If you or someone you know has been penalized by Google for unnatural links (and possibly other reasons), there’s always hope. This article provides a solid blueprint on recovering your rankings. It may take months, but for a lot of businesses it’s definitely worth it.
I read a couple of great internet marketing articles recently that I’d like to share with you.
#1 – How to Increase Search Traffic
Check out this kickass case study by Jason Acidre…it’s all about re-optimizing his existing blog.
What he did was quite simple, yet very effective:
- Determine variations of search queries that are sending highly qualified traffic to the site (often keyword variations that aren’t primarily targeted for existing pages/posts).
- Optimize the pages/posts to match and be ranked/served on those long-tail searches.
Find effective long-tail keywords on Google Analytics
I personally try not to use Google Analytics as you can see from this post. It’s not that I don’t think it’s an effective tool, I’m just paranoid. Note: You can still use Jason’s suggestions with other analytics tools like Piwik or Open Web Analytics.
But, most people use GA, so Jason has provided some great steps to export your organic search traffic data into a CSV file, and then segment the data by 2 metrics:
- Average Visit Duration
- % New Visits
He then uses the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to check each keyword’s search volume to see if it has enough searches to be useful.
Jason also recommends looking at the Top Landing Pages data and adding “Keyword” as a secondary dimension so you can see which pages get the most traffic and for which keywords. Simple but brilliant.
Re-optimize your site
- Choose 20 keyword/page combinations (found above) to start with. For each keyword/page…
- Update the HTML Title tag to include the keyword.
- If it’s impossible to change the Title tag (it could already be ranking well for its primary keyword and changing it wouldn’t make any sense), edit the HTML Meta Description to tackle the keyword. Sometimes this may just require adding a single word, because you can rank for a long-tail keyword if part of the keyword is in the Title and the other part is in the Description.
- Link internally between pages using anchor text containing the new keywords. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to track pages from your site that internally link to the page you want to optimize.
- Build new signals. You now want search engines to re-crawl your site and discover the changes you made. Some ideas are:
- Publish a new blog post.
- Share the old links on social networks.
- Build new links.
If you follow this process every month, your traffic should continue to grow
#2 – Keep Visitors Longer
Chris Gilchrist over at HitReach wrote this article about making your website more interesting and linkworthy.
Some of the ideas are quite creative!
Here’s a few of ‘em:
- Liven up the “People” page for your corporate site by using cartoon overlays on rollover
- Make your “Privacy” and “Terms & Conditions” pages more exciting by using images and normal English
- Add a visual timeline to your “About Us” page
- Make your “Contact Us” page more fun by replacing the employees with a picture of a giraffe and giving the mustaches
- Add “Fake” (hilarious) products
- Add interviews, videos, etc to your “store” website to spruce it up
- Add gamification! No brainer
I guess the whole point is…be creative and have fun with it.
Both of these really intrigued me, so I thought I’d share with my followers…
How I Hijacked Rand Fishkin’s Blog
When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document. This idea first came to my mind while reading a paper called “Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications” by Daniel Peng and Frank Dabek from Google.
Super interesting…I was under the impression that the PR of your own webpage didn’t really matter, unless you were selling links or planning to flip your domain. I didn’t think it affected rankings of that specific page. But apparently it does…you can go out and rip of other people’s content, and as long as your PR is higher than theirs, you’ll rank for it!
Crazy.
Check out some of the case studies that Dan posted.
The good thing is, you can take measures to prevent this “hijack” from happening to your own content/pages:
- Canonicalisation - set rel=”canonical” in your HTML header; you can also protect documents like PDFs
- Authorship – have an author box for each article
- Internal Links – use complete URLs, not relative URLs when linking internally. I have a habit of using relative URLs because I figure if I ever need to move my site to another domain, all the links will work out-of-the-box. Well I guess I won’t be doing this anymore!
- Content Monitoring – use services like Google Alerts and Copyscape to be notified if your brand is mentioned online, then you can contact the site that stole your content and request it to be removed, or a link back to your site
Prediction: Anchor Text is Dying…And Will Be Replaced by Co-citation
This is super cool. Rand Fishkin (it’s really just a coincidence that he’s the subject of the prior article I talked about) gives examples of relatively competitive keyword phrases and find sites and brands that are ranking without appearing to target the keyword, meaning that keyword isn’t in the title tag. It’s barely even on the page. It doesn’t seem to be something that they’re going after. They’re not getting much anchor text for it.
My eyes are definitely open to the importance of using keywords and brand names inside of social media posts. I had no idea Google was this clever. Dang.
