Your sites have been audited, improvements have been made and there is more to come in the road map. The technical, editorial and marketing teams are trained in SEO best practices and are integrating them into the daily workflow. Sounds good, but are your efforts working? That’s where tracking and measurement comes in. When it [...]

It has been a couple years now since page speed has been an official Google ranking factor and one year since the launch of PageSpeed Online, the Web-based version of Google’s tool for analyzing site performance. So I thought I’d check in on the PageSpeed scores for a selection of major news sites. Page speed [...]

Google’s recent algorithm change that favors the most recent content for certain types of queries offers good opportunities for news and content sites. But for individuals and organizations, does the Freshness Update make online reputation management more difficult? If you cover breaking news, hot topics or regularly occurring events the Freshness Update will create more [...]

News publishers are all too familiar with the fact that Google News doesn’t always do such a great job of favoring original sources in its story clusters. It is not usual to see a syndicated, aggregated or simply re-covered version of an article gain prominent visibility over the original. Today I noticed an example that [...]

Google’s expanded sitelinks give sites greater exposure for branded searches and the ability to dominate the page one results above the fold. User reactions have been mixed so far (some find them overwhelming or borderline obnoxious) but Google is touting the user benefits and the expanded sitelinks appear to be here to stay. That means [...]

eHow is back in the news after claims it was hit hard by latest expansion of Google’s Panda update and subsequent denials from Demand Media. Articles like “How to Pour Water Into a Glass Cup” make it difficult to dispute eHow’s reputation as the poster child of content farms. But in terms of keyword targeting, [...]

The launch of Google’s Page Speed Online (which allows users to get Page Speed scores without installing a browser extension) reminded me that it has been a year since I looked at the page load times of major news sites. So I thought I’d go back and see if there have been any performance changes [...]

In reading a Search Engine Land article about Jason Calacanis’ remarks during “Ending the Content Arms Race” at Signal LA this passage caught my eye: Calacanis shows a “How to cook a turkey” page on Mahalo which he says has tons of good video content, then decries it has to compete against 17 different articles [...]

For the past couple years Google has been embedding a Hot Trends graph in the regular search results for the top 100 fastest rising terms. I referenced this in my post on tools for monitoring search and social trends because it was a useful way to check for trending terms beyond the top 20 shown [...]

By now most editorial sites are employing basic SEO best practices in the newsroom but how many are taking full advantage of every opportunity? To be successful an editorial staff needs to do more do more than just optimize headlines and title tags; there are a wide range of editorial SEO tactics that need to [...]