Recent content by Marie Haynes

Hi Daniel, Thin content penalties are my least favorite because they are hard to recover from. I agree with Barry that all manual actions can be removed. However, from my experience it can be very difficult to recover traffic that's lost after a thin content penalty. Please know I'm speaking...

My understanding is that if a widget is embedded on your site, it's perfectly fine to have it there, but Google won't show the rich results (i.e. review stars) in the SERPS when displaying your site. What I'm still unclear on though is product markup. If a company sells its own products...

Good discussion. It's been a while since I've seen Google give a manual action for doorway pages. You could report them, but realistically, Google likely wants to rely on their algorithms for determining whether these pages are actually helpful for people. I had a quick look and I do see they...

Hey everyone! As some of you may know, our company, MHC is one of the competitors in the Wix SEO competition. While we don't believe Wix is perfect by any means, we do think that there are many businesses that successfully make use of a Wix site. We're going to write an article to feature some...

Interesting! I am betting that this is similar to manual actions for other things like unnatural links or pure spam. If you get a pure spam penalty because you bought a domain name that was previously used for spam, and then you get the penalty lifted, your site should have no problem ranking...

I thought this was an interesting discussion. Ben says he's had a few cases where there was a GMB suspension and then, after being reinstated, rankings took a while to return to normal levels. Joy and Jason chimed in saying this has not been their experience. I'm wondering whether in Ben's...

Out of the many clients that came to us with big drops with Medic (Aug 1) or Sep 27, most are seeing some type of improvement. Some of those sites have made a full recovery, while some have made just partial recoveries. These sites span many niches. While many of these sites were medical or...

Sorry for the delay...was traveling last week. Although I can't see the content on these pages, I likely wouldn't worry about links like this. When we're doing link audits, almost every site collects spammy cruft links like this. Although these are the types of links that a tool will flag for...

I don't know the exact answer to this question, but I can tell you that it is usually easy for us to determine on manual review whether there are a lot of self made links. I am positive that Google's engineers can algorithmically determine this as well. On a manual review, here are the types of...

Thanks for the kind words Craig. We only contact site owners when we're trying to remove a manual action. John Mueller has said several times in the past that when Google is looking at links algorithmically, disavowed links are just ignored, and there would be no added benefit to actually get...

Hi Joshua, thanks for chiming in! They most definitely do have ways to determine whether content is paid or not. I started my career as an SEO in removing manual penalties. Google would often send 2-3 example links along with the penalty and they were quite good at finding paid links. When...

Thanks Joy! At the risk of sounding super Canadian, I apologize for how long it took me to write that article. I'm happy to give my thoughts if anyone has questions about the current state of the disavow tool and whether it helps to use it.

Here are the notes including the exact transcript on what John said about this last week: January 22, 2019 - Google Help Hangout Notes - Marie Haynes Consulting

Agreed! I think that for a single location business, I'd put location schema on the homepage, about page and contact page. For multiple locations, it makes sense to have it on the location pages as well.

I was at a help hangout with John Mueller last week and this topic came up. The question asked of John was, "Should corporate schema be added to just the home page, contact page, or all pages?" The answer was basically that it doesn't matter. John, and also Martin Splitt from Google both said...