Cutting-Edge SEO Insights

While there was a lot of talk about Penguin updates and the obsoletion of black hat SEO techniques, you will still have the chance of seeing them in full action, especially for very competitive keywords like viagra, cialis and payday loans. After the last Penguin update people had high hopes on abolishing black hat SEO. Everybody proclaimed the death of strategies including parasite hosting, cloaking and Google bombing.  The order on the search results was once more restored and everyone was ha [...]

You may never know when you are going to stumble on an unnatural links penalty, whether it’s algorithmic or manual. And you’re going to have to deal with that problem one way or the other. When you’re trying to get rid of those harmful backlink profiles, one solution that prevailed is to remove the page from your site to which the unnatural links were pointing. You’re going to swiftly deal with the problem, but you’re going to remain with a page that will give the 404 message. Will [...]

Less than 24 hours ago, Matt Cutts, the head of the spam team from Google, announced via Twitter that Google is rolling out the Panda 4.0 update starting today. Although many speculations regarding the rise of a possible Penguin 3.0 have been made, it's about that time of the year when SEO news is a-buzz with one particularly cute animal: panda. Only it's not our Chinese bear darling that's occupying the minds of web experts, it's the Google algorithm. However, all the Google updates speculat [...]

In the evolutive world of Search Engine Optimization, people got used to changing their behavior and habits around it. We transform, having different characteristics from one year to another, eventually ending up to form a new species of SEO professionals ... with different concepts about the notion of what this means. We’ve talked before about 3 Black Hat SEO Strategies that still work in 2014, even though we don’t endorse such techniques, we just wanted to provide you with the full palett [...]

Art is not, as the meta-physicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being [...]

I think it's no secret for anyone now that cats rule the internet, and, in a more conspiratorial note, maybe the world. If a couple of years ago we found it hilarious that in Ancient Egypt cats were worshiped and considered gifts from the Gods, nowadays the fluffy felines are back in power. When Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, was asked at the celebration of the 25th birthday of the web what was the most surprising thing about his invention, he reacted promptly: “Cats! I [...]

A question came out at a radio station: "Is it true that Mercedes cars are being given to citizens in Moscow?" The  radio answers: "In principle yes, it is true, but it is not Moscow but Leningrad, not Mercedes but Ladas, and they are not given to but stolen from." Much like in the case of this joke, a lot of the beliefs that are popular about SEO are only true “in principle” and some turn out not to be true at all. Some of these ideas may have started as true, while others have always [...]

There are no more shortcuts to link building. In 2013-2014, Google changed the rules for SEO once again. It’s slowly trying to shift the mentality from "hunting" for links to "growing" them naturally. Sincerely, there are no future proof link building techniques that we could vouch for, because we’re swimming in a sea of uncertainty. You can’t forecast with certainty the decisions Google will or will not take in order to predict the path for SEO as a technique. The algorithms developed [...]

The antagonism between black hat and white hat strategies has been going on for years now. These strategies have been around since the existence of SEO. It seems they aren't obsolete. On the contrary, they’ve persistently lingered around the SEO world and seem to be fruitful even in 2014. We do not endorse or recommend the usage of these techniques. This blog post's intent is to show how black hat SEO works in 2014. Some of the techniques presented below are not only black hat but also "cra [...]

The concept of manual link building has been multiple time reviewed and re-analyzed over time. Putting it simply, a manual link building campaign is a process of actively trying to increase links to a website.   When it comes to ranking and natural links, leaders aren’t spawned overnight and they can’t just buy their spot. Those long-term top ranking sites get there by working smart. That’s the right price when it comes to achieving that goal. We're here to talk to you about manual link [...]