Author Archives: Ryan Clark

About Ryan Clark

I'm the CEO of Linkbuildr Marketing and the brains behind our branding and blog content. I specialize in effective marketing strategies for hotels, luxury brands and real estate. If your brand is in need of a boost then don't hesitate to contact me for a free proposal. Follow me on Google+: +Ryan Clark Twitter: @Linkbuildr on Twitter. You can also come ask me a question on our Facebook Page.  

Interview With Jason Acidre

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September 1  |  Interviews  |   Ryan Clark

It’s been a while since I’ve had an interview on here so it’s my pleasure to have one of my favorite bloggers join us on here. Jason Acidre is no stranger to the SEO world and you’ve no doubt read one of his excellent content pieces in the past month. I figured our readers could use a good break from my rants and take in some knowledge from another great mind in this industry.

1) Background info and a little bit about yourself

I’m Jason Acidre, an SEO based in Manila, Philippines. I’ve been working as a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama and Traffic Travis for over a year now. I manage their search marketing and link development campaigns, and sometimes, my tasks there also include implementation on areas like product development and quality assurance.

Before I entered the Search industry, I first started as a Professional Counterstrike Gamer – for 6 long years. Currently, I’m in the process of establishing my own SEO agency, wherein I have invested most of my time in training people extensively and in developing other side projects (test/money websites).

2) What’s your mentality/mantra/method for building links

My campaigns’ are mostly focused on acquiring links that have multiple capabilities, links that are not just focused on improving search rankings and in building the brand’s authority, but also have the ability to generate leads to the site (through highly visible and contextual links), which often require time and effort in building opportunities.

With this perspective in mind, my SEO strategies – for any form of industry – usually come down to two chains of actions:

  • If I want to build links and aim to rank for a certain keyword, I will need to create a content that strictly pertains to the targeted keyword, have high potentials of attracting people to voluntarily link to or socially share it, and a content that will have higher response and approval rates when presented in sending out link requests, as this type of content will have higher chances of ranking naturally on search engines. This can also serve as a strong support page when internally linked to the site’s landing page(s). And if I wanted more high-value links and more results from the campaign, I will need to create more content that can develop the brand’s reputation in their industry and eventually attract and acquire more links and leads to the site.
  • If I want to build scalable link opportunities that will improve the site’s reputation/popularity/authority, then I will need to build connections within the community by targeting specific individuals within the field and leverage these connections through externally distributed content, as these connections will help disseminate the site’s web presence and probably allow the site to draw more natural links.

3) What are the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to building links

I guess the most obvious mistake that others do when it comes to link building is focusing most of their efforts on building one-sided links, links that are solely built and created to manipulate search engine results, and not utilizing those link acquisitions’ fullest potentials, like brand emphasis through branded anchor text links and/or links that encourage visitor click-throughs, particularly from distributed content that can constantly generate organic traffic (like from topically relevant guest blogs, slide presentations, forum threads, etc…).

There are also some who centers their campaign’s objectives to only aim to rank for exact-match keywords, which usually result to force link building (in terms of speed, variation and quantity), wherein the exact match keyword links that they’ll be able to build will appear too manipulative to search engines – I personally prefer highly-descriptive anchors as these will look more natural and they do have high CTR, more often than not.

4) What are some link building methods you stay away from and why

  • · Automated link building (using tools/software) – as Google will never stop in hunting these links down.
  • · Article marketing – I would rather invest on content to be created and distributed for guest blogging.

5) What are some tools you love/like and would recommend
I’m not really a big fan of tools, though there are some that I couldn’t work without, particularly in link prospecting:

  • Google search – I mostly do my link research through using advanced search queries or search operators on Google search, I also use other international Google extensions when doing extensive link search.
  • SEOQuake – this tool makes my link prospecting process a lot easier, as it shows some of the most vital metrics I use in determining if a site is of high quality (like number of incoming links to the page/site, number of indexed pages on Google and search engine traffic price). This tool also shows these stats instantly on Google’s SERP display and on Yahoo Site Explorer, which makes it easier to skim pages shown on the results.
  • Mozbar – also shows up instantly on SERP display, and allows me to see important page and domain-level metrics such as MozRank, Page Authority and Domain Authority.
  • Opensiteexplorer.org – very useful in collecting link data from competitors, particularly in monitoring their anchor text distribution and the list of linking external pages that can be downloaded in excel format.
  • Google Analytics – allows me to track the best performing links I’ve built by identifying referring sites that are constantly sending traffic that have low bounce rates, staying longer on the page or clicking through other pages of the site and driving unique visitors. This in turn allows the campaign to create a pattern in terms of the placements of links and on which type of sites it should be built.
  • Stumbleupon – this is one of the most useful tools that I’ve been using in finding link opportunities recently, as it is capable of returning exceptional content from both authority and emerging influential sites from any industry.
  • Traffic Travis pro version – the features that I mostly use in this tool for link building is its keyword suggest feature, as it helps me expand my list of search queries when finding for more link opportunities. I also enjoy its link finder feature – when I don’t feel like searching for links manually.

