Some companies post fluff on the web as a marketing strategy. We’ve all seen it: “helpful” articles written without the benefit of a decent encyclopedia by writers paid pennies per post. Until recently, Google’s preference for content-heavy sites rewarded these content farms with improved search rankings.

In February, Google took steps to downgrade the search rankings of high volume, low quality sites by making a significant adjustment to it’s algorithm. In April, Google expanded its algorithm change from just U.S. sites to all English-language sites. By some estimates, visibility of some of these sites fell as much as 94% after Google’s initial adjustment.

But fluff isn’t just limited to content farms. Could your site get caught in Google’s fluff reduction efforts? How much of your website is fluff?

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Is the Internet making you stupid? Many academics say sites like Twitter — and the Internet at large — are devouring our brains like zombies. But is it really the Internet’s fault that you decided to follow Snooki? No! Smart ideas do exist online, and you can absorb them into your deteriorating grey matter if you know where to find them. Then you can tell professor Mark Bauerlein (author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future) where he can shove it!

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Our copywriters recently caught up to Scott Goodson, Founder and Chairman of StrawberryFrog, “the world’s first Cultural Movement agency,” with offices in New York, Amsterdam, Mumbai and Sao Paulo. Pushing innovation and brand building boundaries for over a quarter of a century with agencies based in Canada, Sweden and the US, he’s helped brands such as P&G, Heineken, Pepsico, Starbucks and Daimler Benz, to name a few. So we felt compelled to ask him about everything from when he first fell in love with the Internet to what he cherishes most about designers.

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FAQs are questions your website visitors and customers frequently ask. But sometimes you need to ask yourself: “Why do they keep asking these same questions?”

The answer could mean there are problems with your website content. What message are you not getting across? What information do people often have problems finding?

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In this inaugural edition of Are You Really Gonna Search That?, Opticon makes a peculiar discovery while conducting keyword research for a snowmobiling company in Whistler, BC.

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