It has been seen tonight that WebmasterTools has suffered a major security hole and opened up and reverified all old accounts. What does this mean to the SEO community?

From initial glance at our WMT’s accounts we now have regained access to every old account we have previously been given access to, whether that is a previous client or maybe a site that came to us for some short term consultancy. What is also quite amusing (if you look on the funny side) is that you can see who won the client or who you won the client from.

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Website owners across the world were reporting that they had seen dramatic movements within the search engines over the weekend, some seeing sites plummet deep into the darkest corners of the search ranking spectrum and with such big changes, people were laying claim to the fact that they thought that there had been a Google Panda update but we now know that that isn’t the case.

According to the guys over at SERoundtable, they have reached out to Google in the hope to be able to gain confirmation that Panda #22 had been rolled out but it seems that the shake-up has nothing to do with the Google Panda algorithm update.

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This afternoon we have been looking at some of the Google search results for some of the branded search terms that we have been tracking and it seems that the branded element that Google have continuously spoken about seems to have been given the biggest boost to date following a shake-up of branded search results.

We have looked at a number of brands following the recognition that the search engine results were being overrun with pages from the particular brand being searched and found that Google have now created a new look for themselves which would in theory prevent third party websites being able to outrank the brand, a common trick that affiliate webmasters have looked to undertake in recent years.

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Update: I’ve been told by James Lee at Google that “The reason the probability fluctuates is because Content Experiments is using Monte Carlo simulation to calculate the probabilities. It’s possible for there to be a slight variation because of the noise.” – so there you have it, very interesting in did!

I’m a big advocate of Google Analytics, and I’m fond of split testing – you can’t argue with the facts! But recently I had got into creating my own statistical analysis for split testing (not just for websites) and so when I found that the “Probability of Outperforming Original” figure on Google Analytics Experiments didn’t match my own I got a little suspicious.

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I read this blog post from the Google Analytics Blog this morning and I must say, I am VERY impressed. The attribution modeling tool that has only been available for Google Analytics Premium users is being rolled out to all users!  If you want to get early access you need to register for the webinar on Friday, fill out your details here. Not only that but they are releasing a number of new features:

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• Cost Data Import – from any digital source (this will allow you to calculate ROI of all sources of traffic) – rolling out over the next month.

Following a series of questions surrounding the successful recovery of a site that we tested with the newly released Google Disavow tool, I thought that we should look to offer more information about what we did, how we did it and the results that we witnessed, so here we go.

The test site that we used to Beta test the Disavow tool had received a number of warnings via Google Webmaster Tools which began with an ‘Unnatural Link Warning’ which was sent 21^st March 2012, which sparked a link removal process undertaken by us to see whether we would be able to have the site reinstated, however as you can see from the image below, there were two failed attempts to satisfy the powers that be at Google and we were told that they were still seeing links pointing into the site that they believed to be ‘unnatural’.

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Listen up Google, we know you’re all about transparency now, so we’ve come up with a brilliant list of things that we think you should introduce, and we believe it would lead to a win win situation. So without further ado, here is the Bronco SEO’s Google Webmaster Tools Wishlist:

1. Currently you only show a sample of links, but what happens if this doesn’t include bad links? Surely it wouldn’t harm you to show all of them?

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Having returned from doing 2 conferences back to back, the iGaming Affiliate Conference in Barcelona and the A4U Expo in London, I thought it would be a good time to do a post on the topic that I was talking about in my sessions.

I tend to get asked to talk on the future of SEO, and with this year being such as violent one in terms of changes from Google it’s important to take a look at what is SEO 2012.

Back in January 2011 I did a session on the future of SEO and created a screenshot of what I thought Google would look like .. this is what I thought…

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