6) Links are definitely being valued differently these days. Where do you see the link game going into the near future
My perceptions on Search were entirely derived from the concept of building trust to both users and search engines. I’ve always believed that the more search engines trust your site, is the more that they’ll reward your site with better search rankings, and certainly make your inner pages show up more prominently on their result pages.

In my opinion, the future of link building will revolve around “trust”, on how people really see your site, which can be measured through authentic recommendations, citations and participation. The strongest form of link that any site can get – in the past, today and probably in the future – is a link that was voluntarily given by a satisfied user, and that’s where we should all be focusing on.

These past 8 months, I have been a persistent advocate of branded link building, as I have somehow anticipated that it will be the new era of online marketing – and evidently, it’s the most sustainable way to build a robust following base on the web as well as the best way to exemplify authoritativeness to search engines.

In this case, I see the link game shifting back to the less complex formula of optimizing a website, wherein artificially created links may only be used in improving web authority/popularity, whereas the keyword game might be completely up to the on-page relevance of the content and the authentic, highly descriptive and contextual links that it will get (search engines will certainly find their way in filtering this kind of link in the future or perhaps I’m just crazy lol).

7) Where can people find you online

You can follow me on my SEO blog – Kaiserthesage, on Twitter @jasonacidre and on Google+. I’m also a contributor at Affilorama’s blog, SEO-Hacker, Traffic Travis’ blog and Technorati’s Business Channel.

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Local Link Building Strategies

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August 31  |  Local Business Marketing  |   Ryan Clark

Local links for businesses are a coveted item and fulfilling an effective local link building campaign can be a daunting task but it doesn’t have to be. Since we do a lot of real estate SEO, we spend a lot of time in the local netherworlds and have a few great ways to generate some link gold (awwwwww yeaaaaaa). The great thing is that you can absolutely dominate your local niche if you do a few things right. Our ideas should absolutely be expanded upon and hopefully they help you find your local link gems with little effort. The basis though, as should be true of all campaigns, is about building relationships with those that matter!

Local link building also shouldn’t take up a huge amount of your time, something that’s quite refreshing; It’s not like you’re going after the keyword “credit cards” or something insane. If you’re in the bigger cities, then you do have an obvious challenge ahead, but that also means that there are more link targets to snipe! We’ll also make sure to take a look at the link bait options as well as what you can do to build links yourself straight away. I know Google doesn’t like the latter but you gotta do what you gotta do!

The local link building game is, in my humble opinion, about three different types of links. This mix involves hitting up all the usual suspects such as:

1) Regular nofollow/followed links
2) Social media links eg. bit.ly
3) Citations even if it’s only a business name or the url typed out without it being “hyper”

This is all natural “web doings” for any business, so we shouldn’t have a problem here. I’ll also talk about what we see trend-wise in the local link building arena and talk about how other local businesses can do most of your link building for you – Yes you did read that correctly!

Sniffing For Backlinks:

After 6 years of viewing link profiles in local markets, I can tell you two things that are still dominating for rankings. These two are pretty obvious and in the end, pretty sad:

1) Local business directories work well
2) Links from local bloggers are awesome

There are, however, two positives that come from these two things: You can take better tactics and build WAY BETTER links than those. The other positive? Building those links is relatively easy and you can make a lot of headway in just a few months time. I know a lot of local businesses don’t have a lot of spare time to market themselves, let alone build a few dozen links. So, for the first month you go at it all you’ll need to arm yourself with is a link analysis tool.

It’s pretty obvious I’m going to tell you to pull the links of every competitor in your vertical, true! But there’s more! You’re in a local market and there are tons of other places you’ll be able to get a link from. So sit down, break out a pen and pad (what’s that?) or your laptop, and write down a dozen other local business categories. I’ll bite and give a few examples such as plumbers, lawyers, mortgage brokers, local webmasters and even local SEO consultants. Sniffing their links out will always lead to other local link finds, I guarantee it!

