Sunday, May 22, 2016
Monday, January 18, 2016
The Why and How for the Evolution of Link Structure as Material Marketing (Part 1).
Link building is not dead.
Link building is still essential to any SEO efforts.
The “old” methods of link structure are still valuable.
However things have changed for you as a marketer.
And this modification is just the start.
Here’s where you are now, and where you’re going as an SEO, link home builder, and content marketer.
The 4 Axioms of Online search engine and Relevance
Browse engines are here for one thing: To supply the most pertinent search engine result for its users.
That’s it. Absolutely nothing else.
Browse engines do not care that you count on their traffic to make money as an online marketer or webmaster. And in the methods that they do care (e.g. making Google Analytics complimentary), they just appreciate due to the fact that it helps them fulfill on their guarantee to their users.
So long as internet search engine remain to meet on the promise of having the most appropriate search engine result for their users, individuals will remain to utilize them and they will have the chance to find out ways to earn money through selling advertising to their users.
However there’s a 2nd axiom that you most likely don’t commonly imagine: The best method that search engines can offer the most relevant results to its users is to have as much details as possible.
With more info about how individuals use their search engine result (and the web), the much better online search engine have the ability to rank websites based upon a search query.
In the beginning, “as much information as possible” indicated things like more websites in its index, indexing text and titles on a web page, and having as much link data (internal and external links) as possible. Those data points have obviously changed gradually.
Which brings us to the third axiom: Having as much information as possible is insufficient to figure out relevance. You need to likewise correctly focus on and value the information points.
As people began to utilize the internet in a different way (which has actually happened as a shift from content consumption to material production), the power moved hands from web designers with technical expertise to the layperson.
Which brings us to the 4th and final axiom: Having as much data as possible and prioritizing it properly is insufficient. How information is prioritized must also develop in parallel with how users connect with the web.
Before Google, the material on a web page was all that was required to prioritize search engine result. As the web evolved, Google saw links as an algorithmic benefit to more relevant search engine result.
Now where are we?
It’s obvious that links are not the only significant element anymore. We’ve been through over a decade of special c-blocks, link text, PageRank, authority, trust, etc.
. We were staring down the barrel at social becoming an important factor for rankings, but with the walled gardens of Facebook, Google not restoring their firehose arrangement with Twitter, and Google+ still a far minority in terms of usage and breadth of demographics, it’s unclear regarding the direct impact of social on search engine result.
However there’s something else that us marketers aren’t speaking about.
And maybe we’re not discussing it since it’s frightening as hell for any of us to consider these other metrics. These other metrics cannot be controlled straight. These other metrics are successful based on imagination rather than strength. These impact of these other metrics just cannot be anticipated with the information we have access to as marketers.
These other ranking factors are a black hole that, in a significant way, you have no control over.
However prior to we enter that…
… Why Link Structure is Not Dead The initial
factor that link structure developed into content marketing is because it got links that you could not get otherwise.
In the past, content marketing has actually been supplemental to your direct link building efforts. Your direct link structure efforts (directory sites, links pages, link exchanges, etc) eventually became the exact same thing your competitors were doing. To differ, you began doing some material marketing like visitor posts, infographics, “link bait,” and so on
. Historically, material marketing has actually been additional to link structure simply because the competitive landscape of link building got thinned down. Basically, everybody was doing the same stuff. Due to the fact that we we’re all eventually doing the exact same stuff, online search engine required another way to distinguish the most appropriate web pages for a search question. The few links that very little material marketing efforts accomplished were enough to set those sites apart.
“A couple of links from content marketing” is no longer enough to be competitive.
Now, link structure is not dead. You still require to contend, at a very baseline level, with your other search rivals. If your top-level rivals are ranking due to the fact that they have directory links, there is excellent need to get directory site links. If your top-level rivals are ranking because they have guest post links, there’s good need to get guest post links. If your top-ranking competitors are ranking since they do infographics, there’s excellent need to make and promote do infographics. And, gasp if your top-ranking competitors are ranking because they pay for links, there’s great reason to spend for links. (Though, for obvious reasons, I do not specifically recommend purchasing links.)
This is not just how SEO works. This is the nature of competitors.
