How to Rank in the Local Pack Across Your Entire City (Study)

I did some Local SEO research on how to rank in the Local Pack across your entire city, not just from your office location. It was published on the AttorneySync blogĀ today. Here’s the gist of the study: Often a business will spot check their rankings in the Local Pack or organic to get an idea … Read more

Why is Buying Links a Problem?

Early last week, Jon Christian dropped a story about Jayson Demers promoting his own clients with links he dropped into Forbes, Entreprenuer, Inc and others. There was shock and horror from people outside of the digital marketing industry. Look at how a portion of the public (and our President) currently treats reporters and journalists. Add … Read more

Why Don’t Newspapers Link Out?

ļ»æ via GIPHY (Hey look! A link) (Updated 7/9 with email examples) Linking Policies are Stupid Letā€™s chat about the stupidity and inefficiency of newspapers linking policies. Recently, Iā€™ve picked up a few new larger clients who tend to get a good amount of positive press. Hooray! Being the opportune link builder I am, I … Read more

Pubcon 2017 Las Vegas

Las Vegas Pubcon 2017

Las Vegas Pubcon Pros & Cons

Last week I had the awesome opportunity to attend Pubcon in Las Vegas. Iā€™ve been in the industry long enough to know what Pubcon is about but had yet to make it out to a conference. I was very much looking forward to everything it had to offer. Below are what I found to be the pros and cons of this years Pubcon Las Vegas.

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Fighting For Minimal Clicks

brian-barwig-fighting-for-minimal-clicks

The Fight for Less Clicks

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and wanted to get some thoughts to paper, especially since I’m nowhere near my 1 post per month I anticipated doing at the beginning of the year.

I recently read 3 terrific articles ā€“ oneĀ from Gyi, one from Andrew Shotland at SELĀ and another from Jon Henshaw on MediumĀ  ā€“ and they got my mind buzzing. Google has never really been one to give away free traffic and make things easy for SEOā€™s. Back in the wild west of SEO, there were ways to game the system and rank a website, though G was always cutting down easy ways to rank, attempting to get people to buy Adwords and penalizing websites. The same continues today at an even more rapid pace, as easy loopholes get shutdown, more ads are placed and there is less real estate in the SERP.

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Breakdown of the GMB Help Guide

gmb motherload
The GMB Motherload

Updated: July 20th, 2016

GMB Help

Yesterday, Cori Shirk found the Google My Business goldmine. A few weeks back, I remember hearing Google was going to be adding more information and guides to their Google My Business help section. I was skeptical on how much ā€œinformationā€ they would be providing. Turns out, itā€™s a good deal of information, 7 sections in total.

Hereā€™s a breakdown of each of the sections:

  • Report incorrect Street View imagery
  • View business info live
  • Cant Find business info
  • Info displayed on G+ pages
  • Place Labels on G Maps
  • Info in Knowledge Panel
  • Improve Local Ranking

Lets roll through a few of the more interesting sections:

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Are Big Brands Being Forced Out of the Local Stack?

 

Google Local in a nutshell
Google Local in a nutshell

Updated July 25th, 2016

It has been over 2 months since Google reduced the Local results from 7 down to 3. Since the change, Iā€™ve been attempting to analyzeĀ various items in the Pack – picture sizes, who is ranking, why they are ranking and what factors are keeping the businesses in the Local Stack. Iā€™ve written several posts on how terrible the results are and what a poor experience the Local Stack has been so far. I think Google is doing some things to better the user experience but it still has a ways to go.

I have been noticing more and more small business, ā€œmom and popā€ shops, located in the Local Stack since the change and decided to test my theory that big Brands are being pushed out of the Local results.

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Google goes to Local 3 Pack

New Local Pack
New Local Pack

As reported by Mike Blumenthal earlier this week, Google Local has shifted from theĀ 7 Pack to aĀ 3 pack. The shift was first reported as a possible test in various markets, is now rolled out to even more markets and should be nationwide soon.

The shift from a Local 7 Pack to a Local 3 Pack is a horrible user experience for several reasons.Ā Instead of seeing 5 or 7 local results, there are now only 3. Those three local results:

  • Do not have a website
  • Do not have a phone number
  • Do not have a Google+ page visible
  • Take 3 clicks to find a meaningful result

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I Got us Pandalized. Then We Got Out. Here’s How.

What Happened

The Google Panda algorithm was first deployed in February of 2011 and effected up to 12% of search results, most notably for us ā€“ our website. The algorithm targeted low quality websites with thin content, high ad to content ratios and other quality signals such as content farms. We got smoked by this algorithm and continued to get dinged each time a new version of Panda was released to the wild.

panda1

I’ve read others say that once you get hit by Panda once, you somewhat flatten out and it doesnā€™t keep hurting you. My perspective on that is different. Our website continually got hit and each time it took a good portion of our traffic ā€“ anywhere from 5-20% of whatever the current level of traffic happened to be. Now, this was our own fault mind you. Some of it was because we were lackadaisical in changing our content from standard, un-unique, nearly duplicate content on nearly all of our city/state/zip code pages and some was because I was still pumping out guest blogs which were of the same, poor quality as our website content. I take full responsibility.

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Pigeon Algorithm Analysis

spammylinks

Its been a few weeks since my last post on Pigeon, though I want to give an update on some items of interest I’ve been seeing with the update.

Ive been researching Pigeon since the day it was announced in an attempt to figure out just what is going on with the awful results being displayed. Hereā€™s a quick rundown of what we know so far:

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