Local Directories:

This is the easiest and first place you should look for links, even though I’m slightly embarrassed to be recommending directories in this day and age. The truth is, in the local scene they’re an asset. You also have a plethora of options to rock out with and it can keep your link building fingers going for a while. There are always the hyper local directories that have been around for years. As well, there are plenty of the big guys that serve the local market. I’ll only provide a small sample of links because everyone and their mother has lists for this already.

Hyper Local Link Directories:

– $cityname business directory
– $cityname web directory
– $cityname directory
– $cityname local business links

“Big Boy” Local Link Directories:

– Yelp.com
– Local.BOTW.org
– Google Places
– Bing Local business
– MerchantCircle.com
– MyCity.com
– YellowPages.com
– http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/10322/The-Ultimate-List-50-Local-Business-Directories.aspx

Because You’re a Business:

Since you’re a business there are a good amount of other link building opportunities to take advantage of. We’ll kick off the thought process for you, but you’ll really need to take what you learn here and dig deeper. The rabbit hole sometimes goes way down and you’ll really have to work at it.

Chamber Of Commerce – This can always lead to a really strong link and definitely comes with a fee… well usually anyway. You’ll also find that if you get linked here, other websites will use that data to fill out their link pages or if they happen to write about your market. It really can lead to good things!

Business Associations – Becoming a member of a local organisation is not only essential for a local business, it can provide one helluva link. Memberships usually come with a fee, but for the networking alone I’d recommend it. In fact, I demand you do it! (Good)Links are all about relationships and I almost can’t think of a better way to do it in a local market.

Meetup.com – I’m a huge fan of this social networking site and running an event not only leads to a great link, it leads to business.  If you’re speaking at your event or have a guest speaker, the chances are good that you’ll get attendees blogging about it and linking away.

Local Event Listings – If your business can put on a function, you best be making sure you’re getting links for it. For an example, my hometown’s local business site lists events and links to the homepage for whomever is putting it on. You can also list to the big event sites like Eventful.com for some great exposure as well as a link! Check out our old post on event link building for way more awesomness.

Company Directories – While these may not be local sites, they’re usually good because they’re listed by Country and area. Sites like Manta.com and Company.com are great business directories to get into. There are also a lot more sites out there like them so check that link and do some snooping of your own.

Local Media Networking:

Getting a mention in the local media requires not only some skill, but something worthy of a link/mention/citation. Getting mentioned the easy way requires you to do something horrific that they just can’t refuse talking about. Perhaps that’s not the best route, however. Getting links from this area requires networking, time and patience. If you’re not doing anything exceptional in business, then skip this part and move along.

Finding Your Connections:

It’s easier than ever to connect with people via social media so there’s no excuse not to try reaching out to local media influencers. This works the same for the local blogger as well as your newscaster. There are three obvious places to start and, while I’m reluctant to reiterate, I might as well for the increased word count.

Twitter – This is an obvious one and all you need to do is follow and get noticed. Start retweeting, asking questions and being interested in your targets. Make sure to utilise sites like WeFollow.com to easily find the most influential people in your area. I also like to check for the local new’s twitter account to scout of followers and lists they’re involved with. This always leads to finding the key people I need to associate with.

Facebook – Almost every news site has a Facebook page and it can be a great place to start networking. You also don’t want to come off as a spammer, so don’t sign up to just post your latest blog link. You’re going to have to be crafty, participate and perhaps find a way to cover a hot news topic on your blog.

LinkedIn – Here’s a great way to connect with local media types and build some trust levels up. You’re golden if they accept a friend request so just make sure your profile is professional, clear and appealing. I’d also check out any groups that person is in as it opens a door. Perhaps there’s even a local media group worth checking out.

Bloggers – All I an say about this is either try and get interviewed from a local business blog or podcast. If you can’t initially, why don’t you interview someone more prominent with your area who can push social followers your way? They’re going to promote the interview to their fans and this can only do good things for your marketing efforts.

Press Release Strategy:

Make a list of all the local news sites and see which ones are picking up on press releases, especially ones with links in them. While dupe PR may not be the best of links, you still might as well get all you can out of it. You’re going to have to whip out your backlink analyzer of choice and reverse engineer the press releases. I like to have every little bit of information so I can try and game my clients release getting on that news site. It’s not hard, just look for what service it was launched with. See if they have geo-targeting options and even what tags they used with the release.

Those in larger cities will have better luck with this. To give you all an example, The Miami Herald has an area for press releases and they do provide links within the release. Sometimes going this route is much easier and quicker than building connections up, but do both or I’ll be upset with you as a marketer!

Getting Legit .Gov/.EDU Links:

Everyone and their mother wants these links but most of you folks pay some shady link broker to sneak them in. When it comes to the local market it doesn’t require any money to snag these links, just good content, time and a little creativity. There are a few easy ways to score some local .edu and .gov links and I’ll drop a few methods. After that, you’ll have to scour their websites to see what they’re linking out to and how you can create linkable content. They’re definitely some of the hardest links to obtain, so don’t give up and do the best you can.

Links For Jobs – This is a great way to score some natural links from either your local government or university. A lot of .edu’s have local job boards and hiring local students to do work is great for everybody involved. Government sites tend to also have job boards so do your best to sniff things out. You’ll have to watch out for https job postings and weakly linked job pages that don’t index well. Also keep an eye out for job/career fairs because they usually provide links to the participants.

Guest Speaking @ School – This has worked for me personally and it’s a great way to not only score some links, but become a local business leader. Connect with the department heads that relate to your business and offer yourself out. You never know what’ll come of it!

Reciprocal Linking:

Yea I said it, so what? Google’s quite clear that recip linking for the purpose of passing PageRank is a no-no, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. A well designed, uniquely named links/resources page for your area can really do you some good and provide users with a piece of useful content. I’m talking about only one or two dozen links on the page backed with unique content, but most importantly, never game any anchor text.

A lot of people think that reciprocal linking is a waste of time and are dead wrong when it comes to ranking locally. I’m coming from years of experience as well and we have clients surviving and thriving thanks to this link profile diversification. Like any tactic, you don’t want to rely solely on it, you don’t want to game anchor text and you want to link to and from quality related sites only.

While I might get some flack for what I’m about to say, I’d even recommend buying links on related, local businesses resource pages. If you just stick to getting a site/brand name link, mix some up with nofollow and pick really quality sites, you’ll do just fine. Sometimes you’ve got to get your hands dirty and if you do, be damn sneaky about it! There’s no way Google’s going to be able to tell it’s a paid link unless the webmaster rats you out. But even in that case, nothing is likely to happen because they might get penalized for selling links. As long as your link profile is diverse, clean and not too spammy, you’ll be fine. If worse comes to worst, Google just devalues those links.

Guest Blogging & Blog Commenting:

Local blogs are a great place to build relationships, get some links and build up your brands awareness. This can be done by guest blogging, commenting like a boss on a really good post or doing an interview on your blog with someone influential. I recommend doing all of those tactics because they work great and add a good link diversity to your profile. Not only that but you start to really build your brand within the community, make friends and have fun all at the same time.

Do’s:

– link to other local influential bloggers a lot
– write as much as you can and contribute somthing to the discussion when commenting
– use link bait such as infographics and widgets to score links from local blogs
– blog about local hot topics to attract social traffic
– build a good local Twitter and Google+ follower set to influence the SERPs
– do crowdsourced content locally when possible

Do Not:

– use keyword anchor text for your “name” when commenting
– steal copyrighted images for your posts
– slander another business as this never works out well
– comment on lousy obvious spam blog posts
– syndicate content from other sources in your area

Build It And They Will Come:

This is some of the best web advice out there! Keep blogging, networking and inspiring and the links will follow along with the business. These core tactics and fundamentals should be enough to dominate any local marketing effort within 6-12 months. Don’t give up and once you find your groove, there’s no stopping you; Only you can get in the way at that point. If anyone has any specific local link building tips then you know what to do, drop them in the comments below!

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10 Big Brands That Google Has Penalized For Paid Links

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August 25  |  Paid Links  |   Ryan Clark

Over the years, Google has applied some high profile penalties and they’ve always been a fun read. I thought I’d round-up all the big ones I could find and present them for your amusement (and education). All the companies in this post had been caught with their hands in the paid links cookie jar. Whether they were selling or buying, Google came down hard on them for a bit but, as you can see, they’re all back and doing fine now. I won’t name names, but one of these ten below is still blatantly selling links on their high profile site.