When you contend, there is a base level of requirements you need to satisfy. If you’re building a brand-new automobile, you still need four wheels, an engine, a frame, and a steering wheel. And if you’re aiming to rank on well online search engine for certain keywords, you still require to build relevant connect to your website.
Content Marketing as a Competitive Benefit in SEO and Link Building
It’s real that if you’re developing a brand-new car, you need 4 wheels, an engine, a frame, and a steering wheel. However if that’s all you have, there’s no reason for somebody to purchase your automobile.
To stick out, to lead a market (and the search results), in addition to what is needed by your consumers, you must do something distinct. In business, you call this a Competitive Benefit. In marketing, you call it a Distinct Offering Point. In economics, it’s Minimal Energy bill.
When it comes to SEO, content marketing has ended up being a competitive benefit. Here are 4 reasons why.
1. “Old” Link Structure has Become Commoditized
When something becomes commoditized, it means it has moved from a Competitive Advantage to an Industry Requirement. Where you could formerly contend on the competitive benefit of “old” link structure, it is now the standard for any SEO project. Links got by means of standard ways not have the effect they when did. You require something various to stand apart.
2. Content Marketing Sets You Apart
Material marketing is unusual, important, and challenging to execute. These are 3 features of a strategy that online search engine love to determine in order to identify the value of a strategy. This supports the third axiom laid out earlier.
3. Search Engines Crave Relevance
If you’re frequently producing content, you give internet search engine more content-based data indicate utilize in your ranking. Do you discuss all kinds of electronics? Or just phones? Are phones the primary subject of 50 % of your new content in the last six months? Or is it simply 10 %, while you also speak about stereos, laptops, and more?
4. Frequent Content has More Value to Online search engine in the Long Term
If you have actually released 100 pieces of brand-new content about phones in the last YEAR, and the majority of the other websites about phones have produced just 10, this can show to a search engine that you’re not just pertinent, however might also be timely and current with your details.
Why Social Metrics are Not the Future of SEO
As people, we suffer from Adaptive Predisposition. Adaptive bias enables us making presumptions about something without sufficient information. When given insufficient details, we make forecasts based just on the information we have. We adjust our forecasts based just on the (commonly insufficient) details offered to us.
In the context of comprehending how social metrics affect search rankings, we will look at metrics like Facebook Likes, Shares, Tweets, Klout, and so on. We take a look at these only because it is all we have to analyze.
In the end, we just have connection information and absolutely nothing that almost certainly points to causality.
Here’s why social media metrics have no direct effect on search rankings: Google and Microsoft don’t have access to this data. Facebook is a walled garden and Google chose to not renew its firehose account with Twitter.
Google does not have the metrics.
Google+? Sure. It’ll get you indexed quicker. Which may have a short-term effect on rankings. But already, Google would be absurd to let Google+ impact rankings more than that.
But social does matter. Here’s why…
…
Next Up … Next up, I’ll discuss the previously-unspoken ranking elements of the future (and most likely now), and the main (only?) thing that will really be beneficial for SEO.
About the Author
The Why and How for the Evolution of Link Structure as Material Marketing (Part 1).
Sunday, January 17, 2016
Stop Link Structure For Penguin
“We got hit by penguin! We need you to obtain us some better links than the last firm got us.”
The more client work that gets sent my way, the more requests I see for links. Which is no huge deal, but when the site has no resources on it, much less a blog, I get an anxious jerk in my ideal eye. I suggest that could also be the caffeine getting to me, but I’m not one for stopping coffee cold turkey to discover.
How do you create the missing resources?
Just recently in an Ask the Experts: Top 3 Link Building Methods in 2013 interview I did alongside some other smart link structure peeps, I mentioned that an initial step is to use what the client currently has on their site. If they have an infographic, for example, that hasn’t been provided any interest; I think about re-launching the material. This especially works fantastic it is time-sensitive material. It can help get the link structure ball rolling. Nevertheless, if there is absolutely nothing that can be refurbished successfully, then it’s time to put on the thinking cap and figure something out.
Choosing who is accountable for developing the material (or establishing a shareable tool) is going to be a huge factor. If the customer is going to undertake this, then excellent! You can focus on working on things that you can construct and press. Or you can simply work on other types of link building while that’s being done. Things like:
- Finding brand points out without links
- Ways to utilize
SEOMoz Fresh Web Explorer with BuzzStream (on the BuzzStream blog by the smart Matt Gratt) - Link Structure for Startups- Find Unlinked Brand Discusses at Scale (great piece by John-Henry Scherck)
- Ways to utilize
- Prospecting for a variety of links
- AWESOME post on this by Matt Polsky (even if he is a Cardinals and Mizzou fan:P)
SEOMoz post on link prospecting
- Required something a little bit more creative to do?
- Link techniques (Point Blank SEO)
- The most innovative link structure post ever (and it actually is, also Point Blank SEO)
- 44 Creative and Ingenious link building professionals and their methods (Kaiser the Sage)
- 11 Imaginative ways to develop links (Neil Patel)
For how long should you do a push on these resources?
This response will differ, based on a couple of factors. An example is how huge the product is that requires to be pressed and how time-sensitive it is. For example, you can push a resource like an energy conversion chart longer than you could an infographic on the same topic. The numbers on the conversion chart are less likely to change and be something people will use year round versus the fixed data in the infographic outdating seasonally.
Now I’m not saying infographics cannot be pushed for a month or perhaps a couple of. Exactly what I am stating is you should not be making it your go to products for links and social promotions. With each advertising push you (and your client) ought to be intending to go bigger and bigger. Perhaps you begin with an infographic and then carry on to building an online tools for your clients to use, like the conversion chart I discussed. Or possibly even something as interactive as Moz’s Open Site Explorer (that might be a bit extravagant, however you get the idea here of an optimal goal).
That all sounds fantastic. What else can I do?
See the links I dropped to those posts? Have you read other link structure posts aside from this one? Have you actually attempted to go develop links? No matter your response to these questions the only thing delegated do is to in fact do it. For the longest time I truly didn’t like sending out e-mails (resources or not) since I didn’t like getting rejection e-mails. Distilled’s Lexi Mills accomplished completely if you have the exact same doubt I had (still get from time to time) with this: “It does not matter if it’s sending out pitch e-mails, or asking website owners to links to the resource you have actually constructed. Success of link bait isn’t really guaranteed no matter how much you prepare.”
That’s not to say it’s going to fail either, however regardless if you’re tracking everything (making notes, saving emails, etc.) find out from what went incorrect. If anything did fail, make sure not to restart it next time. The exact same is also true if something succeeds. Make certain you understand what went right so you’re sure to do those exact same actions next time.
The viewpoints in this post are those of the author and not always of Marketing Pilgrim.
Stop Link Structure For Penguin
Saturday, January 16, 2016
The Why and How for the Evolution of Link Building as Content Marketing (Part 2).
And so we start…
… The Previously-Unspoken Ranking Aspects where Material is the Only Method to Compete
As people, we deal with Adaptive Bias. As marketers with Adaptive Predisposition, we struggle with aiming to fit the square peg of social metrics into the round hole of search rankings.
Exactly what we have no idea – – because we’re not looking at it – – is how other aspects are influencing internet search engine rankings.
What if there was another set of aspects that more accurately anticipated relevance to a search inquiry than content significance, social metrics, or link metrics? Exactly what if I informed you that mysterious information is extremely hard to come by? And exactly what if I informed you that Google has more of it than any of us most likely realize.
It’s my belief that Google does have this data. And it’s likewise my belief that this data is definitely vital to being the most accurate predictor of significance in the future of search.
The data is this: Analytics data.
Page views. Distinct visitors. Time on page. Time on site. Recommendations. Conversions. Navigation paths.
Sure. As marketers, we’re all acquainted with those. But there’s more…
… What if Google knew where a user pursued your website? Exactly what if they understood a visitor went from your website to a search engine 50 % of the time after visiting your site, while the average in your market was only 10 %? What if Google understood that 2 % of the new visitors to a specific page on your site acquired something…… despite if you make use of PayPal, 2Checkout, Stripe, or your very own merchant account?
These are the type of metrics that I believe they desire (and I think they have it already to a certain degree) and will need in order to provide the most appropriate search results imaginable.
How would they get this information?
As negative online marketers, we presume they have this information from Google Analytics. But that only offers them a partial view on a per-site basis. Leaving one website and going to another breaks the user flow if you look just at Google Analytics information.
However Google also owns loads of dark fiber and a public DNS service.
However even with that, it’s just a small slice.
So they offer you phones. And laptop computers. And web internet browsers. And a publicly-accessible typefaces API. And publicly-accessible designer libraries. And all of this other stuff that they can utilize to deeply track how the web is utilized.
All with all of these gifts for “complimentary,” they simply may be able to collect adequate details about total usage on the web and websites that they can then put together a precise understanding of what content is important…
… However they won’t do this with links and material. They’ll determine importance by actual website and page use, traffic patterns, etc.
. And, if you think this is all some sort of dystopian view, it’s not. It’s just company. It’s simply exactly what they have to do to stay competitive in displaying the most pertinent search engine result to their users…… so they can gather more marketing dollars and endure as a business. It’s company. And it’s survival.
How Content Marketing Defines the Future of Link Building
If this sort of universal analytics is the future of link building and search marketing, where actual usage of the internet is what is required as a competitive advantage and not just content or link significance, content marketing is the only long-lasting option.
Not links. Not content optimization. But getting your visitors to enjoy your material so much that every brand-new “use” metric increases. They remain on your content longer. They visit your website more frequently. Repeatedly. They bring more people to it by sharing on social media. There are more referrers from a larger number of websites. They go to other search engines less after seeing your material. Yours is a last stop on their look for that information due to the fact that they do not later on go to other comparable pieces of content developed by your rivals. Your visitors purchase from you and not from your rivals. Your visitors download your ebooks. And they sign up for your newsletters. And they read your blog. And all sorts of other metrics that you can imagine.
The only thing that can do that is content.
And if material marketing isn’t really the leading priority for your long-lasting search plan, you will soon find a rival whose leading priority is.
About the Author
The Why and How for the Evolution of Link Building as Content Marketing (Part 2).
Monday, January 4, 2016
If a link drops on the internet, does Google care enough to penalize you?
The links utilize the “rel=’nofollow"” quality and I manually evaluate all the remarks. When in a blue moon a spammer surpasses my caution with a well-crafted generic comment. I have actually learned to be more suspicious and to often search the Web for the 1-2 sentences that the spammers leave before approving comments.
The Issue Is Not the Hyperlinks: It is the Absence of Research study
Not every Web marketer has been doing this as long as I have so I aim to cut people with less experience some slack when they make errors. However the growing number of link reduction demands from people who clearly do not understand exactly what they need to be removing is beginning to alarm me. The requests all have generally the exact same explanation: “Google Web designer Tools reveals me that I have 500 links originating from your website.”
Firstly, you do not have 500 links coming from my website. It’s more like 1,000 links. And you should be HAPPY that someone with my experience would be thankful to hand you 1,000 NoFollowed links. They won’t injure you in anyhow.
Secondly, I removed the WordPress widget that was providing you those links quite some time ago. So when you search in your GWT link file, you need to comprehend that those links may no longer exist. The widget I utilized was “Current Comments”. It’s a standard WordPress widget. It’s a blogger’s method of rewarding people for commenting and assuring new visitors that genuine individuals do read the blog (and leave comments).
The Marketing Web is Changing Due to the fact that of You, Not Because of the Guidelines
It’s simply a shame that lack of knowledge and fear are compeling individuals like me to change exactly what they place on their Sites. I did not eliminate the widget for your sake; I removed it for mine. There is no chance Bing or Google will appreciate any connect to your site from my blogs. They understand my sites, they have known my sites for many years, and they understand those links are great, safe links.
It’s not the online search engine’ fault that Web marketers are beginning to run in a panic toward the nearby exit from the Link Building. Web online marketers did this to themselves, and to each other. If you check out advice on a popular SEO blog it must be good, right? After all, it’s a popular SEO blog. And I am offering you recommendations on a popular SEO blog. However the difference between my guidance and the bad guidance out there is that I am not telling you how to playing around the Web and construct spammy links.
