Recently, Google’s John Mueller posted about what to do if your site goes offline. The advice was to serve a 503 server status code if the outage is short term. So someone asked if they can serve a 502 server status code instead. John Mueller said you shouldn’t.

We’ve all seen the message in Google Search Console’s index coverage report for “Page indexed without content.” Google’s Gary Illyes said when you see that, most of the time (not all of the time), it is about “pages that are blocked by robots.txt.”

Establishing your ownership and registering with the U.S. Copyright Office are the only real steps you can take to protect yourself (and when things go wrong, it could pay off in big ways if you do it early enough). CD Baby is thrilled to partner with Cosynd to provide a quick, easy, and affordable way for you to register your copyrights for 80% less than similar services. As a CD Baby client, you can now register the copyright to your album, songs, videos, literature, or images for as little as $25 (plus federal filing fees). You can take advantage of […]

Understanding the CASE Act Last summer, a major artist sampled one of our artist’s songs, even after the artist rejected the original sample request. The major artist sampled the song anyway and over 100,000 physical copies of the record containing the sample were sold. Our artist wanted to file a lawsuit, but couldn’t because he didn’t register the song with the U.S. Copyright Office first, a recent Supreme Court ruling he wasn’t aware of. After paying $800 for an expedited registration for one song, he started to gather insanely high quotes from litigation attorneys. This seemed like a dead end […]

Music Copyright 101: How to copyright your music and compositions as an artist, songwriter, or producer As an independent musician, you own your songs and recordings. It’s YOUR intellectual property. That might seem obvious, but it’s worth repeating: YOU control the copyright to the songs you write and the recordings you create. Ownership of your music copyright gives you leverage, protection, and power when it comes to making money from your music catalog. In this article we’ll provide an overview of what music copyright is, how to copyright your music, and how you can use your copyright as a songwriter […]

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

If you’ve been researching ways to market your music recently, you’ve probably read suggestions to use social media influencers. That’s great advice! Working with an influencer can be an effective way to market your music online. But are you scratching your head at just what all that means? You’re not alone. Of all the new terms to enter the lexicon of the social media age, “influencer” is one of the more nebulous. What is an influencer? And what do they do? What is an influencer? According to our Modern Music Glossary, an influencer is: “Someone who has significant knowledge and […]

Google is now testing a “not helpful” button in the local reviews within local listings in Google Maps and Google Search. Tom Waddington spotted this and posted the screenshot below on Twitter.

Last week, @PPCGreg spotted Google testing a brand new match type in Google Ads named “Smart Matching.” What is Smart Matching? I have no idea but Google Ads confirmed it was a “small tests that select advertisers have opted into.” But I have no idea what makes this match type “smart.”

Google’s local panel allows you to message or now chat with some businesses that enable the messaging feature in Google My Business. Previously, Google always called it “message” in the local panel but now Google is testing calling it “chat.”

For most SEOs, this is very obvious, that it is not about the raw number of links you have to your webpages but rather the quality of those links. Google can and likely does ignore the low quality links, so having a billion low quality links is worthless in many cases. But having one high quality link can be huge for a site.

On a bit of a gloomy day, Dan Toplitt was out in my neighborhood and stopped by to get on the vlog. Dan and I met prior to him becoming an SEO…

Google’s John Mueller said in a video hangout on Friday that Google has stopped automatically moving sites to the mobile-first indexing system. Instead, the last batch of sites are being queued up and will all be moved over sometime in the coming month or months.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…