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Two articles were published this week that spoke of the frustration most of us who have worked in SEO have felt over the dominance of large brands for many search results. I’d like to share why I think Google has this problem, and why I think we will soon be seeing a change where more […]

Have you wondered how Google is able to detect and stop artificial link building schemes designed to unfairly manipulate search rankings? SpamBrain, one of Google's artificial intelligence systems, allows them to neutralize the impact of manufactured links. SpamBrain makes it so that Google can neutralize unnatural links rather than penalize for them. It's not perfect, […]

MHC is closing down our disavow blacklist tool. Learn why and more about toxic links in the article.

This article is a summary of everything I could find that was a statement from Google in regards to negative SEO.  Do they admit that it can happen?  Is it a common occurrence.  In a few places in this article I have given my opinion or commentary, but the majority of the article is quoted […]

Updated: November 23, 2022 This article was originally written in 2014. I wrote it because there was a lot of confusion in regards to Google's stance on guest posting for links. I did not anticipate that EIGHT YEARS later, we would still be having the same discussion. Is guest posting for links a good idea? […]

Updated July 4, 2019 This article was originally published in 2014. It is still applicable at the time of editing in 2019.  Important: In May of 2019, we received a number of requests for help removing unnatural links penalties from sites that had overused footer links. Several of these were sites that made use of links […]

July 6, 2013 I’m pretty sure you’re a smart SEO.  You’re not one of those SEOs who gets links from low quality sources like comment spam, low quality directories and fake forum profiles, right?  You are likely able to get great links by writing good, authoritative articles and getting them published on high quality sites. […]

Recently, another batch of unnatural links warnings was sent out to webmasters via Google Webmaster Tools.  The warnings are the exact same as the ones that were released from July 2011 to March 2012, and say the following: