It’s hard to explain the stress of that time, but as I write this account, I can feel it all over again. I knew that what I had found would revolutionize SEO, but to profit from it, I...

In our last episode, John Heard told me to go read the original Google paper. I did. Over and over. And “the secret” (to ranking, not the movie!) was totally plain and obvious, well, at least to me. These guys...

You almost never know how important something is while's it happening.  This was one of the biggest moments of my life, but I wouldn't know that until much later. It had been a couple weeks since I sent review copies...

A thing I was calling OptiText.  Never heard of it?  Not surprising: I never released it because of this weird thing called "ethics". During late 2000 and all of 2001 I was getting serious about growing organic traffic to some...

On May 22, 2002, at 2PM Pacific time, Michael Campbell (website no longer active) announced OptiLink to his newsletter subscribers.  This is the first of ground-breaking tools that "put me on the map" in SEO. I know it seems hard...

My son played Hockey as a kid and later went on to ref it for a time.  It's a great game - if potentially a bit violent.  You're wondering what this has to do with Google, right?  Stay with...

It used to be that every link was a good link so "back in the day" , pretty much any SEO was better than no SEO.  This meant that "taking action" was the primary factor driving success.  Even just...

At The SEO Braintrust, we both advise students and provide service to clients on link penalty cleanup.  Often, these folks come to us having already done one, two, three or (gasp) more reconsideration requests - denied each time of...

Buying an existing web business is much the same as refurbishing a fixer-upper house. If you have the skills, money, and time, flipping real estate is a good business in pretty much any economy. The same can...

Well, mostly it is because of "scale", which this infographic doesn't really do justice to, but it does show some really good measures of the scope of the problem.Why is Search So Complex?