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Thursday, May 10th, 2012
The Google Penguin update, launched last month, punishes sites participating in dodgy paid link schemes by removing them from the search results.
Now, post-Penguin, the Internet marketing industry is debating whether the algorithm change has become a charter for negative SEO.
Negative SEO is essentially search sabotage: giving competitors a Google Minus, if you will.
The idea is to use underhand, blackhat SEO techniques on a competitor’s website – as though the competitor had done it themselves. Google sees dodgy SEO activity on the competitor site, and downranks it as a result. Your site then sails up the rankings as your sabotaged competitors disappear.
It’s a horrible strategy.
Penguin’s introduction was supposed to bolster honest, white hat SEO: not destroy it.
But some commentators claim that by arbitrarily downranking sites with unnatural link profiles, Penguin has made negative SEO strategies a very stark reality.
One of the main problems is that most small websites can’t actually control their own inbound links. Bigger companies can afford lawyers to run round getting dodgy sites to remove links. Smaller sites cannot.
If you run a small e-commerce site, which currently ranks on the first page for your core products, will your business survive on Google’s first page if a nefarious competitor aims 50,000 bad links in your direction?
Some experts say it would be too hard to make negative SEO foolproof, and it would essentially be impossible to downrank well-established sites because of Google’s other ranking factors.
Negative SEO has always been in existence and it’s not something Google would want to promote.
Yes, Penguin has made backlinks a dangerous factor for all sites, but in reality, it shouldn’t really increase the prevalence of negative SEO campaigns.
That’s partly because backlinks are just one metric Google uses to analyse the quality of a website. The basic idea is the more backlinks a site has, the more trustworthy it must be, the more useful its content must be, and the more valuable it is to a searcher.
Sites like the BBC, Daily Mail or Wikipedia have massively strong link profiles, and they rank very well for a huge number of search terms as a result. Their SEO work, compared to smaller, less-known sites, is pretty much an effortless process.
Smaller sites are judged on the same metrics as massive global brands, and that includes backlinks.
Some experts have cited examples of negative SEO campaigns actually working on smaller sites – especially as SMEs don’t have the international recognition or consumer loyalty of bigger brands.
The advice for vigilant SEOs is to stay vigilant. You should be checking sites for evidence of negative SEO campaigns anyway – and there are some steps you can perform to help protect you against this kind of underhand campaign.
If you notice a spike in unnatural-looking backlinks, work quickly to try to get them removed. Contact sites who have given you positive links and establish a line of communication. If those links are suddenly removed by a fraud, you have more chance of getting the link back.
Other negative SEO tactics to look out for include crawlers sent to your site to scrape it and slow down load times – this can cause visitors to bounce very quickly, so you should always be checking the IPs visiting your site, and blocking potential crawlers.
Stealing content from competitor websites before Google has indexed it is another means of sabotage. If Google sees your content on a competitor site first, it will discount yours as duplicate or plagiarism (even though you wrote the piece). Using rel=canonical tags can help prevent this.
Other tactics can be harder to deal with: this includes spamming review sites with bad reviews, or even with good reviews, as a huge swathe of positive reviews (especially from the same IP address) would immediately appear dodgy to Google.
The first iteration of Penguin was always going to have a few creases to be ironed out.
It’s unlikely Penguin can be refreshed to recognise whether a site owner or webmaster has paid for backlinks, or whether a competitor has attempted to sabotage them.
But it’s also highly unlikely that Google will allow negative SEO success stories to become the norm.
Something’s got to give.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Tags: algorithm, backlinks, canonical, Google, internet marketing, link profile, negative seo, online marketing, penguin, spam, tags, unnatural, update, webspam, white hat
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation
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Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
Internet marketing companies and search engine optimisation experts are poring over their websites today, after Google released its latest algorithm changes, designed to weed out “webspam” sites which manipulate search rankings.
Google’s latest tweak will punish sites using dirty tactics to trick search spiders – such as keyword stuffing
Most reputable SEO companies use “white hat” techniques for search engine optimisation and Internet marketing. But various nefarious webmasters ride roughshod over their good work: creating unnatural copy which reads like a random selection of words, or stuffing completely unrelated keyword links into articles.
“Good” SEO involves a mix of techniques – including ensuring onsite copy contains the right keywords in the right volume, writing the right title tags and descriptions, and a mix of regular, quality content updates; meaningful blog posts and newsworthy press releases.
Inbound links are another metric Google uses for PageRank – based on the premise that users will happily share links to sites which host trustworthy, valuable and informative content. Sites full of spammy rubbish clearly wouldn’t be linked as they are useless.