Split testing email marketing increases and drives your potential customers and curiosity-seekers to your website. It provides a better understanding of visitor behaviour and shows what effectively attracts and increase sales and returning customers.
Split testing is a good indicator of email marketing weak areas and how to “fix” them. Most service providers make it easy to use free split testing software to upload broadcasts for comparison. It allows testing of more than one version to determine what design and content generates the most traffic. In the long run, it’s all about profit.
Subject Lines and Headlines
Split testing provides comparative results for optimizing open, click, and conversion rates by testing subject lines and headlines. Apply the “2-Second Rule.” Subscribers receive great deal of emails. Familiar senders are typically weeded out, read, and responded to first. The rest are in a pool whose subject lines are skimmed quickly and opened or deleted. The more clever and to the point the subject line is, the greater the chance is the email will be opened. Most segments respond to minimal words (20-25 characters).
The headline must compel the visitor to read the content. The headline should not shout at, or conversely, be understated. Split testing allows the comparison of headlines presented in various sizes, fonts, colour and highlights. It quickly becomes apparent what type attracts whom and if two or more email versions should be used to attract a larger population.
Content and Calls to Action: What you say and how you say it
There are some words that resonate with most audiences such as “Free,” “Buy One Get One Free,” or “Free-Shipping.” First, split test how your email content is worded, and secondly, what entices the visitor to read on, click through, and feel comfortable entering information that guarantees future activity.
Split test demos, promotions, free download, and content that engages the most subscribers. In an interactive, social, environment, the expectation is to be asked to “register now,” watch a video, or download something. Situate buttons reasonably near the top of the message or headline so they can be immediately seen so the reader may anticipate what’s coming.
Test your demographics to determine if your audience is more responsive to hard sell or soft sell? It is the goal to get subscribers to engage.
Design and Images
Split testing helps determine what attracts which demographic and for how long. Some groups craving “new” require more email updating. Some prefer dynamic imagery, while others are offended by it. Others may prefer more conservative images and consistent headline, format, and placement of boxes, buttons, and links. Free testing images may be found at http://ipyxel.com/free-image-variation-pack-download-for-split-testing-your-images/.
Keep in mind how emails are typically purged. A rule of thumb is to feature the main focus of your content in the email preview pane. Also, note some email servers disable images from emails.
Sending
To avoid having your email immediately deleted or sent to Spam, include a “From” name as well as address that is immediately recognized by the recipient to have come from a credible and reliable source. A mistake is to only show the address, leaving the “From” blank.
Best Time to Send
We operate in a very mobile global environment. Time zones, mobile devices, and industry may influence when you choose to send your email. However, responses may come at any time depending on when, where, and how the recipient receives and views the email. Convenience is the determining factor, and it is not unusual for an email to be opened, and read, and saved for action at a later time, or date. Testing various subscriber lists sent at different dates and times may be the best determination of when to send group emailing’s.
Landing Page
The best means of determining how successful a landing page is, is to use a simple A/B test on two different headlines, buttons, calls to action, etc. Performance and increased traffic and purchases indicate which combination works the best for your overall recipient demographic.
Responding and Frequency
Email responses should be personalized according to the demographic information the subscriber provided at the initial sign up.
Contact frequency may be determined by how often subscribers are opening sent emails, clicking, and buying. Test a sample group of the most product-engaged members to see if increasing the email campaign will heighten favourable performance activity. Keep an accurate measure and analysis of test results and what works and what does not.
Email Marketing Services
Check out our comparison of the best email marketing companies.
About the Author
Lucy James is a freelance writer specialising in various internet marketing subjects like email marketing, social media and PPC management. She also currently helps to represent Net Effekt, a white label email marketing reseller.
I hear this question now more than ever before. The reason why? Since the beginning of the year, hundreds of thousands of webmasters (heck, maybe even millions) have received a warning similar to this:
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://example.com/
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://example.com/,
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
This warning by itself is not the problem. The problem is that the warning is typically accompanied by either a drastic drop in SERPs, or your domain being completely deindexed by Google.
The latest word on the e-street is that simply submitting a “reconsideration request” via Google Webmaster Tools isn’t going to get your site’s ranking or indexation penalty removed. The only viable method seems to be doing your best to have all spammy backlinks removed, and then communicate it to Google.
Check out the top response in this SEOmoz thread to read how…
Another option, if you feel your site was unfairly targeted by the latest Penguin update, is to fill out this form. It’s unclear exactly what effect it will have though, it’s possible that Google is simply collecting data.
