Will Hattman

All of us in the agency SEO world have dealt with a client suffering from Rankings Monomania. The symptoms are always the same:

• No matter how often you communicate, or by what means, they ask after their rankings in every exchange;
• They’re usually laser-focused on how they’re ranking for one major keyword in particular, and usually for cosmetic reasons (in severe cases, this keyword will be a nightmarishly broad and competitive one, like “car insurance”);
• They refract every strategic or tactical idea of yours through the lens of rankings, and in severe cases only buy in if specific rankings improvements are included among the expected gains in your pitch.

This obsession does not make RM-afflicted clients bad at their jobs. It’s not their fault. Rankings do matter. The anecdotal but universal understanding that Google search results beyond page one constitute a wasteland still holds true: [Read more…] about Don’t Worry About Rankings. Worry About These Things Instead.

A maddening issue plagues the SEO community, a stone in our collective shoe that we keep trying to ignore, but that at least once a year rolls right back under the most sensitive part of our foot. We keep walking because the fast pace of the industry and the day-to-day needs of our clients make it so we don’t have time to stop, untie the laces, and pop the shoe off to shake the stone out. But sooner or later we’re going to have to, come what may.

I’m speaking of the disconnect between the primacy of mobile devices in search — both in Google’s eyes and users’ — and the desktop-exclusive perspective that we professionals remain locked into. Daily Google search queries on mobile outpaced desktop years ago, and the Google Speed algorithm update promised for July of this year, in which mobile page speed becomes an official ranking factor, constitutes Google’s third big effort to jam home the same mobile-first message in as many years (following the “Mobile-Friendly Search Results” update in 2015 and the “Mobile-First Index” update of 2016, and heck, you might even count AMP here too). But SEO practitioners simply cannot adopt a felt, experienced appreciation for this changed landscape, for the simple reason that desktop computers are still, overwhelmingly, the devices that we use to do the work. [Read more…] about We Need a Real Mobile SEO Methodology

This post started as a bit of a kiss-off to Bing. This is not to suggest that we at UpBuild have any beef with Microsoft’s eternal underdog of a search engine; while it’s unlikely to ever have the market share Google does, Bing can be a useful source of traffic, especially for specific niche markets, and it’s always best not to put all one’s eggs in Google’s basket. But since the founding of our fair company, there has been this one thing, this one feature of our standard SEO package that always required an undue sacrifice of time and effort almost exclusively for Bing’s sake, and during one of the industry discussions we had on our recent Team Day, we decided we weren’t going to take it anymore. [Read more…] about Why We’re Not Going to Write Inline Semantic Markup Anymore

October will mark the five-year anniversary of Google adding the Disavow Links tool to what was then still called Google Webmaster Tools, and anecdotal evidence I’ve accumulated in that time suggests that only a small fraction of the total people aware of its existence actually understand how it’s intended to be used.

I’ve spoken to people in the business who almost reflexively say the word “disavow” in mentioning that they detected backlinks that seemed fishy, or, in the case of the particularly trigger-happy, backlinks that they just didn’t remember acquiring (as if someone at an enterprise-level company should be expected to record, let alone remember, every backlink that its website gets). “The site that gave us this link looks weird. Can we disavow it? Google lets you do that now, right?” Well, yeah, in the sense that they did create this tool and we do have access to it. But the disavow tool is not to be reached for the minute you notice a link that arches your eyebrow. It’s to be kept behind emergency glass and used only when you’re as sure as you can possibly be that 1) the link is toxic, and 2) there is no other way to remove it.

Use the disavow tool wisely, and you unleash one of the most fearsome foes that spam has ever seen. Use it nonchalantly, and it will come back to haunt you. So let’s talk about the rare conditions that actually might inspire you to consider this nuclear option called the Disavow Links tool, the better to keep you from exposure to radioactive fallout. Or something. [Read more…] about What Google’s Disavow Links Tool Is and Isn’t For