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Friday, July 07, 2017

How Scammers Are Using Social Engineering To Target The Jewelry Industry

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How Scammers Are Using Social Engineering To Target The Jewelry Industry daily-golden-nugget-1564-71
On June 23, 2017, the Jewelers' Security Alliance issued a special alert outlining a widespread scam that's been recently targeted at the jewelry industry. In the security alert, which you can read here, the JSA explains that scammers are profiling retailers and manufacturers in order to pull off the reported telephone scams.

According to the JSA...
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AT: 07/07/2017 07:49:36 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, May 05, 2017

The Marriage of Websites and Social Media

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The Marriage of Websites and Social Media daily-golden-nugget-1555-43
Your website is the cornerstone of all your online marketing; it's what people find when they search for a local business type or a specific product by name or by model number. People go to Google with an instigated need for an immediate purchase, when they need a specific service, or when they need to start research on a longer term decision making process. Those with immediate needs will take action based on what they see on your website or your social accounts. Those looking for an immediate purchase will look for an onlin...
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AT: 05/05/2017 11:12:51 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, March 17, 2017

Photos Now Appear In Google Local Pack Results

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Photos Now Appear In Google Local Pack Results daily-golden-nugget-1548-30
Google made a significant change in the search results page layout over the last 7 days that removes the powerful advantage that they'd bestowed upon local businesses for about 10 years. Today, I'll dive into the details of those changes.

A Little Background


Google created their original Local Business database in the early 2000s and has morphed it through many permutations with names like Places, Maps, and Local. Today, they call it "Google My Business" or just GMB for short. Having your business...
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AT: 03/17/2017 11:43:44 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, March 03, 2017

Bloated Websites vs. Simple Websites

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Bloated Websites vs. Simple Websites  daily-golden-nugget-1546-82
I'm taking a different approach in this week's website review. Normally, I look for poorly ranked websites and try to find reasons why they are not ranking well. When I started my search this week, I found a bunch of mediocre websites that were outranked by Yelp and YellowPages. All of the websites needed improvement. Oddly enough, the site I thought needed the most improvement, was outranking all of the others.

Today, I'll explore why that might be happening. First, I searched for "jewelers Healdsburg CA" and saw these resul...
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AT: 03/03/2017 01:01:57 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, February 24, 2017

TamRon Jewelry Design Technical Website Review

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TamRon Jewelry Design Technical Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1545-20
For this week's website review, I went searching for "jewelers spokane wa" and had some trouble deciding on which site to review. There are several jewelers in Spokane to choose from with a wide range of websites from very old looking to very modern. The goal of this website review is to give ideas of how to improve a site and increase its ranking or improve its customer usability.

Pounder's Jewelry was the first website I found that could use improvement. The website address was VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 02/24/2017 12:29:10 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 06, 2017

SERP Review for Sandy Springs, GA

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SERP Review for Sandy Springs, GA  daily-golden-nugget-1538-32
Time and time again, jewelers tell me they want to come up first in Google search for phrases like "engagement rings" or anything related to bridal jewelry. Those are tough keyword phrases to compete for since large ecommerce jewelry website spend a lot of time, money, and optimization efforts to maintain top ranking. Independent jewelers have a better chance competing in their local markets using the popular phrases that people search for.

Popular local phrases include the words jeweler, jewelry, or jewelry store, followed by either ...
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AT: 01/06/2017 08:20:53 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, September 30, 2016

How Jewelers in Jurupa Valley, CA Compete

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How Jewelers in Jurupa Valley, CA Compete daily-golden-nugget-1524-48
My website reviews every week usually start with the random selection of a town, but this week, I didn't find any jewelers when I selected Jurupa Valley, California. If there are jewelers in Jurupa Valley, then they probably don't have a website or a large enough digital footprint for Google to find them.

With the lack of any real local results, Google returned store listings from surrounding towns and a bunch of directory sites, like Yelp. Here's what Google gave me:

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AT: 09/30/2016 11:46:58 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, August 05, 2016

Pugh's Diamond Jewelers #FridayFlopFix Website Review

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Pughs Diamond Jewelers FridayFlopFix Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1516-77
It's time for the weekly case study of a website that's pretty old and in desperate need of a makeover. I call these weekly posts my Friday Flop Fix review. During these reviews, I look for websites that are implementing search engine optimization strategies poorly, or have poor website designs and I suggest ways to make them better.

This week, I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers Zanesville, OH" and was shown these results:

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AT: 08/05/2016 09:32:04 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, July 22, 2016

Cairo GA SERP Review

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Cairo GA SERP Review daily-golden-nugget-1514-80
Welcome to a somewhat unusual Friday review. Every Friday, I usually look for a website that's a bit of a fixer-upper and I suggest how to make it better. This week, as usual, I opened my Google Chrome browser in incognito mode and ran a search for "jewelry stores in Cairo GA."