Recently, I’ve began the laborious process of migrating away from Google Analytics on most of my sites. Why? Because it is frankly starting to scare the hell out of me.
Here’s why:
- Bounce rate is believed to be a factor used in determining your Google search rankings. This is a measure of the percentage of visitors the leave your site after only viewing the initial first page. It would be silly and very unfair for Google to penalize sites that don’t use Analytics, however, for sites that do use Analytics, Google can easily access your bounce rate. Without Analytics, I can’t think of an easy way Google engineers could figure this out, unless they’re using data from the Chrome browser, in which case we’re all fucked. I know some people will say “well, just create quality websites with unique content that engage your visitors, and your bounce rate will go down”. I’ve said the same thing myself. It’s good advice. But I still don’t want Google having such easy access to data that they’ll use in determining my rankings.
- Lately, Google has been on a real witch hunt for private blog networks and other SEO services. There’s been reports by many companies about their domains being deindexed by Google, which essentially destroys their business. Being in the SEO biz, I don’t want to share any data with Google if they’re coming after people like me.
- I’m worried about the whole footprint issue, with all my sites using Analytics, I’m assuming that somehow this makes it easy for Google to calculate similarities in traffic between my sites and negatively impact my rankings. I also think Bing/Yahoo can notice this footprint. Maybe this is over-the-top paranoid, but it worries me nonetheless.
Here’s a few of the alternative web analytics tools/services that I’ve been evaluating:
StatCounter
- They host your data and you just have to add a bit of javascript code to your site. So, no FTPing or creating databases to get StatCounter to work.
- Their Free account seems decent, suitable for sites that you don’t care about Goals or Actions or anything super comprehensive
Clicky
- Another popular hosted service.
- They specialize in real-time data and have a tool that allows you to popup a chat window with visitors
- Their Free account doesn’t seem very good, so there’s a fair bit of pressure to upgrade to a Paid account.
Piwik
- Probably the most popular open-source, self-hosted solution. This means you need to download the software, unzip it, FTP it to your server, create a MySQL database, then go through the installation process. It’s a PITA initially but…
- The functionality is much better than StatCounter, at least from what I’ve seen
- I’ve been running Piwik on a few sites for over a year, the only problem being some larger reports have trouble loading due to PHP memory issues. This could be resolved by moving away from shared hosting to something with more horsepower like a VPS or dedicated server.
Open Web Analytics
- Another self-hosted app, so you’re running it on your own server.
- Clean and comprehensive interface.
- It looks like Piwik is the more popular self-hosted tool, but OWA has an impressive list of features.
- Comparison to Google Analytics: http://www.openwebanalytics.com/?page_id=158
What about you? Have you left Google Analytics for similar reasons? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
As an owner of SocialAdr, a social media marketing web service, I get the opportunity to hear what people think about different SEO techniques on a daily basis. Occasionally I learn a thing or two. But most of the time it’s just plain wrong.
Social media involves many people from around the world “talking” about a webpage from many different social sites. The search engines know that the more “social” activity they can pick up about a specific URL, the more effect this should have on that URL’s rankings. And in the past couple years nearly every major Google algorithm change has further embraced social media.
I realize that I’m fortunate I decided to create a social media service in 2009, rather than an article marketing service, or a directory submission service, or any other type of SEO service that is becoming less and less effective.
Here’s a few myths that I hear quite often:
There’s no benefit in having multiple backlinks from the same domain
This is one of my favorite. People get brainwashed on forums like the Warrior Forum, that backlinks are only beneficial if they’re doFollow and from different class-C IP addresses. Maybe that used to be true, I don’t know. What I do know is that the core concept behind “social media”, is having multiple accounts on the same site promoting your URLs. When something goes “viral”, does it receive a single Tweet and a single Google +1 click and a single Facebook Like? Hell no. It receives thousands of similar social signals, from all over the place.
Furthermore, certain social media sites, such as social bookmarking sites, use “votes” to help promote URLs to the “top votes” pages or even the homepages. And these pages are often high traffic and high PR.
So by getting multiple social media backlinks from the same domains, your URL is not only saying to search engines “Hey, look how popular I am! It’s almost as if I’m viral!”, but it is also appearing on high traffic / high PR pages. How is that not absolutely ideal for SEO purposes?
NoFollow links are useless
This myth isn’t specific to social media, but to SEO as a whole. Recent research has shown that a healthy mix of doFollow / noFollow links is better for search engine rankings than having only doFollow links.