Linkbuilding schemes are a relatively complex area, but a good strategy will ensure the right websites for your industry are hosting links to your content. “Bad” linkbuilding schemes include buying backlinks from random sites, or participating in link schemes where vast swathes of sites backlink to each other in a bid to dupe Google’s algorithm.
It seems Google is actually manually reviewing sites which its algorithm has flagged as having “unnatural links”. Around one-million messages have been sent to webmasters who Google suspects have dabbled in black hat link schemes. The fact Google has done this send-out manually shows how important it is to get this right: webmasters who’ve built links with great content may still be flagged by the robotic algorithm – human review checks whether the spiders were right.
The latest update will see these “bad” SEO practices penalised – so sites who use honest, white hat techniques don’t get pushed down the rankings by cheats.
“The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines,” said Google engineer Matt Cutts in a blog post. “We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content… our advice to webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
Tags: algorithm, backlinks, Black hat, google rank lost, internet marketing, link schemes, links, online marketing, Panda, ranking changes, SEO, spam, webspam, white hat
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation
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Monday, March 19th, 2012
Search engine giant Google is set to change the game for search engine optimisation once again: by penalising sites that are too obviously optimised.
Recent changes to Google’s algorithm have attempted to weed out sites which feature poor content, poor information and poor quality, but rank well because of their SEO measures.
Now, the engine is going a step further: it will downrank pages which are too obviously tweaked for SEO.
The changes should be a bonus for any site which features quality, pertinent content, and a death knell for spam sites set up to farm clicks.
Similarly, the move will also see amateur SEO efforts – which are often based on outdated information, black hat strategies or falsehoods – become less effective, whilst agency-experienced SEO will become more effective and more valuable.
Head of search at Google, Matt Cutts, told delegates at the South by Southwest conference: “The idea is to try to level the playing ground,” he is reported to have said by Search Engine Land.
“We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t do SEO, we handle that,” he said. “And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect.”
The changes have been in the pipeline for some time, but are likely to go public sooner, rather than later, Cutts said.
The announcement comes after Google said it was refocusing its efforts on Semantic Search, to return better search results for mobile and voice queries.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Tags: algorithm, backlinks, changes, Google, Keywords, optimised, SEO, update
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation
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Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
URL shortening services have become more and more common as websites achieve record-breaking URL lengths for individual pages. (Luckily, this site is very simple but imagine if they had a database driven site with lengthy URLs for each page?! http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com/)
So, why would you use a URL shortener? Well, there are multiple reasons.
- Easy to remember, to share and to spell
- Don’t break or wrap in emails
- Fit in text messages, tweets, and status updates
Here are a list of some of those we have found whilst updating our list this week.
However, be warned. There have been many over the last few years but it seems they all struggle to survive as we have found more dead than alive! If you are posting your shortened URL to places where you are relying on it to still work in a few years time, think twice. It may be better to have the full URL with an OPTIONAL shorter link just in case the service folds.
- bit.ly – offers you tracking as well as an account that allows you to archive all of your shortened URLS
- snipurl.com – one of the best as it allows you to make multiple URLS in one go, you can choose from snipurl, snurl and snipr, and you can create multiple shortened URLs to the same page for tracking purposes.
- tinyurl.com – allows previews which gives confidence that there is not a spam link behind the short URL and also has a browser bookmarklet so you can shorten URLs with one click
- urlcover.com – offers customisable URLs, an API so you can integrate it with your website, and allows you to enter multiple URLS in one hit
- 4url.cc – allows you to add a preview feature which is great to convince people your link is clean and non-spammy
- ilix.in – a new service that masks the original URL eg for affiliate links etc. It also offers to pay you per view for your link at a rate of approx $1 per 1000 views. There have to be some doubts about the validity of this business plan (even Microsoft have recently binned their Bing cashback scheme for shoppers), but time will tell.
Whichever service you use, remember to keep track of your links so that you know which points where!
Tags: backlinks, TinyURL, Uniform Resource Locator, URL shortening
Posted in Blog, Link Marketing, Small Business Resources, Social Media, Tips & Tricks
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Tuesday, August 11th, 2009
Take a look at your website.
On every page, and every piece of great content, how many ways of sharing that content do you have? None? One? Many?
Do you make it easy for a site visitor to send out a link to that content? Can they tweet it, add it to Digg, Facebook, delicious? Is there a retweet or reblog button? Is there an RSS feed to syndicate the content not just to RSS readers, but also to sites that accept RSS feeds? Have you added your RSS feed to sites who cater for your target audience? Is your blog RSS feed listed everywhere it can be? Are you on authoritative blogs’ blogrolls? Can your video content be embedded in other people’s sites?