There are certain search phrases that trigger specific search results formats, and normally when you search for a "jewelers in _____" or "jewelry stores in ____" Google activates the local results version of the SERP, but today it didn't.

Instead, this is what I saw:

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AT: 07/22/2016 12:28:14 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, May 06, 2016

Orca Jewels #FridayFlopFix Website Review

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Orca Jewels FridayFlopFix Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1503-99
Every week, I review the website of a randomly chosen retail jeweler. This week, I searched for "jewelers Ketchikan, AK" to find a review candidate. This type of search always triggers Google local results format, which includes the top three business listings for that area. Google understands that people are usually looking for local businesses whenever a keyword is included along with a town name in a search query. Google then shows results formatted like this:

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AT: 05/06/2016 02:15:56 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, March 18, 2016

HUR Jewelers #FridayFlopFix Website Review

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HUR Jewelers FridayFlopFix Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1475-45
This is the #FridayFlopFix website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every week, I scrutinize the website of a random retail jeweler and make recommendations for how to improve the site. I seek out bad websites for these unsolicited reviews so you, the reader, can learn how to identify and improve upon your own websites.

I'm changing up my approach this week. Normally I choose a review candidate from the first few that appear in the Google search results; this week I'm digging into the second page of the searc...
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AT: 03/18/2016 12:50:11 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, March 17, 2016

Keywords Don't Belong In Your Meta Descriptions #TBT

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Keywords Dont Belong In Your Meta Descriptions TBT  daily-golden-nugget-1474-30
In today's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to January 2012 to my topic of avoiding keyword stuffing in meta descriptions.

What Are They?


The meta descriptions are the approximately 150 character descriptions you see in the search engine results pages. What you put in the meta descriptions does not count towards your search engine optimization; rather, it's there simply to exp...
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AT: 03/17/2016 11:27:11 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Organic Mobile Search Engine Results from December 2015

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Organic Mobile Search Engine Results from December 2015 daily-golden-nugget-1448-57
A few weeks ago, I published a Nugget showing the recent trends in search engine organic usage. I've been tracking those statistics since 2010, and now I have enough information to compare mobile organic visits to desktop organic visits.

In that previous Nugget, I showed that Google cu...
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AT: 02/10/2016 01:09:17 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, January 21, 2016

Organic Search Engine Results from 2015 #TBT

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Organic Search Engine Results from 2015 TBT daily-golden-nugget-1434-68
Welcome to #ThrowbackThursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. As I looked back over my recent data, I realized I haven't analyzed the top performing search engines for quite a long time. The last time I reported the top search engines results was back in May 2014.

I've collected a lot of data since then, and now I can even report on the differences between desktop and mobile search engine usage.

Global...
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AT: 01/21/2016 09:56:21 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, November 06, 2015

Baxter's Fine Jewelry Website Review

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Baxters Fine Jewelry Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1380-16
Hello and welcome to the Friday Flop Fix, or #FridayFlopFix. Every Friday I randomly choose and review a retail jeweler's website. Normally I just choose the first jeweler that appears in the SERP listing for whatever town I look at; sometimes I find good sites, and sometimes I find bad sites. I'm going to change it up and intentionally look for sites that have problems, the website flops as it were, and offer ideas to fix them.

My search this week to me to Warwick, RI, specifically the Google search for "j...
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AT: 11/06/2015 01:04:59 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, November 04, 2015

What is Google RankBrain and How Does it Affect Search?

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What is Google RankBrain and How Does it Affect Search? daily-golden-nugget-1378-73
Google has been working on artificial intelligence (AI) for several years. When I first reported Google attempts at AI back in February 2012, it was still a far flung dream. Since then Google has achieved an early stage machine learning artificial intelligence that has improved search results, and created higher than expected profits for the company this year.

N...
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AT: 11/04/2015 12:09:13 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, August 03, 2015

Blocked Resources: Practical SEO Guide

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Blocked Resources: Practical SEO Guide daily-golden-nugget-1311-8
In today's Practical SEO Guide, I will tell you about website "Blocked Resources," how to view this report in Google Search Console, and how Google alerts you when they find a blocked resource.

First, let me explain that a Blocked Resource is a page, script, or some file that Google cannot read because you are telling them not to read it; yet, that same page, script, or file is used on the public site.

There's a difference between your public site and your backend area that you use to manage your sit...
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AT: 08/03/2015 07:07:48 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, July 06, 2015

Product Page Titles: Practical SEO Guide

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Product Page Titles: Practical SEO Guide daily-golden-nugget-1291-53
As I quickly approach my 1300th Daily Golden Nugget, I find myself pondering my existence. What else could I possibly write about that I haven't already?

