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One of the New Rules of SEO is that Google now has a user engagement feedback loop that helps them understand if the user is getting what they expect to see for any given query.

While we can’t be certain exactly what these signals are, it is widely suspected that bounce rate is an important ranking factor. In this post I’ll define exactly what bounce rates are and describe when a bounce isn’t actually a bounce.

Plus, you’ll discover why the bounce rate data shown in Google Analytics is mostly useless and see what you can do to fix this problem.

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Google does not want good content.

I know you’ve been told otherwise. I know that “Google wants good content” is a phrase repeated over and over, often by people who should know better. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true and believing it could be dangerous.

In this post, let’s examine what Google really wants and what that means for you.

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For small businesses and bootstrap marketers, it’s easy to feel persecuted by Google. From banning AdWords and AdSense accounts to Panda updates and from blocking keyword referral data (unless you’re a paying AdWords customer) to an increasing big-brand bias in the search results, it seems like Google is out to get small websites and small businesses.

That might not be literally true, but there’s no doubt that Google’s main goal is to make more money for Google. Being nice to small businesses doesn’t enter the equation for any decisions they make. And that makes relying on them too much a bad idea.

What then, are small businesses and individual SEOs to do? Is there a way to break out of the cycle of constantly trying to adopt to Google’s latest change, only to get smacked down by the next one?

There is. And it’s called the New Traffic Paradigm.

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Understanding match types is essential to both SEO in general and more specifically keyword research. I’ve received various questions about the significance of match types and I’ve seen some rather confusing and conflicting information on this topic, while searching through forums and blogs.

In this post, you’ll find a simple, straight-forward explanation of what the three match types are all about and exactly how this is significant to you.

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What do Seth Godin (author, marketing cult-figure and notorious bald guy) and the Google Panda update (change in Google algorithm that left a lot of sites in the dust) have to do with each other? Watch the video below to find out:

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Here’s the write up for an interesting little experiment comparing the click through rates of a #1 organic search listing and a PPC ad for the same keyword. I wanted to see which would get more traffic, the results are below!

If you looked at a typical Google results screen 5 years ago and compared it to a typical results screen now then you’d probably notice some rather large changes:

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I already reported on Google’s most recent “slap” against spammy sites an content farms in my previous post. Shortly afterwards, we saw what is probably the biggest real-life difference this slap has made, in two different ways: