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.
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.
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.
WebProNews recently posted this super interesting article about an experiment done by SEOMoz that looked at different Google ranking factors, and how many Search Engine Optimization experts view their importance.
http://www.webpronews.com/google-ranking-factors-2-2011-06
A few things that stuck out for me:
- Page-level backlink metrics are the top algorithmic factor (compared to domain-level, link authority, social metrics, etc.)
- Diversity of backlinks is greater than raw quantity
- Nofollow backlinks do indeed help with rankings (further evidence to support this post)
- Pages with more content rank better
- Long titles and URLs are bad for SEO
- Using keywords earlier in tags and content seems “wise”
- Facebook may be more influential than Twitter for ranking, but Matt Cutts says Google can’t see Facebook shares so this doesn’t make sense to me
- Google Buzz may be used for indexing (more info here)
- Matt Cutts says in general the more content on the home page, the better, but you can also have too much
If you’re a nerd like me, hopefully you find this data useful too!
I just saw a very interesting video post on SEOmoz:
One of the things we did when we saw no-follow links having a really high correlation was we went, well that’s just weird. Maybe what’s going on here is that no-follow links and followed links have a high correlation with each other, and in fact, they do. If you have lots of no-follow links, you tend to also have lots of followed links. So, that makes sense. All right maybe that’s all that’s causing it. But then there’s this one weird, weird data point – well, there’s several weird ones – but there’s this one weird data point around the percentage of followed links having a negative correlation, kind of a strong negative correlation with rankings, which sounds weird, but it suggests that websites and web pages that don’t have any no-follow links aren’t performing as well as those who have at least some or some reasonable percentage of them.
This paragraph caught my attention enormously, mostly because I’ve always been of the opinion that natural backlinking from a variety of sources is the best way to do off-page SEO. I’ve always thought that a healthy mixture of noFollow and doFollow links were important, otherwise it’s pretty frickin’ easy for search engines to notice that you’re trying to “game” your rankings. This is also why my automated social media service, SocialAdr uses a mixture of noFollow and doFollow social media sites.
Aaron @ SEOmoz sums it up well when he adds:
What I think that’s happening is that people who do natural things, normal websites, this is not normal. It is not normal to have a website that only has followed links. It’s almost like, man, you must be doing something funny because normal websites earn links from no-follows. They get linked to on Wikipedia, which is no-follow. They have blog comments that people leave and point to them. Those are no-follow. They have social media profiles. Almost all of those are no-follow. People tweet about them. Those are no-follow. There are all of these no-follow links that exist from sort of good places on the Web where you would naturally be mentioned if you’re a good website.
Thoughts?
A recent link building service I’ve tried and wholeheartedly recommend is One Hour Backlinks. The dude who created Linklicious launched this creative site that makes it super simple and super quick to blast your sites with backlinks. I’m a big fan not only of the ease-of-use of the site but its pleasing design. It’s rare to find an internet marketing / SEO site that doesn’t look like it was designed using Geocities in 1997 
Here’s what the order form looks like:
Like I said, super simple.
- Use the top slider to select how many backlinks you’d like (the more you want, the cheaper they get per link).
- Optionally choose radio buttons for “indexed links only”, “dofollow only”, or “PR1+”, keeping in mind that each option costs extra
- Enter your keywords
- Enter your URLs
Done!
Once you’ve placed an order and its been completed (mine took about 20 minutes), you can view the data on your “Complete Projects” page:
As you can see even though I paid for 2000 links I received 2420 of ‘em and the Indexation rate was 45%.
The “download links” hyperlink lets you download a CSV file that contains, for each link:
- URL
- PR
- Indexed (yes, no)
- DoFollow (yes, no)
- Keyword
- Target URL
This spreadsheet is super handy for loading into other link building systems to further boost the SEO-juice of your new One Hour Backlinks.
WINNING.
Occasionally I come across an SEO tool that I feel is worthy of blogging about, and oddly enough today I have two of ‘em.
Linklicious
Instead of wasting hours building RSS feeds and pinging the feeds hoping for crawls, Linklicious eliminates all of the guesswork by providing a guaranteed 100% crawl rate. It comes with a WordPress plugin so every post is added to an RSS feed, auto-shortened, pinged, and tracked so you can see exactly when your links were spidered.
Linklicious is quite affordable too: they have a free account and the most feature-packed paid account is only $54/mo.
Here’s a chart that shows the improved crawl late with and without using Linklicious:
Link Pushing
I was looking for a completely automated, hands-off service that combined multiple backlinking techniques. So I headed over to the Warrior Forum and a quick search brought me to this WSO.
Here’s what the “Link Pushing” service offers:
- User enters their information; a 2 minute process.
- System grabs an article from a random article directory.
- System spins the article using The Best Spinner.
- System submits the articles to Web 2.0 Properties and Auto-Approve Article directories backlinking to the money site.
- System then submits to various Doc share sites splitting the backlinks randomly to the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve articles.
- System then submits to microblog sites with links randomly split between the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve Article sites.
- System then submits spun articles to non-auto approval article sites with backlinks to the Web 2.0s and the auto approved article sites.
I had a couple questions before signing up and was super impressed with how quickly and professionally Greg (one of the owners) responded to me. Although this service is in its infancy, so far I really like how easy it is to use and it seems like these dudes have some great features planned in the next release. I don’t have enough data on its effectiveness to improve SERPs yet but I’ll post an update when I do.