Wait a sec…what? So even though Google (Matt Cutts) proposed the idea of the nofollow hyperlink attribute, an idea that has been widely adopted all over the web, they don’t even abide by it themselves?
That’s just ludicrous!
Or is it?
Here’s my take on it. Originally the nofollow attribute was intended to help reduce spam. Webmasters could use the attribute so that would-be spammers would be less inclined to leave spammy comments, because the backlinks they received from those comments would have no SEO value. But…as more and more sites starting using nofollow attributes, the percentage of “legit” available backlinks become lower and lower. That means the % of links Google can use in their ranking algorithm is/was shrinking. It’s only natural to believe that if your input variables become fewer, the quality and accuracy of your algorithm reduces.
If you think about a “natural” progression of backlinks to a specific webpage, what would this consist of? By “natural” I mean you’re not promoting your own webpage and nobody else is doing any SEO work for you. The internet world has discovered your webpage and, because it’s so awesome, people feel obliged, without incentive, to promote it. In this case, you might get a bunch of Tweets, Likes, social bookmarks, microblog mentions, social networking status mentions, Web 2.0 posts, blog posts, press releases, articles, etc. etc. Now what type of links would these be? Would they be ALL doFollow? Hell now. They’d be a healthy mix of doFollow/noFollow.
So in Google’s eyes, sites that have a healthy mix of doFollow/noFollow backlinks haven’t tried to “game” their rankings. It’s likely they obtained their publicity honestly and naturally, compared to sites with ONLY doFollow links that are obviously using grey hat SEO techniques.
I want to create my own social media accounts and only promote my own URLs
Although I don’t hear people making this exact statement, I get the feeling from reading forums and seeing the different social media software offerings, that this mindset is very popular.
I look at it exactly the opposite.
Let me use an example. A recent piece of desktop software I saw on the Warrior Forum made me reflect on this philosophy. Here’s what it does:
- Creates a Hotmail email address
- Creates social media accounts (you have to manually enter CAPTCHA unless you have one of the popular paid services setup)
- Posts a bookmark to the accounts it just setup
I’m not even going to talk about the fact that it’s risky to repeat these steps a large number of times from the same IP, as the software doesn’t utilize proxies.
What I want to talk about is how this process is the opposite of what you should be trying to accomplish with social media. Rather than setting up accounts, for yourself, that will only ever contain your own URLs, what you should be striving for is having other people promote your URLs to their accounts. Then, and only then, will your social media campaigns appear “natural”.
Now if you’re wondering how you can get other people to promote your links, here’s a couple different ways:
- Design an attractive website and write quality content that engages visitors and encourages them to spread the word out of sheer love for what you’ve created. (this is difficult for a lot of people to accomplish, but is ideal if you can make it happen)
- Pay people to spread the word about your pages (SocialAdr is one service that does this very effectively)
Hopefully this post helps clear up a bit of the misinformation that’s out there related to SEO, link building, and social media in particular.
Google’s latest major algorithm change, rolled out in Feb 2011, is called “Panda” and was big news for anyone doing internet market or SEO. Many marketers reported huge SERP drops while a lesser number noticed gains.
Rumor has it that the Panda update came about from a focus group that Google held. They had real humans evaluating actual websites and giving their opinions on different metrics. The results of this group were then translated into a programming algorithm that was encorporated into the ranking calculation engine.
I’ve done a bunch of research and experiments on my own rankings since this update, as well as reading what guys a lot smarter than myself have published, and here’s what I’ve come up with:
Domain quality is now important again
In the “May Day” update prior to Panda, a chance was made that allowed individual pages to rank higher on their own merit, regardless of the trust value or strength of their domain. It looks like with Panda that’s been reversed and now the collective value of ALL pages for a domain is taken into considering. This is the main reason why EzineArticles rankings dropped and they’ve lost a lot of traffic.
What does this mean to me?
- It’s no longer beneficial to add hundreds or thousands of low-quality content pages, as they’ve drag down the rankings of your entire domain
- It’s better to build backlinks to your home page AND inner pages, rather than just your home page. This tells Google that many of your pages have value and other sites “like” them.
Sites are evaluated monthly
Websites are evaluated every month. If you make an on-site or off-site SEO change today, it’ll take about a month for Google to recognize it and adjust your rankings accordingly.
What does this mean to me?
- If you’re experimenting with multiple link building services and techniques at the same time, it’s gonna be nearly impossible to know which ones helped and which ones hurt your rankings. Also, it’s not productive to try a service for 1 week, assume it doesn’t work, and cancel your membership. Then 3 weeks later you’ll just be surprised to see your rankings change and not attribute it to the service you had canceled.