If you see a short article on your favorite SEO blog that informs you ways to get links from a certain Site, using a specific tool, and so on think of any links you obtain through that technique as spam. The online search engine might not have an issue with those links today but as more marketers follow that advice all those links will set a pattern of apparent manipulation and abuse that becomes identified as spam.
So the links you ought to be disavowing are the links you developed for SEO, not innocent remark links.
If you cared enough about what I wrote someplace to leave a remark, to thank me or to disagree with me, and you embedded a connect to your site in that comment: you’re fine. If, on the other hand, you used XRumer or some other spam device to leave a bajillion comments throughout the Web connecting back to your spammy affiliate website or client site, well, you need treatment.
Excellent comments might be rewarded with links from excellent Sites.
Bad comments should just hit the SPAM folder and become erased.
The Variety of Remark Links from a Site Does Not Matter
You’re confusing the old SEO practice of asking for/buying sitewide links (which did not utilize “rel=’nofollow"”) with the Web large practice of sharing genuine links. Browse engines know the distinction.
Remark links injure you if, unlike a real individual, your Website amazingly appears in comment links on hundreds or countless Sites within the space of a day, a week, a month.
Remark links are reasonably harmless if, like a ravenous healthy commenting passionate person, your Site appears normally in comment links on dozens or perhaps a hundred Sites a month. If you leave 5 real discuss Websites every day, you can leave 150 healthy comments a month.
That ought to not injure you. How do I know this? I leave comments on blog sites all the time and I have never as soon as received a suspicious links discover from Bing or Google. And I publish thousands of linky comments on my blogs without ever receiving any warnings, charges, downgrades, or memos from Bing and Google.
The online search engine do not appreciate real-world, passion-driven links. If you’re charging up your blog comments with lots of connect to malware-laden Sites– well, you’re probably not the sort of person who would care about charges anyhow.
The Only Thing You Required to Find out about Any Link is WHY it was Left There
If you were not spamming at the time you left a discuss my blog, and if your comment was approved, your links are great. You don’t have to ask me to eliminate them. You do not have to disavow them.
Let your honest intents be your guide. Your gut impulses will serve you far much better in evaluating your link profiles than all the SEO bloggery worldwide.
The only good link is the link you didn’t appreciate when you created it since you were so bent on taking part in the discussion.
The only bad link is the link you made due to the fact that you keep reading some marketing blog or online forum that this was an excellent connect to get.
About Michael Martinez
Michael Martinez has been establishing and promoting Websites considering that 1996 and started practicing search engine optimization in 1998. He is the principal author of the SEO Theory blog site.
If a link drops on the internet, does Google care enough to penalize you?
Monday, March 16, 2015
SearchCap: Link Building In 2015, Google’s New Doorway Page Penalty Algorithm & Anna Atkins Google Logo
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Link Building In 2015, Google’s New Doorway Page Penalty Algorithm & Anna Atkins Google Logo appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
SearchCap: Link Building In 2015, Google’s New Doorway Page Penalty Algorithm & Anna Atkins Google Logo
Thursday, March 5, 2015
The Most Important Link Penalty Removal Tool: Your Mindset
Posted by Eric Enge
Let’s face it. Getting slapped by a manual link penalty, or by the Penguin algorithm, really stinks. Once this has happened to you, your business is in a world of hurt. Worse still is the fact that you can’t get clear information from Google on which of your links are the bad ones. In today’s post, I am going to focus on the number one reason why people fail to get out from under these types of problems, and how to improve your chances of success.
The mindset
Success begins, continues, and ends with the right mindset. A large percentage of people I see who go through a link cleanup process are not aggressive enough about cleaning up their links. They worry about preserving some of that hard-won link juice they obtained over the years.
You have to start by understanding what a link cleanup process looks like, and just how long it can take. Some of the people I have spoken with have gone through a process like this one:
In this fictitious timeline example, we see someone who spends four months working on trying to recover, and at the end of it all, they have not been successful. A lot of time and money have been spent, and they have nothing to show for it. Then, the people at Google get frustrated and send them a message that basically tells them they are not getting it. At this point, they have no idea when they will be able to recover. The result is that the complete process might end up taking six months or more.
In contrast, imagine someone who is far more aggressive in removing and disavowing links. They are so aggressive that 20 percent of the links they cut out are actually ones that Google has not currently judged as being bad. They also start on March 9, and by April 30, the penalty has been lifted on their site.
