A Blog by a career In-House SEO for all the SEO Pros and Wannabes…

This is just a short update.

So yesterday while I was checking this blog to see if anything major happened or broke, I realized that the PageRank has been updated from the gray bar to… zero! Yay? Nothing worth for a celebration, as I’m not really expecting huge amount of traffic or high ranking since I haven’t had much time to update the blog or write any post in the last couple of weeks, but it’s nice to see that the site is making progress since its inception about three weeks ago.

I don’t know about you, but I have often been asked the question about the best method to geo-target content to different countries or regions. Most of the time it comes down to either use country specific TLDs, or create subdomains and set a geo preference in the Google Webmaster Tools console, and as a third alternative, we can always use sub-folders in a similar fashion to the subdomain method.

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It is a known fact that many websites are getting away with black hat SEO tactics like buying links, cloaking and spamming, and you would believe that, in a perfect world, Google is really serious about swinging its ban stick at sites that violate the rules.

After all, there are plenty of horrific stories about Google penalizing legitimate sites for various marginal or wrong reasons. Yet, there are miraculous stories like this one about an insurance site not only running black hat tactics under the nose of Google, but also rising to the first page in a short period of time. It really makes you wonder if Google is colour blind?

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As reported by a few webmasters in many SEO forums, Google has updated the sitelinks for many websites. I haven’t heard a complaint about the new update as it seems to able to provide better anchors and destination pages.

On my end, the sitelinks for the company I worked for have disappeared since Google introduced the search box a few weeks ago, but they have resurfaced once again. I believe the update happened during late morning as the sitelinks were still missing this morning, but now it has reappeared.

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On Monday, Google LatLong announced that the search company has added a new feature to incorporate YouTube Videos into the Google Maps Results. This is great news for those small businesses that are having a tough time to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack.

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Is it still safe to use subdomains or is it better off to use a separate domains all-together? There was a lot of buzz regarding Google’s supposed change in their SERP to treat sub-domains as sub-folders of the same domain a few months ago. Some people loved the idea and some thought the sky was going to fall for them, and I was closely monitoring the situation at the time as basically all of my sites were using subdomains for good reasons. Well, it seems like nothing much has changed since then, as Hugo Guzman at Zeta Interactive pointed out in his post about subdomains still dominate the SERPs for major brand names.

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I could imagine the panic when you realize the familiar designs of your site have disappeared in front of your eyes. Google Webmaster Tools Blog had a post about “things to do when your site is hacked”. Aside from contacting your hosting provider, here’s a summary of what you should do if your site fell victim to the hackers:

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Like so many other SEOs, I have noticed some changes in the SERP since yesterday on Google.ca, but not as significant as many others have claimed. A few keywords that dropped rankings since the last “#6 Penalty” bounced back to their original positions, along with some odd pages that I’ve never seen before.

The term “Dewey Update” has quickly been coined for this update in the SEO community, as Matt Cutts came out and asked webmasters for feedbacks about SERP shakeup in the WebmasterWorld forum and asked for the term “Dewey” to be included in the form.

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Have you ever tried to get your site on Google News? I sure have, and I must admit, it took a little trick even for a huge site with tons of content to get in.

Anyways, the Google News Blog today has released a post about the truths and myths of Google News. To summarize:

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