Truthfully, a lot, but I'm also realizing that's I've never created a series of simple examples or how-to's for typical search engine optimization tasks. So, starting today, I'm going to work through several days (however many it might take) to show you how to tie together simple SEO procedures.

I'll tie together information from free tool...
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AT: 07/06/2015 12:49:58 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, June 25, 2015

#TBT Try Changing Your Name To Avoid Failure

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TBT Try Changing Your Name To Avoid Failure daily-golden-nugget-1284-57
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople


Names may change, but things stay the same. What's in a name, really?

In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to November 18, 2010 and m discussion of when Google first announced their "Google Places" service.

Well, honestly, there's not much to say about Go...
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AT: 06/25/2015 12:14:06 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, June 12, 2015

J&M Jewelry Mobile Website Review

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J&M Jewelry Mobile Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1275-33
Welcome to the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal for today is to find and perform a usability review of a random jewelry store mobile website. I'm performing the review on, and taking screen shots with, my iPhone 6.

The first review for today is to see if a google.com search through the Safari web browser would yield the same results as a search using the Google search app on the iPhone. Here's a side by side comparison of the two methods:

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AT: 06/12/2015 07:22:44 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, June 05, 2015

The Jewelers of Las Vegas Website Re-review

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The Jewelers of Las Vegas Website Re-review daily-golden-nugget-1270-61
In honor of the big jewelry shows in Las Vegas that came to a close on Monday this week, I'm searching around Las Vegas again for this week's website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget.

I was still in New Jersey when I wrote last week's review of another Las Vegas jeweler, but this time I'm sitting in my hotel room at The Excalibur writing this weeks.

Last week, I simply searched for...
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AT: 06/05/2015 12:55:26 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, April 01, 2015

Image Quality As a Factor in Customer Satisfaction and Ranking

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Image Quality As a Factor in Customer Satisfaction and Ranking daily-golden-nugget-1223-39
Apparently Google is turning a few more heads with its recent search engine ranking algorithm changes again. I'm not talking about Mobilegeddon, which will happen on April 21, 2015, but their latest announcement about e-commerce product images.

Google has put a lot of effort into improving how it understands images and the types of images that people would like to se...
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AT: 04/01/2015 09:49:16 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, March 26, 2015

Google and Bing Web Page Cached Dates

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Google and Bing Web Page Cached Dates daily-golden-nugget-1219-38
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to Daily Golden Nugget number 218 from March 25, 2011. Back then, Google was generating SERP instant preview images for websites, a feature that was then dropped in April 2013, but it I want to cover a different topic from that Nugget that I never wrote about in detail...

Google Cache and Bing Cache.

Both Google and Bing record the last ...
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AT: 03/26/2015 11:25:27 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The Use of Ellipses ... in Meta Descriptions

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The Use of Ellipses ... in Meta Descriptions daily-golden-nugget-1212-33
The ellipses are a set of three periods that has different functions depending on how that punctuation is used.

In these Daily Golden Nuggets, I often use this symbol to represent a long pause or a trailing off thought. In text messages, I use them to represent long pauses, or sometimes I even send them alone in a single text message to illustrate a perplexed reaction when I don't know what to say. A stunned silence, perhaps.

The ellipses has turned into one of the most commonly u...
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AT: 03/17/2015 07:24:42 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Understanding The Different Types Of Search Intent

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Understanding The Different Types Of Search Intent daily-golden-nugget-1188-87
Evolution, it's nature's way of subtly changing things so the next generation will continue to survive and thrive. But it's not just nature that changes things for the better, it's how we all live, learn, and change things around us for the better.

The engineers over at Google are constantly trying to improve and evolve their search engine algorithm to better understand what information is being published online and how that information will be used. Sometimes the information we...
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AT: 02/11/2015 09:18:27 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, January 22, 2015

How Can I Get Number 1 Ranking on Google?

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How Can I Get Number 1 Ranking on Google? daily-golden-nugget-1174-76
It astounds me that people still offer first place Google ranking service. Every day I still receive at least one spam email which offers me to get first place ranking on Google if I hire them to improve the SEO of any of the domain names I manage.

I started writing these Daily Golden Nuggets more than four years ago and even before then, Google posted warnings saying how first place ranking could not be achieved by simply hiring someone. Their warning is VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 01/22/2015 01:09:10 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, January 07, 2015

November and December 2014 Web Keyword Data for Retail Jewelers

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November and December 2014 Web Keyword Data for Retail Jewelers daily-golden-nugget-1163-36
Throughout 2014, Google made several advancements in their search engine and gave us some new reports in Google Webmaster Tools to see the results of those advancements.