Now they can begin rebuilding their business, five or months sooner than the person who does not take as aggressive an approach. Yes, they cut out some links that Google was not currently penalizing, but this is a small price to pay for getting your penalty cleared five months sooner. In addition, using our mindset-based approach, the 20 percent of links we cut out were probably not links that were helping much anyway, and that Google might also take action on them in the future.
Now that you understand the approach, it’s time to make the commitment. You have to make the decision that you are going to do whatever it takes to get this done, and that getting it done means cutting hard and deep, because that’s what will get you through it the fastest. Once you’ve got your head on straight about what it will take and have summoned the courage to go through with it, then and only then, you’re ready to do the work. Now let’s look at what that work entails.
Obtaining link data
We use four sources of data for links:
You will want to pull in data from all four of these sources, get them into one list, and then dedupe them to create a master list. Focus only on followed links as well, as nofollowed links are not an issue. The overall process is shown here:
One other simplification is also possible at this stage. Once you have obtained a list of the followed links, there is another thing you can do to dramatically simplify your life. You don’t need to look at every single link.
You do need to look at a small sampling of links from every domain that links to you. Chances are that this is a significantly smaller quantity of links to look at than all links. If a domain has 12 links to you, and you look at three of them, and any of those are bad, you will need to disavow the entire domain anyway.
I take the time to emphasize this because I’ve seen people with more than 1 million inbound links from 10,000 linking domains. Evaluating 1 million individual links could take a lifetime. Looking at 10,000 domains is not small, but it’s 100 times smaller than 1 million. But here is where the mindset comes in. Do examine every domain.
This may be a grinding and brutal process, but there is no shortcut available here. What you don’t look at will hurt you. The sooner you start on the entire list, the sooner you will get the job done.
How to evaluate links
Now that you have a list, you can get to work. This is a key part where having the right mindset is critical. The first part of the process is really quite simple. You need to eliminate each and every one of these types of links:
- Article directory links
- Links in forum comments, or their related profiles
- Links in blog comments, or their related profiles
- Links from countries where you don’t operate/sell your products
- Links from link sharing schemes such as Link Wheels
- Any links you know were paid for
Here is an example of a foreign language link that looks somewhat out of place:
For the most part, you should also remove any links you have from web directories. Sure, if you have a link from DMOZ, Business.com, or BestofTheWeb.com, and the most important one or two directories dedicated to your market space, you can probably keep those.
For a decade I have offered people a rule for these types of directories, which is “no more than seven links from directories.” Even the good ones carry little to no value, and the bad ones can definitely hurt you. So there is absolutely no win to be had running around getting links from a bunch of directories, and there is no win in trying to keep them during a link cleanup process.
Note that I am NOT talking about local business directories such as Yelp, CityPages, YellowPages, SuperPages, etc. Those are a different class of directory that you don’t need to worry about. But general purpose web directories are, generally speaking, a poison.
Rich anchor text
Rich anchor text has been the downfall of many a publisher. Here is one of my favorite examples ever of rich anchor text:
The author wanted the link to say “buy cars,” but was too lazy to fit the two words into the same sentence! Of course, you may have many guest posts that you have written that are not nearly as obvious as this one. One great way to deal with that is to take your list of links that you built and sort them by URL and look at the overall mix of anchor text. You know it’s a problem if it looks anything like this:
The problem with the distribution in the above image is that the percentage of links that are non “rich” in nature is way too small. In the real world, most people don’t conveniently link to you using one of your key money phrases. Some do, but it’s normally a small percentage.
Other types of bad links
There is no way for me to cover every type of bad link in this post, but here are other types of links, or link scenarios, to be concerned about:
- If a large percentage of your links are coming from over on the right rail of sites, or in the footers of sites
- If there are sites that give you a site-wide link, or a very large number of links from one domain
- Links that come from sites whose IP address is identical in the A block, B block, and C block (read more about what these are here)
- Links from crappy sites
The definition of a crappy site may seem subjective, but if a site has not been updated in a while, or its information is of poor quality, or it just seems to have no one who cares about it, you can probably consider it a crappy site. Remember our discussion on mindset. Your objective is to be harsh in cleaning up your links.
