Google Confirms: What It Really Thinks About Your Title Tag

During the last Google Webmaster Hangout session an interesting question came up. Just how important is the title tag for Google? Here’s what Google’s John Mueller had to say about the topic: We use that just as a part. I think it’s not like the primary ranking factor of a page, to put it that […]

Google Confirms: There’s No Technical Benefit to Having Multiple Sitemaps

Sitemaps are a key part of any websites onsite SEO task-list, however what happens when you have a really large website with dozens of categories and hundreds of pages? Do you keep everything within a single sitemap, or do you split it up? Furthermore – what does Google want?! Well, Google’s John Mueller answered this […]

Google Confirms: Don’t Use Special Characters In Your URLs

This recent confirmation from Google is a bit common sense, but just in-case: don’t use commas, semicolons, spaces, quotes, and other special characters in your URLs. John Mueller from Google stated in a Google Webmaster Help thread: I generally recommend avoiding special characters like commas, semicolons, colons, spaces, quotes etc. in URLs, to help keep things […]

Google Will Favor HTTPS Content In Search Results

It’s probably safe to say that Google has started, and led, the battle for a safer and more secure browsing experience – ever since they mentioned the first SSL ranking boost back in 2014. Ever since I’ve seen countless websites transition to HTTPS, and have gotten tons of questions from webmasters – most of whom […]

Google Confirms: Clicks On Your Business Impact Your Local Ranking

A recent post over in the Google My Business Help Forum confirmed something we’ve long believed: clicks on you’re listing help boost your listings ranking. Search history: The number of times it has been useful historically on the basis of relevance, prominence and distance. Which basically means how many times someone has searched for a […]

UK2 Group Launches New Website SEO Guru Tool

UK2 Group, which runs various hosting brands such as Midphase, WestHost, and VPS.net, have recently launched a new SEO tool called the Website SEO Guru. The Website SEO Guru is an automated tool which analyses ones website performance and suggests content tweaks that would make the website more discoverable online. Website SEO Guru is the simple online […]

Bing Launches Their Own Mobile Friendliness Test Tool

Bing has launched their very own Mobile Friendliness Test Tool – much like the Google Mobile Friendly Test tool located here. The tools functions in much the same way as the Google counter-part, providing a clean and straight forward report for you to see exactly what you need to change – if anything. Here is a […]

Google Confirms: We Pick Up Text Links But Do Not Pass PageRank To Them

Ever wondered just how Google would treat a non-hyperlinked text link? Will Googlebot recognize it as a link or simply look over it? Google’s John Mueller finally confirmed on Twitter that Googlebot does in-fact recognize text links however no PageRank or link signals are passed to it. @AGr4ves @methode We can pick up links from […]

Yahoo Can Now Display Google Ads & Search Results

Yahoo has published their 2015 Q3 Results, which shows a 7% growth in GAAP revenue, a loss from operations, oh and a partnership with Google that lets Yahoo show Google search results and ads. I’ll quote directly: In October, the Company reached an agreement with Google that provides Yahoo with additional flexibility to choose among […]

Get Instant SEO & Social Media Stats Via Our New, Free, Online Tool!

Back in 2012 I started offering free SEO analysis reports here on Rapid Purple in an effort to help small business owners and other webmasters have a way to get some basic SEO details and statistics regarding their website without ever paying a dime for it. When this first launched I would manually run these reports, […]

Google Battles Spam From Hacked Websites

Google recently rolled out a new set of algorithms designed to help clean out their search results from spam induced via hacked websites. As a webmaster, if you didn’t notice the hack yourself than Google’s Webmaster Tools will often times send you a notification when it locates something suspicious – and often times these are […]

GoDaddy Launches 3 New Services for Canadian Small Businesses

Following up on GoDaddy’s report showcasing that the majority of small businesses do not have a website – GoDaddy has launched three new services in their Canadian market geared towards helping small businesses create and manage their online presence. The new additions are: Personal Domains – which let you easily point domains to 16+ social […]

Check Out Google’s Hour Long Discussion On Duplicate Content

Earlier this week Google’s John Mueller held a video hangout to discuss the SEO communities most popular topic: duplicate content. The hangout ended up lasting over an hour, featuring roughly 20 minutes worth of presentation and a 40 minute Q&A session. I won’t even attempt to summarize all the different questions and concepts that get […]

Get Your Bing Link Explorer Results Exported While You Still Can

Bing has announced the retirement of Link Explorer, a tool originally from Yahoo which let you see your own websites backlinks along with those of your competition. This was a great way to do some competitive link analysis to learn who was linking to websites such as your own. Bing states that the Bing search […]

Google+ Page Link & Reviews Removed From Google Search Results

Google has been hard at work restructuring, rebranding, and basically taking things AWAY from Google+. As of this week Google has dropped the links that pointed to a businesses Google+ page, and they’ve dropped the reviews count from all Google search results. Searching for a business now provides a rather empty search result focusing on […]

Yandex Gets Nasty With Link Sellers

We’re always talking about the various different penalties and algorithms that Google and Bing put into place to help protect their search results from any manipulation – but what about the other search engines out there? Yandex has recently launched a new update to their algorithm called AGS which targets link sellers and negatively effects […]

Google Confirms: Full Screen App Interstitials Will Break Your Websites Mobile Friendliness

Interstitial app ads are extremely annoying – in my opinion anyway. They pop up just when you’re expecting to dig into the content you wanted to read, and half the time you close them they force the page to reload. Well Google seems to agree with me here and as of November 1st, 2015 any mobile […]

Want To Keep That SSL Ranking Boost? Perfect Your SSL Setup

I’ve covered SSL several times now in post and video form – and if you’ve decided that there’s a benefit to converting your website to SSL I urge you to do it correctly. That means going through your website to make sure that all of the elements you are utilizing (all of your scripts, images, […]

Tweets Now Displaying In Google Search Results

Just a couple of months ago Google officially began showing Twitter Tweets as part of their search results – and I made a video stating that Twitter was going to becoming the quickest way to the top of a Google search result. Well while most of us were relaxing and enjoying our days off this weekend […]

Google Confirms: We Will Probably Never Index All Your Website Pages

Have you been desperately trying to get Google to index all of your websites pages? Constantly revamping your sitemap, updating your content, and resubmitting only to find your stats in Google Search Console barely improving? In a tweet Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Google will never actually index all of your pages and there really […]