Do you make all of the above as easy as clicking a mouse?
Take a look at this video (which is quite amusing!) and note the simplicity of sharing the video, embedding it on your own site, tweeting, adding to facebook, digging etc.
Is your content this easy to share? Or are you still manually seeking out valuable links rather than letting your users do it for you?
Tags: backlinks, Blog, Digg, facebook, link, links marketing, twitter, website
Posted in Content, Link Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Tips & Tricks
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Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
This blog post from last October gives some very useful information about the types of links that Google likes to see on your website.
Using Google Webmaster tools is a great way to keep up to date with what links you have to your site. Some may have been created without you asking for a link so it is always worth keeping a check on who is linking to you and developing relationships with those sites and those audiences. It may well be that you have a target audience you were unaware of, and those are business opportunities worth pursuing.
Internal links are fantastic too for driving people to content areas within your site that may also be of interest, for promoting specific products or services to a wider audience, and can help the searchbots to index your site.
Tags: backlinks, links
Posted in Google, Link Marketing
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Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Backlinks are an important traffic driver, not just for the search engines algorithms but to ensure that your site is listed in as many places as possible to capture extra visitors.
The important rule of thumb is Complementary not Competitive. So, if you are promoting training seminars for the doctors and therapists, you need to be on sites which don’t also offer the same services, but offer advice, support and help to doctors and therapists for whom your training seminars and events would be of interest.
Establishing backlinks is a long, hard slog and you should aim to set a target for finding and establishing backlinks each month so that you are slowly, but surely increasing the number of places where a link to your site is featured.
Some SEO companies look to achieve around 5000 per month but for many this would prove almost impossible without a dedicated team. If you only achieve 5-20 per week, that is a great start!
Always look for sites with a high PR; an audience who regularly interact with content, which often implies repeat visitors who will see your link time and time again; and strong unique content. You will often need to provide a reciprocal link on your own site so make sure you have areas where you can put reciprocals that do not detract from your site content and are useful for your website visitors.
Tags: backlinks, reciprocal links
Posted in Link Marketing
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Thursday, November 13th, 2008
As per the previous post about finding a good PPC services team who will help teach you about running a PPC campaign rather than taking all control from you, it is interesting to note that Eric Ward – master link builder from Wordtracker – has the same belief, highlighted at the start of this recent interview.
Building inbound links (or ‘backlinks’), ie getting websites to add a link to your website, is not the black art that many make it out to be, but it takes time and it pays to be methodical in finding those that will bring the best return. Surprisingly, this is not always those sites with the highest PR or Alexa ranking.
However, in order to get worthwhile links you must have good content that others will find of value. Many websites have passionate and committed communities of loyal visitors, who will swear that xyz website is their ‘bible’ for information on that particular subject. Whatever niche you are in, your aim should be to provide similar value to your visitors. This will then show that you are a mine of information on your particular subject, which will encourage others to link to you.
Eric Ward gives some prime examples of creating valued content, and if you take a step back from your own website, you should be able to work out how to do this too in your niche.
Whatever anyone says about the importance of SEO, if you do not have the content to back up your optimisation efforts, it is likely to prove a waste of money and time. Links are still one of the first and foremost ways of bringing in highly targeted traffic and although it is a time-consuming process, it yields major dividends. And in order to get links, we are back to that old saying, “Content is king”.
Create good, high quality, relevant, unique content and others will link to you. Y c’est ca!
Tags: backlinks, Content, links
Posted in Content, Link Marketing
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Monday, November 3rd, 2008
Link Juice is still being discussed regularly, and despite the ever-changing rules about what is a good link and what is a bad link, you do still need to have links (backlinks / incoming links) to get Page Rank, visitors, and hence sales. But let’s remember that it is not the search engines who will buy your products or services – it is the customers who find your links and follow them who are the ones who will part with cash, so link juice is as important for traffic flow as it is for SEO.
However, there are some in the SEO World who have decided they know better than Google and have decided that ‘outing’ or reporting sites with what they feel to be ‘bad’ or spammy links is fair game. For instance, Rand at SEOMoz decided to out a site for the term ‘seo company’ last week.
We are back into the black hat vs white hat SEO techniques debate again. Although I agree with some of his points, there are also issues about whether a single individual should be able to blog about a site like this and undo what may have taken months or years to achieve, and undoubtedly cost money. (And I don’t mean in acquiring paid links, I mean in paying those who set the links up with directories etc in the first place.)
It should be taken as at the very least a salutory warning that the search engines do act upon reports such as these, and your hard work can be undone. Seemingly, whether you are using dubious or valid techniques.
Tags: backlinks, Google, link juice
Posted in SEM Industry, SEO
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