That’s how long humans have been sharing stories, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.

From ancient Indonesian cave art to cutting-edge infographics – fast forward a few millennia, and people are telling more stories than ever.

We’ve just shifted the medium.

Our digital world is evolving at a breakneck pace.

Content gathers dust like fossils, and today’s trending hashtag is tomorrow’s ironic meme.

Attention is at an all-time…

First things first, what exactly is an ugly URL?

Google gives us and URLs that could cause some issues.

If something in the URL is causing Google to have difficulty crawling it, that can be a real problem.

See the above link for examples of that.

But as long as Google (and Bing!) can crawl a URL, it doesn’t really matter if it’s “ugly” to users.

While keywords in URLs and URLs themselves might be one of the hundreds of…

The important consideration when removing content is that it’s not a one-size fits all solution for improving rankings. Removing pages does not automatically help all sites rank better.

Furthermore it’s important to assess whether a page simply needs improvement.

Removing content is an old solution for traffic issues. There was a related SEO solution for removing content was called Content Cannibalization. Then about six years or ten years later the technique was rediscovered…

In the latter half of March, eMarketer surveyed 203 respondents. 67% were agency-side, and 33% were marketing professionals, but all work functionally in media decision-making.

Participants were asked two questions:

• What media types were they choosing to pause/reduce spend from, based on their initial response that they would be doing so
• What media types would keep or receive funds shifted away from other channels?

The initial data reflected the…

Is it acceptable for authors to link to their guest posts?

That’s one question asked of Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller during a Webmaster Central hangout held April 9.

The question was submitted by a site owner who contributes a modest amount of unique content to other sites within the same niche.

They were concerned that linking to those posts from their own site would have a negative impact on SEO.

Here is the question that was…

These difficult times it is more important than ever to get more effective work done in less time and with fewer resources.

One boring and time-consuming SEO task that is often neglected is writing compelling titles and meta descriptions at scale.

In particular, when the site has thousands or millions of pages.

It is hard to put on the effort when you don’t know if the reward will be worth it.

In this column, you will learn how to use the most recent advances in…

It’s not uncommon for Google to generate a meta description to display in place of the one provided by a web page.

Mueller lists the most likely reasons why this would occur:

• The meta description is not relevant or useful (ie, just a collection of keywords).
• The exact same meta description is provided across a large number of pages.
• The meta description doesn’t match what the user is searching for, but other content on the page does.

In…

it is safe to assume that Bing and Google are organized and function on similar lines.

With that in mind, if Google won’t tell us much about how the algorithms function, I figured that asking Bing is the solution if I wanted to better understand.

So that’s what I did.

Below is the first interview in a series of five I did with team leads at Bing.

Dubut states quite categorically that the foundation of every single results page on a modern search engine is the “10…

It seems like you have accomplished the first step in moving a company’s focus toward SEO.

The first step is to take the SEO, as well as anything else that has to do with the website, away from your IT folks.

IT folks are usually not marketing folks.

IT will always prioritize tasks that affect “critical systems” over SEO items.

And this makes sense.

You won’t hear screaming from your users if a meta tag isn’t…

In a Google After Hours Office Hangout Google’s John Mueller answered a question about links and rankings.

Along the way he demonstrated that sometimes what we think we know about SEO isn’t entirely correct.

He then offered advice on how to fight for the top rankings.

The publisher started off asking a question by stating that “everyone knows” that dofollow links are necessary for rankings.

And that’s where the publisher was mistaken.

So part of the…

Strategic domain registration is something every business needs to understand.

Approaching domain registrations from a strategic perspective can open up opportunities for success in earnings and search traffic.

This is a reasonable approach that does far more merely protecting a brand.

Defensive domain registration is the act of buying different versions of a website’s domain name in order to block competitors from obtaining…

I think we can all agree that it’s been a crazy couple of weeks, courtesy of COVID-19.

Every day, we face a new reality, adjusting the way we live and work, walking the line between precaution and panic.

Tensions rise along with the number of Coronavirus cases reported in the news.

We stock up on groceries, make sure that our loved ones are safe, and overhaul our daily routines.

We follow all the guidelines and hope to settle into a new normal.

And that’s…