What is Growth Hacking?

Growth Hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow a business. Growth hackers are marketers, engineers and product managers that specifically focus on building and engaging the user base of a business.

Continuing to grow each year, content marketing is here to stay. Content marketing is defined as:

“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience—and,

Earlier this month Google Webmaster’s Google+ account produced a series of informational posts on Google’s reconsideration request process called #GoogleRecon.

Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, released another video on Google Webmasters YouTube to answer the following question:

“How can content be ranked if there aren't many links to it?

How Your Content Ranks

Cutts explains that the process by which Google judges content without many pages linking to it, is similar to how search engines worked in the days before SEO and link building: “You’re pretty much judging based on the text on the page at that point.”

Link building is far from being dead and if you implement proper white-hat, ethical strategies, you'll see a positive boost in your rankings. Let's talk links for just a minute, before we dive into the 3 key ways to improve your rankings.

It's important to keep in mind that links will continue to remain a strong ranking factor to how Google views the quality of your site, and it’s been stated by Matt Cutts several times throughout 2014. Recently in a You&A at SMX Advanced, Danny Sullivan asked the following:

If your website received a manual action notice from Google, you now have the chance to request to the almighty Google to reconsider your website. If you’re not sure if your website received a manual action, take a look at our blog post on, “How to Determine If You Were Hit By A Google Penalty Or An Algorithm Update”.

Now that we have that all squared away, we have 5 tips to share with you before submitting your reconsideration request.

Matt Cutts released another video today on Google Webmasters YouTube in response to the following question:

Will backlinks lose their importance in ranking?

He stated how backlinks still have many years left and will continue to matter. According to Cutts back in February, "excluding backlink relevancy resulted in much worse search quality and backlink relevance still really helps in terms of making sure we return the best, most relevant, most topical set of search results”.

In a recent video from Google Webmaster Help, Matt Cutts replied to the following question:

How can I tell if my site is affected by a particular algorithm?

If you’ve ever experienced the shear panic of losing search engine rankings in Google, you’re not the only one. If this has happened, you may begin to question if you’ve been hit by a Google penalty or an algorithmic update. What’s the difference?

What kind of SEO agency would we be if we didnt take advantage of this holiday to put together an Irish Blessing? Here's to all SEOs and Link Builders near and far. Wishing you all the best of luck on your journey to the number one ranking and of course a Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Are backlinks still important?

Yes! In a recent video from Google Webmaster Help, Matt Cutts reiterated the importance of backlinks. The video was in response to the following question:

“Does the big G have a version of the search engine that totally excludes any backlink relevancy? I’m wondering what search would look like and am curious to try it out.”

Is guest blogging for link building officially over?

In a blog post released yesterday, Matt Cutts, head of Google spam team, made it very clear that guest blog posting has gotten too spammy over time.

Matt Cutts followed up with a statement clarifying what constitutes as guest blogging and weighed in on the importance of quality link building strategies:

There’s plenty of content out there that will generate traffic – from hilarious videos and off-the-wall memes to sharp infographics and human interest pieces. There are plenty of click-worthy headlines, interesting ideas and clever one-offs that can bring a flood of people scrambling into your site.

With so many things generating such huge share numbers and enormous traffic counts, you might be fooled into thinking that any piece that generates traffic is “working”…

Late afternoon on Friday, October 4^th, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, confirmed that the latest iteration of the Penguin update was rolling out and would impact 1% of all queries.

Link Removal 101

Our team was thrilled to have Sha Menz, from Rmoov.com visit our office this week to discuss tips, best practices and techniques for identifying and removing negative links. Below I've share my top 5 takeaways to help you handle any link cleanup challenges you may be facing.

Google's Penguin updates have made auditing your website's link profile more important than ever. In addition to your link acquisition process, you should include an analysis of your link profile that will prevent your website from receiving penalties from Google now and in the future. Here's how to conduct a link audit:

A common misconception when it comes to search engine optimimization and link building, is that nofollow links do not provide any value when it comes to “passing link juice” and getting noticed and accounted for by Google’s algorithm. Simply put, this is not true.  After having several discussions with my clients on this topic, I decided to write an article to dispel this rumor.