7 Things Most People Don’t Know About the Google Penguin Update

by Seth Czerepak June 25^th, 2012 2 Responses

Google Penguin rocked the SEO world, especially for WordPress site owners. Heck, a lot of us were still recovering from Panda – an update released a year before Penguin, then the mighty Penguin hit.
From the get-go, there was a lot of confusion about Penguin. This is partially due to how it was rolled out. Matt Cutts, head of Google Webspam team hinted that an “over-optimization update” may be in the pipeline. Although Penguin does target sites which are over-optimized, that’s not its primary purpose.

Seven things every SEO should know about Google Penguin update

Themes

WordPress, Penguin, Google and Matt Cutts’ take on WPMU.org

by James Farmer May 10^th, 2012 101 Responses

So, on the off chance you’ve been living under a rock for the past fortnight, let me introduce to you the Google Penguin update.

Essentially on the 24th April, the Goog rolled out an update named Penguin, with the intended function being to penalize sites that:

Engage in ‘keyword stuffing’
Participate in ‘link schemes’
And are generally of low quality

WPMU DEV

Go Viral With the Pay With a Like Plugin for WordPress

by Sarah Gooding May 8^th, 2012 17 Responses

Even in this digital age where everything seems to happen online or on a device, social connections are still the most powerful way to reach people and spread the word. That’s why we’re excited to introduce our new Pay With A Like plugin for WordPress. This is a plugin that will instantly boost social sharing on your site and get people talking about your content.

How does it work?

Opinion

The Rise of Negative SEO

by Joe Foley April 26^th, 2012 30 Responses

Ah, Google. … Where to start?

OK, let’s start here: There’s a lot of craziness happening in Google’s search results lately. Some of it seems to possibly be related to some algorithm changes that were made recently, but some of it seems more deeply rooted than recent changes.

It’s hard to say why certain things are happening, and it may sound preposterous, but I would guess that even Google itself doesn’t know why some of it is happening.

Plugins

Get Rating With Author hReview

by Tom Ewer April 2^nd, 2012 9 Responses

I do like a good cheese.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not about to go and create a cheese review site. After all, that’s already been done. But it could certainly be done better…

You may wondering if I have in fact finally gone mad. Well I have, but that’s rather besides the point. The point is that review sites are all the rage these days. Affiliate marketers love them because they are a great way of earning commission on products, and people like them because they want to know what is good and what is not.

Community

Making Google + Work For WordPress

by Austin March 26^th, 2012 2 Responses

This guest post is by Austin Gunter, the Brand Champion and Blogger over at WP Engine. WP Engine offers superfast managed WordPress hosting for huge popular sites, as well as small business owners who prioritize customer experience online.

Integrating Google+ with WordPress is becoming as essential as connecting WordPress to the Open Graph.

News

Alert! Google Announces a New SEO Over-Optimization Penalty

by Joe Foley March 19^th, 2012 6 Responses

At a recent SWSX session titled “Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!” Matt Cutts from Google’s Spam Team announced a new algorithm change coming in a matter of weeks/months designed to penalize “over optimized” sites.

A questioner asked if Google was doing anything about the situation where a Mom & Pop website is being outranked by less relevant but more extensively SEO’ed sites.

Here is Matt’s response:

Plugins, WPMU DEV

WordPress Social Commenting with Comments Plus Gets a Big Update

by Sarah Gooding March 13^th, 2012 4 Responses

Originally developed for WPMU.org, the very popular Comments Plus plugin allows your readers to choose to comment on your site via Facebook, Twitter, Google or WordPress. Our developers have been busy improving the plugin and we’ve just released a major update.

Comments Plus is now easier to use
We’ve built in a comprehensive contextual help menu with information and tutorials for getting your social commenting optimally configured.

New Features to Boost Your Site’s SEO
Comments Plus now includes two new Twitter-related features that will help you to get links back to your site, mentions on Twitter and more followers.

New: Mention Me add-on.

Plugins

Display Your Google Photos in a jQuery Slideshow

by Sarah Gooding February 26^th, 2012 Leave a comment

jQuery Googleslides is a cool little plugin that allows you to display Picasa and Google+ albums as a smooth, simple slideshow on your WordPress site.

The plugin comes with a very easy-to-use shortcode in which you specify the album ID and the user ID. You can also select individual images to display and specify various options such as maximum image size, caption and time.

Development

Easily Edit Your WordPress Theme With Google Chrome Developer Tools

by Tom Ewer February 18^th, 2012 3 Responses

If you are a theme “tweaker” or even a full-blown “frameworker”, Google Chrome has an extremely powerful tool that can make your life a whole lot easier. Chrome Developer Tools allows you to inspect and edit (in real time) any web site. Any edits you make will not of course be effected in reality, but the Developer Tools emulates the change in your browser window so that you can inspect the impact of your actions.