One of the more interesting aspects of Google+ redesign in my opinion is the new way of #hashtag handling. This short post goes over a few basic observations I’ve made so far.

Triggering

What I find interesting is that certain keywords trigger the tag, while others do not.

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Google’s webspam team consists of people who look at spammy links on a daily basis and can recognise bad links quickly. These people also help webmasters recover from penalties by guiding them through the reconsideration process. Part of the process often includes examples of remaining bad links and this is what we’re interested in.

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It started in Australia as many webmasters and SEOs noticed a Venice-like update and now it looks like we’re looking at a global algorithm change.

Mozcast shows a very turbulent 5th of May.

Jim Stewart was one of the first Australian SEOs to spot the change saying “ They’ve replaced places for organic…”.

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Earlier this year I wrote about the problem of diminishing keyword data and offered a number of solutions to overcome this problem. Today I will highlight one specific method of keyword and position mining – server log files.

These days there is no such thing as an absolute ranking position.

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Enhance your Google+ stream by following the Google+ pages that you find interesting:

• When you visit a site connected to a Google+ page, a slider will appear on the side of the browser window. Hover over the slider to expand it and easily add the page to your circles.

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I have real-time analytics on my wall in the office and every now and then I bump into an odd case of search traffic. This time I spotted a very unusual keyword:

cache:http://dejanseo.com.au/anchor-text-proximity-experiment/

It’s impossible to search Google for the above as a regular query (unless you use quotes) and users are taken to Google’s cache of the page and not your own site.

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I have so far written around 200,000 words of content. Some of my posts are long and detailed, others can be amazingly short. I experimented with various formats over the years but was unable to find the exact pattern of an ideal post size for my own blog.

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Background

I always felt that surrounding text plays a semantic role in Google’s search algorithm, but was never able to ascertain the degree of its influence or whether it has any impact at all. This experiment was designed to test impact of link context on a small scale with a unique search term.

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Topic Controversy

After much debate in the webmaster community regarding the effectiveness of the link disavow tool on an algorithmic level, Danny Sullivan myth-busted the whole thing¹ thanks to his contacts at Google. Another source² adds further confusion to the case, however, as it perfectly aligns with webmaster observations (no documented case of recovery through link disavow tool upload only) and statements made by some Googlers (and ex-Googlers³ ) regarding the link disavow tool.

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This week we’re introducing a new theme to our weekly hangouts on air. We will pick a few celebrity websites and perform a quick SEO audit on each.

This week we’re focusing on the music industry:

http://www.ladygaga.com/
http://www.metallica.com/
http://www.theprodigy.com/
http://www.justinbiebermusic.com/
http://www.britneyspears.com/

How to join?…