lot more. Honestly, audits...
In April, Stephen Kenwright wrote this post about Path spamming his phone contacts. On the first day his post drove 60,000 visitors to the Branded3 site. That's around 20-30x our usual daily traffic, just to one page. Our Google Analytics graph for April/May looks...
Have you ever seen this message in your Google Webmaster Tools? If you have, you'll know about the panic that ensues. Maybe you know you've done some link-building in the past that's outside of Google's guidelines, or perhaps you hired an SEO firm which wasn't honest...