It’s a good thing that Google is now taking more and more social signals into consideration in its algorithm. This, however, begs the question: how does Google separate authority from popularity? You see, popularity does not always mean authority and vice-versa, and this issue is the focal point of the latest webmaster help video by Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team.

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How do search engines work? That is a question foremost in the minds of countless Internet users who use search engines on a regular basis. They know that a search engine is essential to finding specific information on the vast expanse that is the World Wide Web, but its process for coming up with results remain a mystery to many. The way we understand it, this is how search engines work:

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If you’re one of those who were overjoyed when Google Disavow was launched, then you’re one of many who may have celebrated a bit prematurely. That’s because for all the simple uploading of backlinks that sites suffering from a Google penalty wanted to disavow, it hasn’t really worked the way people expected it to work. Sometimes it does disavow them and helps penalized sites get traffic again, but in most cases nothing really happens.

Many marketers have already conducted all kinds of tests on Google Disavow, but to this very day, the only people who know exactly how it works are its developers over at Google. With all the unknowns of Google Disavow, we recommend doing the following things to make sure that your penalty goes away. These steps are simply much better—for now, or at least until Google makes the entire disavowing process clear—than just using the Google Disavow tool.

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Title tag optimisation is perhaps one of the most basic yet most overlooked on-page SEO steps that can help a site’s rankings. Although it’s true that <title> tags may no longer be as important as they once were, it’s still important for your website to use them effectively. After all, all search engines still consider them in calculating a website’s rankings.

Title tags are primarily utilized to accurately represent the content of any given web page. Usually contained within the Head section of a page, Title tags, which are also referred to as Title elements, play a crucial role in organic ranking and click through rates from search engine results.

When you conduct an SEO audit on a webpage, it is important that you find the <title> tag and see if it’s in keeping with the best practises for title tag optimisation, which are enumerated below:

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This has been a routine that’s been going on for far too long. For as long as anyone can remember, people love making lists of predictions for just about anything in the weeks leading up to the New Year. We know, because we do it too.

While doing it can be fun and in most cases, informative, some of the predictions in the world of marketing are just too clichéd to actually say anything of real relevance. Some just state the obvious, or some make predictions that have actually already happened, or they make predictions that simply border on the ridiculous. In any case, they are getting pretty annoying. Aren’t you just sick and tired of these online marketing predictions?

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The SEO industry has always been full of tricks—often bad ones—just to give one’s own websites a boost in search engine rankings. So far, however, one of the worst tricks to ever have been foisted on the SEO world—and an effective one to boot—is negative SEO, which basically allows site owners to sabotage their competitors by pointing hundreds or thousands of negative backlinks towards their sites.

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