Google Penalizes JCPenney and Overstock.com Websites

Everyone in the world of SEO at this juncture is aware of the recent events involving JCPenney and Overstock.com and the penalties each company's website received from Google as a result of their actions. Essentially, Google determined that JCPenney and Overstock were using link-building tactics that violated their webmaster guidelines, thus dropping their rankings for queries that they had maintained listings on the first page of the organic search results for long periods of time.

Meta Description Tags: Are They Important?

As search engines continue to update and improve their algorithms, SEOs must continuously reassess what aspects of optimization remain important. The use of meta description tags, at one point in time, was an essential piece of the puzzle if a website was going to rank high for relevant search queries. And while I would suggest that they remain an important piece of that same puzzle, the impact that a well written meta description may have on rankings is not as significant as it once was.

Title Tag Optimization and Character Length

Title tags have always played a vital role in search engine optimization. It is widely agreed that optimized title tags give websites a greater chance at being ranked high on any search engine. In the past, webmasters abused this knowledge by stuffing their primary keywords in the title tag of each page, manipulating the search engines and gaining short term value from a rankings perspective. However, search engine algorithms, as we all know, have become more complex over the years and no longer value title tags that only display keywords. And while it is important to maintain keyword rich title tags across your entire site, it is also equally important to make sure that your title tags accurately describe the nature of the page.

Google's Search Engine Results Sting of 2011

Bing, owned by Microsoft, has recently come under fire after Google released allegations on the 1st of February that a sting operation conducted towards the end of 2010 revealed similar search results between the two engines. Google stated that they are convinced Bing has been copying certain search engine result listings.

The suspicions grew in May 2010 when Google noticed that Bing, without correcting the misspellings, was showing identical search results to those of Google for misspelled search queries. Over the next several months, Google claims that more similarities began to surface within the top 10 listings of the first page. Additionally, Google claims that the percentage of identical listings for the number one position increased also.