Specifically, from within Webmaster Tools you can easily see when your website appeared in web search results, images search results, and mobile search results. During the first quarter of 2014, I started noticing retail jewelry websites appearing in image results more than ever before, and the Webmaster Tools ...
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AT: 01/07/2015 12:27:16 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, November 24, 2014

More People Are Switching To Smartphones and Crave Up To Date Information

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More People Are Switching To Smartphones and Crave Up To Date Information daily-golden-nugget-1131-21
I'm often asked how I keep up with all the internet changes because people feel overwhelmed. It really is true; the technology companies that control key factors of the internet make some type of change every day. Even though the internet is made up of millions of computers and billions of wires, it's the search engines and social networks that really control how we use it daily. In reality, the search engines and social networks are just software programs.
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AT: 11/24/2014 01:48:55 PM   0 COMMENTS
Sunday, November 24, 2013

SEO Concerns When Using the Word Inch or the Quote Character

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SEO Concerns When Using the Word Inch or the Quote Character 6644-daily-golden-nugget-871A few weeks ago one of my customers asked me a very intriguing question that I wanted to share as a Daily Nugget.

While trying to work out the proper SEO for his website he asked:

Is (8") or (8 inch) the proper naming scheme for the title of a product?


He was worried about uniformity and what the most popular keyword would be, but there's a deeper issue at play here...

In a case like that, it has more to do wi...
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AT: 11/24/2013 09:48:36 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, April 25, 2013

Understanding What Causes the Navigational Search Type

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Understanding What Causes the Navigational Search Type 9439-daily-golden-nugget-719When reviewing the list of organic keywords that bring visitors to your website, retail jewelers often ask me why their store's name appears at the top of the list. Some jewelers wonder if it's a competitor searching their name, and others wonder why there are so many variations of their store name being searched for. This Daily Golden Nugget will explain all this to you.

Let's consider the customers that shop in your jewelry store. How often do new customers come into your store compare...
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AT: 04/25/2013 01:31:03 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, December 31, 2012

Jewelry Website Predictions for 2013

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Jewelry Website Predictions for 2013 925-daily-golden-nugget-636It's the end of one year and the beginning of another, and that means it's time for predictions for next year.

I have 4 predictions for retail jewelry stores for the 2013 year. Here they are...

Prediction #1.
The problem of easy tracking of users from point of origin online to an in-store sale will NOT YET be solved. This is one of the largest problems that retail jewelers face; in fact all businesses that use online marketing to increase the business of their brick and mortar stores face this problem. The true ROI ...
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AT: 12/31/2012 06:13:33 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, March 14, 2012

13 Months Later: Panda Updates and Jewelry Store SEO

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It's been about 13 months since Google unleashed the Panda filter and ripped apart the internet heyday of article marketing and link building.

Google's "Panda Update" originally went live on February 24, 2011 and has been refreshed a few times since. Panda is not actually part of the search algorithm, but rather an extra filter that's applied to the Google index.

Periodically Google runs its search database through this filter to weed out bad websites so they won't appear in the SERP. Among that list of bad websites are once popular sites like EzineArticles.com, HubPages.com, thefind.com, and mahalo.com.

These websites aren't actually bad, and you won't get a computer virus by visiting them either. Google filters out these online properties because SEO professionals figured out how to abuse them for financial gain....
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AT: 03/14/2012 11:53:48 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Here's How Google's Recent SERP Changes Affect the Local Retail Jeweler

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Today we've got some updates from the world of Google products and how we foresee them relating together to your benefit.

First, let's check in on Google Places, and if you're playing the jWAG drinking game, it's time to take a shot.

Some time in early 2011, Google took away much of the search engine optimization power you had in Places. They disabled several of the built-in fields and limited the information appearing on your jewelry store's Places Page. They claimed it wasn't a permanent change, and that might be what they thought at the time.

It now looks like Google Places is slowly being diminished in its importance. In July 2011, we suggested that your Google Places account and the Google+ Business page would eventually merge. Google+ was given a huge boost in importance when G+ posts started appearing in th...
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AT: 03/07/2012 09:31:15 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, July 01, 2011

Basic Explanation of Google's Panda Update

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We follow news and blogs from a few jewelry industry websites, groups on LinkedIn, Twitter conversations and articles from Instore Magazine and MJSA. When we see something interesting, or perhaps a developing trend, we try to pay attention to it and report back on it here.

We're hoping that you value the SEO education and real world evaluations of websites, mobile websites, and how you can use them.

In other words, we're hoping you value us as experts in our field, and that the jWAG.biz website is an excellent resource for you.

Other jewelry industry sources have yet to take on the challenge of explaining how Google ranking has changed since February 2011; instead, they stay with familiar topics of Facebook, Twitter, Google Places, and marketing ideas. Maybe it's because the changes are too new and no one wants to a...
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AT: 07/01/2011 02:00:25 PM   0 COMMENTS
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