Author name: 417 Marketing

In a shocking move from across the pond, France and the European Commission may attempt to force the king of the Interwebs (i.e., Google) to give up his crown jewels (i.e., the all-important search algorithm). The decision to bring antitrust charges against Google would echo a similar attempt by the EU against Microsoft, and it […]

Twelve times a year, once a month, like clockwork, we send our clients SEO reports. Each of these reports serves a different purpose, and one of them is devoted to showing clients trends for different traffic metrics, such as sessions, page views, average session duration, bounce rate, referrals from search engines, and more. However, in

Any webmaster worth his salt will sit up and take notice when Google issues a warning via Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). So it’s no surprise that when Google did just that last week, some webmasters went into a tailspin. The alert warned webmasters who were blocking the CSS and JavaScript on their

Unlike your home address, which says nothing about you or your family, a thoughtful and well-formed webpage address (also known as a URL) typically describes something about the webpage itself. It can describe the subject of the page or perhaps hint at the page’s location within the overall website. To emphasize this purpose, Google updated

These days, you can’t assume that all Internet users are sitting at a desk and looking at a desktop monitor. They might be wandering the aisles of a grocery store, sitting in a dentist’s waiting room, or preparing to board a plane. In fact, eighty percent of Internet users own a smart phone (source). To

In everyday life, traffic is dreaded and despised. In the world of SEO, it’s typically a sign of success! When you first dip your toe into SEO, you’ll hear a lot about traffic: web traffic, organic traffic, direct traffic, types of traffic, how to drive traffic to your site . . . It may take a

If your friend couldn’t see a beautiful image, what would you do? You would describe it to her, of course. Using words, precise and potent words, you would describe the subjects, the setting, the colors, the mood . . . This is why the alt attribute (more commonly known as the “alt tag”) exists. For

Since the original Panda algorithm was introduced in 2011, Google has updated it twenty-seven times. The most recent, arriving four months after the previous iteration, is known as Panda update 4.1. It arrived on the scene nearly a week ago (September 25), so I think it’s about time that we give this Panda a once-over.

Still mourning the recent death of Google Authorship? Wipe away those tears and remember that Google Author Rank lives on! The late Authorship program was formed so that authors could connect their content to their identity. It was a strong concept, but it failed to live up to expectations. Similarly, Author Rank is an SEO

Fini. The end. That’s all, folks! After just three years, Google has announced the end of Google Authorship. According to an announcement made by John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools, the search engine will no longer be showing Authorship results in Google Search, and it will stop tracking data from content using rel=”author” markup. Why?

Everyone knows that the Internet is full of deception: blatant lies, manipulated photos, plagiarism, stolen identities . . . As you learn more about search engine optimization (SEO), you may come across another type of online deception: cloaking. “What is cloaking?” you ask? Cloaking is an SEO technique in which different content is presented to