You know who just won't stop bothering Webmasters? Google. Those guys are always updating things and sending out alerts. In fact, the sultans of search send out hundreds of thousands of messages to Webmasters every single month. Until recently, we weren't sure how these messages related to Business SEO, but Matt Cutts just released a new video dropping some knowledge on us. 

In the video, Matt answers a Webmaster-submitted question about the content of all those messages that are…

Google's newest patent will prove to be both beneficial and terrifying to users, which is just about par for the course for the search engine juggernaut. It involves tracking you wherever you go and then collating and analyzing that data for personal identification trends. Creepy? For sure. Useful for …

Google has stuck with its story that the various components of Google+ and the +1 button don’t have an effect on search rankings. They have to. Once they admit that it does (as countless studies and tests have indicated), the flood of spam and blackhat SEO techniques will grow larger than it already has. This is important to…

We’ve covered a lot of the bigger issues surrounding social media marketing and Business SEO, but it’s not always the bigger things that hurt you the most. Sometimes, it’s the simple stuff that comes back to bite you. Here are three things you can fix in…

Recent Google updates have made duplicate content a bigger problem than ever before. Sites that were doing well were suddenly struck down as their content was basically the same page recycled over and over. With all the fear around duplicate content, where do quotes fit in? I mean, a quote is inherently duplicate content, but quoting has value. Any …

Using Google+ as a Lit

Facebook has the market cornered on true social networking. Twitter is the news source. YouTube owns videos. Google+, the network that's growing huge but still having challenges communicating its identity, has one major advantage over all of the other social networks: size of posts.



It's possible to format and…

Every few months, marketers around the blogosphere start the next batch of chants that search engine optimization is dying or dead. It's like clockwork; Google makes a change, their pages rank poorly, they declare that the party's over. I think I've written about the topic at least once a year since 2008.

The chants are starting…

For the past several years, content has been a component of search engine and social media marketing that fell far below the tricks and techniques that helped achieve business goals. It was possible to be successful with limited or low-quality content. In…

I vividly remember a conversation I had with Wikimotive's Tim Martell back in 2008. Even four and a half years later, the conversation has remained in my mind. We were discussing the rise of social media. We both agreed that Facebook would be the big thing, but…

Everyone knows word of mouth has gone the digital route. So it's important to have the publics' opinion there for everyone to see. Utilizing every other social media vehicle not only directly effects customers responses to spend money at your dealership, but studies have found not participating could lead them to…

Have you heard the theory that no one is more than six degrees of separation away from Kevin Bacon? Well, itʼs a pretty decent party game (if youʼre at a party with no booze or music) and itʼs been banging around the Internet in one form or another for a decade now. So why are we bothering to talk about it? Well, Google has yet another notch to scratch into its bedpost…

Recently, I called out a couple of vendors for selling a sub par product. I thought about it and decided that if my own services can’t stand up to that level of scrutiny, I have no business telling anyone else what they should do about their service. So over the weekend,…

Everyone has an opinion about how to use Google+ and posting reviews.  We see the extreme from hoping your customers post a good review to allowing the “real experts to post your reviews”.

Those of you, who finish reading this blog, will receive information many companies don’t want to tell you or just don’t know how to do.  Furthermore, your sales both repeat and referrals will increase, your branding will…

The team at PCG Consulting, Inc. has always been one to share relevant information regarding issues that affect dealerships. We have been writing and teaching about the importance of your online reputation and ways to not only grow your presence but to market it as well over the past few years.

Due to the many changes with…

It seems as though Google continues to be more transparent than in the past, which is great for webmasters. At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco last week, I had the chance to take part in a Q&A with the famous Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team.  One of the attendees asked Matt about the Penguin update and what it meant going forward.  I’m paraphrasing Matt here, but he said that webmasters should expect Penguin updates to continue and to be "jarring" for a…

So you've created your dealership's Google+ Brand Page in preparation for the move from Google Places to Google Plus Local...but now what?  Here are some tips for optimizing your dealership's Google+ page:

Keep SEO in Mind: When putting information into the "About Us" tab, use relevant keywords. Also use these terms when adding content to your page to help search engines (especially Google) understand what your page is about.  Use "Recommended Links" to send…

Google recently released guidelines for their Google+ Local Pages, outlining what you can and can’t do with the main picture on your Local page. It is important to stay on top of these announcements from Google, make sure you read over these guidelines to make sure you aren’t hurting your local page, it could have big implications on your…

Websites that have been established for a while always have the advantage over a new website when it comes to ranking with Google. Google tends to trust websites that have been around longer, and these websites have had more time to build good back links, which can make them difficult to compete with. Fortunately there are ways to compete with good…

It's not often that Google announces when they are going to make changes to their algorithm in advance, but they did just that on Tuesday.

The latest update under the Panda name went into effect Tuesday night, Panda 3.9.  Panda was originally released in February 2011 as a way to remove low-quality content from Google's search results.

Google…

Google’s online ventures are usually anything but under the radar. Yet recently, in what may be a game-changing play, the search engine giant quietly entered the third-party lead provider business for car dealerships.

The beta version of Google Comparison Ads for Autos (which is unofficially being referred to as “Google Cars” within the industry) was launched to very little fanfare a few weeks ago in the San…