Search Engine Roundtable

SEO professional here, I can't see the article due to the wide-spread outage but have reviewed the comments here, comments in closed FB groups, and injected links on sites from this tool, as well as the tool's admission of such links on their site. This tool is most likely owned by a publisher attempting to steal SEO link value from user websites, it is also possible they are selling these links outright or via a PBN system. This type of link building was a common practice in the early 00's used by CMS theme developers and tool makers alike to gain link value. Google took a stand against "widget links", which is likely what these would be classified as, and as recent as 2016 even warned against their usage: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/09/a-reminder-about-widget-links

A year later Google's John Mueller, a trends analyst who often also acts as a liasion between Google and the webmaster community, stated that Google might automatically apply a 'nofollow' attribute to these types of links, effectively killing their ability to siphon SEO link value to improve themselves: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-nofollow-widget-links-23869.html

We have noted in our agency research for clients several similar usages over the past few years that appear to be giving websites positive value instead of either being ignored or penalized, including a WordPress plugin that injects links on government and collegiate websites. The way Google assigns value based on links…

1) Make sure you have a Google Webmaster Tools account and see if your site has any warnings and/or other problems identified by Google.

2) Think about reducing the number of links on the homepage, and increasing the amount of content. Maybe a greeting for new users letting them know what your about. Overall your homepage is covered in links and as a user at first glance nothing stands out and I'm likely to hit the backspace button.

3) Create a better site structure (clear tiers of content), its very hard to navigate your site.

4) Get rid of empty pages like this: http://www.cardboardconnection.com/2011-topps-tier-one-baseball.

5) Make sure you aren't copying other's content and they aren't scrapping yours see: http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cardboardconnection.com%2F2011-bowman-baseball

6) Save posts like these for Twitter and Facebook: http://www.cardboardconnection.com/hockey/amazing-patches-from-2011-itg-ultimate-memorabilia-hockey

7) A new design with larger font, different colour scheme and better plugins (commenting, ratings, etc) is in order.

8) Get rid of the Hot Auctions tab, link to eBay from the product page and not a secondary link farm looking tab.

9) Despite all these minor problems (and there's more) the quality of content on site is pretty poor, I guess if I was coming for the history of some cards maybe your site would be helpful but the content is written in a detached, impersonal tone that doesn't garner links or Google…

I hope this doesn't seem self serving, but seomoz.org has some of the highest quality information you can find on SEO. In addition to that, I'd suggest articles on http://searchengineland.com/ - they offer high quality content and news in the industry. Anything written by Vanessa Fox on SEL is usually great.

Guides like Excel for SEO shows some of the basic stuff we do:
http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/

For high level patent / research based SEO, nobody does it better than http://www.seobythesea.com/ (his URLs are ugly, but his content is great)

For specific beliefs on how the algo works, this is a good resource:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

SEOmoz has webinars and a PRO Q&A. Distilled.net also offers videos of our conferences.

As for books, the best I've read are Art of SEO, which is co-written by Rand, and SEO Secrets by Danny Dover (formerly of SEOmoz, now at AT&T) which talks more about the consulting side. The problem with books is that stuff can go out of date quickly. If you're reading a book that talks about PageRank sculpting, for example, it's dated.

Other great sites:

http://www.seobook.com/ - high level opinions and analysis of industry issues

http://www.seroundtable.com/ - recap of industry news and forums

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ - lots of tactical articles

Things I've written for…

Here's an article that summarizes the issue:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-deletes-queries-replace-36165.html

Personally, I dislike this approach by Google (from their response):

> "It’s no secret that Google Search looks beyond the specific words in a query to better understand their meaning, in order to show relevant organic results. This is a helpful process that we’ve written about many times."

This is patronizing, manipulative, and condescending - and 'organic'? They've also been boosting low-quality corporate media outlets to the top of their search rankings for some years now (Youtube search is far, far worse incidentally), as well - part of this 'daddy knows best' mentality, I'm sure.

Google does provide a 'verbatim' option under its tools heading but this is incompatible with time-restricted searching, although perhaps not on the advanced search page. Practically I find that to get what I want from Google (search results from a broad range of sources) you have to jump through many hoops and write complicated queries for no reason other than to avoid their enshittification defaults, and that's a time-consuming process.

It makes Kagi look more and more attractive, certainly - the time-saving alone might be worth the monthly fee.

Google is doing something similar now[0], both from a searchers and a site owners perspective.

Barry Schwartz regularly posts Google updates on his site[1], for over a decade no less. Since August 2023, those updates have been reaching the 500 mean comment range with many updates reaching 700-900 comment range. And this has been happening for 8 straight months!

People have been robbed of their livelihoods and many have caught strays, with the culprit being that Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn have tripled/doubled their traffic.

I just don’t understand why Google can’t create a Discussions panel and let people decide what they want to view as opposed to flat out cutting creators off at the knees.

No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”.

Now they are throwing AI in the mix also which is probably the dumbest thing they could have done, but I get why they are doing it.

I hope it clicks for Google soon that they are “fucked” and will never recover users they lost to OpenAI, etc.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067605

[1]: https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates

Seems like a mixed blessing for users. I just started too realize that I'm getting links like

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/06/germany-extend-nuclear-power-stations?client=safari

from Google. Sites load fast and webmasters seem to like it (1), but I think it's a terrible user experience if you want to share the link etc. Apparently, Google will address this someday (2).

Regarding the issue mentioned here, of course Google can’t give direct support to all webmasters. But in my experience, the Webmaster forum is a great place to get help as it is full of smart users (and Googlers). Then I would say that, as I used to work for Google.

(1) http://digiday.com/publishers/publishers-excited-google-amp-traffic-wonder-revenue-will-follow/

(2) https://www.seroundtable.com/google-disable-amp-feedback-22173.html

(3) https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters