Google algorithm

“Could you please write a post with a clear path on just what to do to rank high in Google?” “What should I do to make sure I’ll outrank my competition?” “Could you write a clear, step-by-step to-do list on how to rank high in Google?” Although I completely understand these questions, answering them is …

Perhaps you’ve read about the related entities patent which was recently granted to Google, or perhaps you haven’t yet. You should read Dave Davies post about it on Search Engine Land and find out more about it. The related entities patent gives us valuable insights into how Google identifies relationships between content. It was a …

It’s hard to imagine a life without a search engine that knows what it’s doing. I remember the days of AltaVista and co, search engines that just dump random pages on you for every given query. I was so excited to see Google enter the scene and immediately do everything right — the results were …

As much as we advocate holistic SEO here at Yoast, there will always be people turning to the dark side, employing less than savory techniques for their own gain. When someone targets a website with actions intended to lower its ranking in the SERPs, it’s called ‘negative SEO’. One way people can try to damage …

In the week of August 1st Google rolled out a “broad core algorithm update.” This update has been dubbed the “Medic update” online. We know it was that because they said so on Twitter. There was quite a bit of buzz around this update. Some sites “won”, others “lost”, which is logical because, in the …

Last week, I wrote about Google’s decision to shorten the meta descriptions. Now, meta descriptions are about the same size as they were half a year ago. But for a couple of months, they were much longer. We got a lot of questions and quite a few people were pretty annoyed — understandably so. Is …

SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’. It’s the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in Google’s – or other search engines’ – search results. SEO focuses on rankings in the organic (non-paid) search results. In this post, I’ll answer the question “What is SEO?” and I’ll explain our approach to …

Low-quality pages are pages that don’t contribute much to your SEO. In most cases, these pages add little value for your visitors as well. You can have different types of low-quality pages on your site, sometimes without even knowing it. Like thin content – pages holding little information – and duplicate content – pages showing the …

Over the last couple of months, I attended some events, for instance, our own YoastCon, which was awesome! The thing that kept echoing in my head was the vast misunderstanding a lot of people have about websites and Google. One of my firm beliefs is that Google is becoming more and more ‘human,’ and should …

Whenever you delete a page (or post) from your site, you also delete one or more URLs. That old URL, when visited, will usually return a ‘404 not found’ error, which is not the best thing for Google or your users. Is that what you really wanted to happen? You could redirect that deleted page …