When you look at over 250,000 links from Penguin-penalized sites, you learn a thing or two. We put together a report based on an analysis of a lot of links, and found that: While folks like to portray Google as fumbling their anti-spam efforts and missing many offenders, the big G may simply be prioritizing. [...]

I’m a huge fan of Garrent French’s link building tool, the Link Prospector, so I was jazzed when he released the Broken Link Finder. I wanted to give an overview of why broken link building is important and how this tool can save you a ton of time and effort. What is broken link building? [...]

Before I even became an SEO I learned to hate SEOs. After all, SEOs would take the beautiful, functional site the designers and developers spent their nights creating and cram it full of footer links, anchor text, H tags, nofollows, and any other piece of code they could think of until the site couldn’t breathe. [...]

Recently, Team Portent has been writing a lot about local SEO best practices for US markets. And with good reason; mobile device usage is on the rise. Think about how often you reach for your smartphone or tablet to get directions to a local business, check their phone number, look at reviews or menus, or [...]

In the brief amount of time I’ve spent doing outreach for link building, my approach and strategies have evolved. In my early days, I was over-eager and optimistic, crafting drawn-out messages and patiently waiting for the links to come flooding in. To continue with the theme of classic television sitcoms, I was the Richie Cunningham [...]

Short version of this article: If you’ve been penalized for unnatural links by Google, either manually or under Penguin, you need to cut deep or you won’t recover. Now, the long version, with examples: Here’s a joke I learned in hebrew school, an unmentionable number of decades ago: Three guys are walking down the sidewalk. [...]

It’s hard to pinpoint when some of us fell out of love with Google. Maybe it was when they went from geeky Stanford students out to “not be evil” to the kinda creepy boyfriend who orders for us at restaurants because “that’s what we always have.” Like it or not, we were trapped. Over the [...]

Recently I did a survey of our staff here at Portent to see if anyone had any questions about SEO they wanted answered. I made the survey anonymous using Survey Monkey, because sometimes people feel more comfortable asking a question without their identity being revealed. In the spirit of sharing and transparency, we decided to [...]

I’m going to play mind-reader for a moment. Here’s what you think about SEO: You think search engine optimization is a closely-guarded secret bag of tricks You think SEO means beating Google at their own game You equate SEO with “buckets of cash” which would be pouring into your bank account if only you knew [...]

We’ve all been there. You’re in the marketing meeting and someone brings up SEO. I don’t know how they’re bringing it up, but they’ve done it one way or another. Maybe they used some of the phrases below. If they did, you need to know why you wish you hadn’t heard what they’ve just said. [...]