SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

New Google Webmaster Tool, “Manual actions”

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New Google Webmaster Tool, "Manual actions" Wordpress SEO & AI Search (GEO) ExpertAnother tool within the Google Websmater Tools suite, “manual actions” shows you if you’ve been penalised by Google for anything, and gives you the opportunity to request a review after you’ve fixed it.

Nice.

Basically, if you violate Google’s webmaster guidelines, such as acquiring shoddy paid links pointing to your site, publishing spammy content, using hidden text, or engaging in other SEO sins of the sort, your site may be flagged by Google’s algorithms, triggering a manual action.

via Google rolls out manual action notification & response tool.

How is SEO like plumbing?

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Jokes about the Internet being a series of tubes aside, I do draw an analogy between plumbing and search engine optimisation.

I am often asked if I can guarantee someone a place on the first page of Google, or the number one spot. Naturally I can’t, because precisely what Google (or Bing or Yahoo!) are going to do is outside my control.

What I can do is make sure your website is up to date with current SEO best practice. Everything will be in place to optimise your site for their indexing.

This is where the analogy comes in. A plumber can make sure your house is 100% ready for water to flow to all the places it needs to. But they should never guarantee that the local water board will never have a supply problem at their end.

If anyone ever guarantees you a position on a search engine ranking, please keep them away from your digital stop cock.

Share your feedback

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Share the feedback you get from your customers, it’s a great way of demonstrating the level of service potential clients can expect from you.

I got less than 5-stars, once. Just once. And that was only because my customer clicked on 4 by mistake. They were very apologetic!

https://petermahoney.net/feedback

Permanently moving website to a new domain

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You really want to add this to your .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 / http://your-new-domain

Let’s break that down.

  • “Redirect” is pretty obvious, it tells the web server to redirect the request.
  • “301” is a special code that tells any search engines that come by that this change is permanent, and they should update their results to reflect the new URL. (Using “302” instead would set it as a temporary move.)
  • “/” just means the entire site, from the very top directory has been moved.
  • “http://your-new-domain” or indeed, whatever your new URL is, is the new domain that all requests should be sent to. Note the final “/” on the end.

Easy peasy! Now all bookmarks, and search engine results will still be valid and get people to your new address, with one short piece of code.

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