Masha Maksimava

As Google's ranking algorithm evolves, we're hearing more and more about site quality. But what factors does Google use to determine quality exactly? The search engine's documentation offers invaluable insight, but that's hundreds of pages of reading... In today's guide, we've put all that information into comprehensible form, and sprinkled it with some actionable how-tos and SEO tips. Jump in to learn how Google determines websites' quality, and what you can do to improve yours for better rankings.

Google's results can be misleading, biased, or just wrong — and when we spot the obvious blunders, we tend to laugh them off. "That's alright, computers make mistakes". But what about the information that we don't know is incorrect or incomplete? And what about deliberate wrongness? Let's look into Google's search quality crisis, the possible reasons behind it, and the implications it has for how we form opinions about the world.

Paid link building isn't something a lot of SEOs are willing to openly talk about — not if they do it, anyway. Perhaps that's what makes it a tactic that's mysteriously attractive and so freakin' dangerous at the same time. For this post, I spoke to 10 professional SEOs, asking them for their honest (and anonymous) opinion on paid link building.

Should you be worried about negative SEO? Learn about the most common threats and ways to stay safe.

Google's desktop search market share (at least in the US) is almost two thirds, so it's only fair Google has become the main focus for SEOs. Or is it? Should we really be writing off 33% of all organic traffic (especially given that they belong to a single search engine)? In today's post, I've put together 5 big fat reasons why no, we shouldn't, along with Bing's major ranking factors to optimize for.

As Google's search results grow increasingly personalized, accurate rank tracking is becoming a challenge. The concept of accuracy itself has become somewhat vague: if there are as many SERP variations as there are locations, which one should you consider "accurate"? In this post, I'll look at the different ways Google personalizes search results, their impact on SEO, and tips to ensure that personalization doesn't falsify your ranking data.

Wow, it's almost New Year's! We hope 2016 was a fun and fulfilling year for you. It definitely was for the SEO PowerSuite team - and for that, we'd like to thank you. Because of a community of users like you, your support and feedback, 2016 was our busiest and most rewarding year yet. To celebrate, we put together an SEO PowerSuite year in review in a... sweater!

I'm sure you know this feeling: you're staring at Google's search results with your competitors ranking at the very top, repeatedly asking yourself this one question: "How on earth did they do it?" To help you find the answer, I've put together a detailed case study of 4 big real-life SEO wins - the success stories of four very different businesses and their way to top Google rankings.

This year's SMX West in San Jose was jam-packed with precious insights into the very near future of SEO. As Googlers shared some surprising facts and trends, and SEO experts reported on the impressive results of the studies and experiments they'd run, the SEO PowerSuite team was writing down carefully to bring you this recap of the conference in 6 most important takeaways from the speakers' presentations.