Google Penalties: What Are They and What Do I Do If I Have One?

Building an online presence with SEO is tough, time-consuming work. It’s what we do every single day for our clients. But it’s rewarding to see web pages on diverse subjects like landscaping, low-voltage electrical installation, and even bricklaying rise in the rankings month after month. If you’ve been handling your SEO for your business’s website, I’m sure you know what I mean. But sometimes? That’s not the picture. Sometimes it feels like you’re doing everything right, but when you load the first page of the search engine results page (SERP), you’re nowhere to be found. For subject after subject, no matter how compelling the content you write, your site struggles to crack the bottom of the second page. It doesn’t seem to be on the search engine results page at all. What gives? Well, believe it or not, you might have been hit with a Google penalty. A Google Penalty? […]

Aubrey Grant

Author: Aubrey Grant

About Aubrey Grant

Aubrey is a copy writer and Head of Content at LinkNow Media. An expert content marketer, he is obsessed with developing strategic solutions that emphasize elegance and simplicity. Although generally mild mannered, he has been known to fly into rages at the sight of a semicolon.

Is Your SEO Strategy Harmful or Helpful?

When we were first introduced to the Internet, we were baffled by how quickly we could get the information we wanted. With no more than a few keystrokes and clicks, we’d be scrolling through pages and pages of helpful information or hilarious entertainment. As time went on, those minor lags and wait-times even disappeared. Soon, we had instant access not only to information but to products. With those second-nature keystrokes and clicks, we could find whatever product we wanted and have it arrive on our doorstep by the end of the following week. In the last few years, even the real world has picked up with the rapid-fire pace of technology. Gone are the days of waiting weeks for orders to arrive. Often it only takes days. The instant gratification the Internet has rewarded us with has set the bar quite high for all services. We expect instantaneous results, no […]

Aubrey Grant

Author: Aubrey Grant

About Aubrey Grant

Aubrey is a copy writer and Head of Content at LinkNow Media. An expert content marketer, he is obsessed with developing strategic solutions that emphasize elegance and simplicity. Although generally mild mannered, he has been known to fly into rages at the sight of a semicolon.

Is your website mobile-ready? It better be!

At the end of February, Google made an announcement that is going to have an enormous impact on search results. Beginning April 21st, websites that are not mobile friendly will be taking a big hit in mobile search results. This means that if your website is not optimized for mobile devices like smart phones and tablets, your site will be dropping out of the search results of users who are searching using those devices. Why is Google doing this? The web is simply not the same place it was even two or three years ago. The explosion of smart phones and tablets means that more and more people are spending a large percentage of their Internet time on these smaller, handheld devices. According to a recent survey of Internet use, the percentage of web use taking place on mobile devices went up from 14% in 2013 to 25% in 2014, […]

Lauchlin MacDonald

Author: Lauchlin MacDonald

About Lauchlin MacDonald

Lauchlin is part of the content and marketing team at LinkNow Media. He has nearly a decade of experience in copywriting and editing, and spends way too much time on the Internet. He can be reached at lmacdonald@linknowmedia.com and @Lauchlin on Twitter.

Top 3 SEO Scams to Avoid!

If you have any experience trying to market yourself or your business online, you have almost definitely come across the term “SEO.” Search Engine Optimization is a critical component of online marketing, but unfortunately most business owners don’t have a good understanding of what SEO services actually do. This makes the SEO industry an ideal cover for scammers and unscrupulous companies, because few people will know what they are doing wrong. If you want to avoid being scammed by fraudulent “SEO experts,” the best defense is to educate yourself about the industry. With this in mind, we’ve put together this quick guide to some of the most common warning signs that you’re dealing with SEO scammers. 1. They claim they will guarantee you top organic ranking on Google for your keywords While the goal of Search Engine Optimization is to improve the organic ranking of your website on Google and […]

Lauchlin MacDonald

Author: Lauchlin MacDonald

About Lauchlin MacDonald

Lauchlin is part of the content and marketing team at LinkNow Media. He has nearly a decade of experience in copywriting and editing, and spends way too much time on the Internet. He can be reached at lmacdonald@linknowmedia.com and @Lauchlin on Twitter.

How to improve your site’s search placement

When anyone uses Google or another search engine to try to find information about a product or service, the search engine will generally return thousands or millions of results. However, Google only shows ten of those millions of results on the first page. The vast majority of people searching the web will find what they are looking for on the first page of results, and the higher a site is placed on the page, the more likely people are to click on it. In fact, nearly a third of all searchers will go with the first search result. If you are trying to promote your business online, you definitely want your website to be on that first page of results, and the higher on the page the better. How to get on the first page If you’re a business owner, it can be incredibly frustrating to see that one of […]

Lauchlin MacDonald

Author: Lauchlin MacDonald

About Lauchlin MacDonald

Lauchlin is part of the content and marketing team at LinkNow Media. He has nearly a decade of experience in copywriting and editing, and spends way too much time on the Internet. He can be reached at lmacdonald@linknowmedia.com and @Lauchlin on Twitter.

Everything you need to know about Google algorithm updates

If you spend any time at all reading about SEO best practices, you have likely seen technology and web bloggers referring to one Google algorithm update or another. However, for those of us who are not Internet experts, all of this talk about algorithms can seem totally mystifying. If you’re wondering what it means for Google to change their search algorithms and how these changes affect you as a website owner, you’re not alone! We’ll do our best here to answer your questions. Why does Google change their algorithm? Google is, of course, the biggest, most widely used search engine on the planet. They have managed to gain this status because they have consistently returned the best, most relevant search results for their customers, search after search and year after year. They are able to do this because they are constantly updating their search algorithms, or to put it more […]

Lauchlin MacDonald

Author: Lauchlin MacDonald

About Lauchlin MacDonald

Lauchlin is part of the content and marketing team at LinkNow Media. He has nearly a decade of experience in copywriting and editing, and spends way too much time on the Internet. He can be reached at lmacdonald@linknowmedia.com and @Lauchlin on Twitter.

Google Pigeon: why is my ranking suffering?

In July 25th 2014 Google announced the largest local search algorithm update thus far.  The main focus of the algorithm update is to provide better search results for local searches but this algorithm is still in its infancy. As the pigeon is just learning to fly there have been many businesses that dropped in rank (referred to as pigeon droppings). It is still too early to say if Google will clean up these dropped sites and return them to their previous ranking but most SEO experts are expecting this new update to be a permanent game changer. But Why? You may want to know, “why has my site lost its previous ranking?”  The reason is that Google is looking to put more importance on location where before it was more on site value. It may be easier to understand it this way: other Google algorithms (penguin and panda) are designed […]

Marc Pilon

Author: Marc Pilon

About Marc Pilon