In fact, the most important principle in evaluating links is this: If you can argue that it’s a good link, it’s NOT. You don’t have to argue for good quality links. To put it another way, if they are not obviously good, then out they go!
Quick case study anecdote: I know of someone who really took a major knife to their backlinks. They removed and/or disavowed every link they had that was below a Moz Domain Authority of 70. They did not even try to justify or keep any links with lower DA than that. It worked like a champ. The penalty was lifted. If you are willing to try a hyper-aggressive approach like this one, you can avoid all the work evaluating links I just outlined above. Just get the Domain Authority data for all the links pointing to your site and bring out the hatchet.
No doubt that they ended up cutting out a large number of links that were perfectly fine, but their approach was way faster than doing the complete domain by domain analysis.
Requesting link removals
Why is it that we request link removals? Can’t we just build a disavow file and submit that to Google? In my experience, for manual link penalties, the answer to this question is no, you can’t. (Note: if you have been hit by Penguin, and not a manual link penalty, you may not need to request link removals.)
Yes, disavowing a link is supposed to tell Google that you don’t want to receive any PageRank, or benefit, from it. However, there is a human element at play here. Google likes to see that you put some effort into cleaning up the bad links that you have gotten that led to your penalty. The more bad links you have, the more important this becomes.
This does make the process a lot more expensive to get through, but if you approach this with the “whatever it takes” mindset, you dive into the requesting link removal process and go ahead and get it done.
I usually have people go through three rounds of requests asking people to remove links. This can be a very annoying process for those receiving your request, so you need to be aware of that. Don’t start your email with a line like “Your site is causing mine to be penalized …”, as that’s just plain offensive.
I’d be honest, and tell them “Hey, we’ve been hit by a penalty, and as part of our effort to recover we are trying to get many of the links we have gotten to our site removed. We don’t know which sites are causing the problem, but we’d appreciate your help …”
Note that some people will come back to you and ask for money to remove the link. Just ignore them, and put their domains in your disavow file.
Once you are done with the overall removal requests, and had whatever success you have had, take the rest of the domains and disavow them. There is a complete guide to creating a disavow file here. The one incremental tip I would add is that you should nearly always disavow entire domains, not just the individual links you see.
This is important because even with the four tools we used to get information on as many links as we could, we still only have a subset of the total links. For example, the tools may have only seen one link from a domain, but in fact you have five. If you disavow only the one link, you still have four problem links, and that will torpedo your reconsideration request.
Disavowing the domain is a better-safe-than-sorry step you should take almost every time. As I illustrated at the beginning of this post, adding extra cleanup/reconsideration request loops is very expensive for your business.
The overall process
When all is said and done, the process looks something like this:
If you run this process efficiently, and you don’t try to cut corners, you might be able to get out from your penalty in a single pass through the process. If so, congratulations!
What about tools?
There are some fairly well-known tools that are designed to help you with the link cleanup process. These include Link Detox and Remove’em. In addition, at STC we have developed our own internal tool that we use with our clients.
These tools can be useful in flagging some of your links, but they are not comprehensive—they will help identify some really obvious offenders, but the great majority of links you need to deal with and remove/disavow are not identified. Plan on investing substantial manual time and effort to do the heavy lifting of a comprehensive review of all your links. Remember the “mindset.”
Summary
As I write this post, I have this sense of being heartless because I outline an approach that is often grueling to execute. But consider it tough love. Recovering from link penalties is indeed brutal. In my experience, the winners are the ones who come with meat cleaver in hand, don’t try to cut corners, and take on the full task from the very start, no matter how extensive an effort it may be.
Does this type of process succeed? You bet. Here is an example of a traffic chart from a successful recovery:
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The Most Important Link Penalty Removal Tool: Your Mindset
Sunday, February 22, 2015
SearchCap: Google AdWords “Call-Only” Ads, Link Building Techniques & Google Misclassifies Websites As Hacked
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google AdWords “Call-Only” Ads, Link Building Techniques & Google Misclassifies Websites As Hacked appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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SearchCap: Google AdWords “Call-Only” Ads, Link Building Techniques & Google Misclassifies Websites As Hacked