Click-through rate is important
The number of people who click your site when it’s displayed in the SERP’s compared to clicking the other sites is now more important than ever. The difficulty in this metric is that there’s no way for you to monitor the click-through rates, because Google doesn’t share enough data to do this.
What does this mean to me?
- Make sure you META Description and Title are specific, relevant, and eye-catching. Definitely don’t have any spelling mistakes, slang, profanity, etc. You want your site to pop-out to the searcher amongst all the other results.
Bounce rate is important
It seems like the sites that had SERP improvements post Panda are ones that have low bounce rates – where visitors stay on the site for a long period of time and view many different pages.
This is sort of a no-brainer. Why would Google respect sites that have shitty content, are annoying to look at, and offer no perceived value, which causes visitors to immediately leave?
What does this mean to me?
- Have a well designed site that’s easy on the eyes. If you don’t have design skills, don’t try to do it yourself. I’ve seen WAY too many sites that have black backgrounds with white text (terrible on the eyes), annoying animated gifs, terrible logos, etc. I immediately think “rookie” and have a perceived notion that any content on the site is going to be amateurish. Hire someone who knows what they’re doing. Or if you’re intimidated by or unable to afford outsourcing, find a free professional-looking WordPress theme.
- Have quality content, that’s unique and interesting. Make it relevant to whatever topic your page or domain is about.
- Offer visitor interaction, like commenting, voting, polls, surveys, contests, etc.
- Keep your site fresh, either by allowing visitors/users to continually add content , or by adding it yourself or through a VA.
Repeat visitors are important
The Panda update is taking into account how many visitors return to your site. Most people think that “unique” visitors are all that’s important, but Google has realized that if visitors are enjoying themselves on your site, they will return, which must be your site is valuable and of high quality. This is also why Web 2.0 sites (compared to old-school static HTML sites or sites that offer no user interaction) are becoming more and more popular and continue to rank well in Google.
What does this mean to me?
- Pretty much the same advice as above for keeping your bounce rate low applies to retaining repeat visitors.
Exact match domains have lost their value
In the past, if you bought a domain that matched exactly to your primary keyword, such as “cheap-ipods.com”, you were all-but guaranteed a Page 1 ranking with Google. Well, post-Panda update that’s no longer the case.
It makes sense to me that the domain name shouldn’t have much effect on rankings, because why is it fair that the first person to get into a niche, who buys the .com, should be ranked higher than someone else who couldn’t get an exact-match domain but actually has a better site?
What does this mean to me?
- Don’t worry too much about buying an exact match domain name, but I still think you should if it’s available. Because I can’t imagine a scenario where Google will ever penalize an exact match domain, and other search engines still rank them higher.
I stumbled across this site recently and thought it was a pretty clever idea. YouLikeHits.com allows you to:
- Get Twitter followers
- Get Facebook likes
- Get MySpace followers
- Get StumbleUpon followers
- Get Digg followers
- Get visitors to ANY website
- Enter your Twitter username
- Define how many points you want to pay for each follower
- Browse a grid of other users who want to be followed, then choose which one you want to follow and click “Follow”. A window will popup with their Twitter page loaded, where you need to click “Follow”. Then return to YouLikeHits and click “Confirm”. In many cases you’ll earn 9 credits for each follow.
I’ve tried A TON of keyword research tools: Micro Niche Finder, Market Samurai, Word Tracker, Keyword Elite, you name it…I’ve tried ‘em all.
What sets SECockpit apart from its competitors is that it’s ridiculously fast. Since it’s a web service rather than a local software app, you can run as many queries as you want simultaneously…in fact it can handle 200 fully processed and analyzed keywords per minute. I’d like to see your current tool do that!
Not only that, but SECockpit uses multiple keyword sources: Google Adwords, Google Suggest, and Google ‘related search terms’.
Let’s take a look at the SECockpit interface, for this example I used the seed keyword “deals”:
As you can see, it comes packed with tons of useful details for each keyword. The “Niche” column is the SECockpit evaluation of how “good” the niche is for that keyword. You can see which domains are available to buy for each keyword, with hyphens and without. You can see which of the top 10 results are sniper sites or Youtube vids.
And if you double-click on a keyword in the results, you are taken to the top 10 Google results which give you some juicy data such as mozRank, Page Authority, Juice links (count of links that are valuable in determining SE ranking), and a direct link to go to Open Site Explorer.
Pretty slick, eh?
Get SECockpit here.