In my younger days, I woke up one morning to find my biggest money making affiliate site with a big fat -50 slap in the face. I was doing everything from buying links, to heavily targeting certain anchor text. At the time I didn’t care, knew the risks and the money I was making was down right ridiculous. I moved onto the next domain and was eventually back making my monies. The ability to shrug it off is lost on a big brand. Everything they do in marketing has to be for the long term and getting slapped by a Google penalty can be a major problem for just about the whole operation. The penalties put on one of the companies below cost them just over $4 million in losses… ouch!

While tons of websites are quietly put in the penalty box for paid links, link schemes and other shenanigans, the big boys are the most interesting. This should also be a lesson to those up and coming, take over the world companies that might be considering partaking in link schemes. It’s a mess to clean up and it can take many months to recover from, if you ever do recover…

If you’re still wanting to buy links, and by all means buy away, learn how to do it properly for Pete’s sake! The reality is, big brands are still buying although they are getting sneakier and sneakier. Mark my words, almost every competitive SERPs top 10 results are going to have a lot of paid links. What I’m seeing lately is just the right balance of paid links, careful anchor text use and a good mix of where those links are pointing. It can be done, but let’s see what impact Google has had in the past.

*I imagine most of you remember the paid links war drum started banging hard around 2006-2007 *

Before we get into the main bulk of the content I’d like to mention that I want comments on the big brands I did miss out on. If you want to see the everyday website getting stung on a weekly basis, come join me on Google’s Webmaster Help. Since Panda started rolling out it seems that paid links are causing webmasters a lot of problems.

1) Google.co.jp


Yes, you are reading that right and this is not a typo! Apparently Google Japan didn’t get the memo on buying links; Either that or they forgot to send it in Japanese. Matt Cutts publicly stated via Twitter that the PageRank drop for their .co.jp search homepage was in fact because of some naughty link buying. They were getting reviews for a widget by paying bloggers and using a pay per post service. To me, this would be a prime link bait tactic for Google to use, except for the fact that they have no real need to be doing that in the first place.

I don’t have a problem with bloggers in a niche reviewing a product or service, whether or not it was paid for; That is just good marketing in my books. If you are really paranoid, ask for a nofollow link. It’s not much different that submitting a press release about a new product launch. Keep in mind, though, that the reason I would do this is not for the link, that’s just the icing on the cake.

2) Forbes.com

Perhaps one of the most well known publications in the world, Forbes Magazine was caught not once, but twice for selling links in a multitude of areas online. By the looks of it, they were making a pretty penny doing it and despite being a very large company, Google still dropped the ban hammer on their website. You can see the original Google Webmaster Help thread which even had Matt Cutts himself provide the best answer. That’s the kind of attention big brands get. I’ve rarely ever seen him pipe in on any other topic in that forum.

Now I wonder how much of a clue Forbes had in the first place. It was online marketing firm Conductor Inc who was the link broker for them and many other large sites that may have been penalized. They were at the very least selling links to other big brands that were closely related in business. A really rather smart idea. If you are going to buy links, then they were doing it the best possible way but it obviously didn’t pan out as they had initially anticipated. Still, there are ways of buying links that Google will NEVER catch on to, so remember that you have to be sneaky if you’re going to risk it all.

3) 1-800-Flowers

1800Flowers.com is perhaps the best known flower chain in North America. Heck, I’ve even used them a handful of times. I did, however, forget to give them paid link advice. They entered a very competitive market both online and off and to boost their rankings they dabbled in the dark side. Needless to say, it eventually caught up to them. The penalties were a major sting to their sales for a little while before Google let them back into the game – something that’s typical after the storm calms down and the penalized site starts playing by the rules.

What kind of links caused it? Well, they denied it but they had links on sites that were quite obviously selling paid links and they were targeting “Mother’s Day Flowers” keywords galore. Like I mentioned above, if you search for Mother’s Day Flowers now you’ll find them at the number one spot and if you check that page’s links, you’ll see how they are still ranking. Regardless of linking methods, that’s a company I’d expect to see in the top 3 spots. The NY Times called them out on it and made it a big story, but at least they got some really juicy links out of it.

So, the lesson learned? Getting caught is a great way to drive links to your site!

4) Newsday.com

Well, we’re not really all that surprised to see yet another publication getting “slapped in da face” for selling links. I understand, times are tough for print media publications and trying to make a buck or two on paid links can bring in some serious dough. This website is for the Long Island area of New York, and is owned by the Tribune group. Newsday.com was the only website in their portfolio that got a slap, so it makes me wonder how many websites they own got away with it.

If you take a look at some of their articles, you might notice some links that may be considered “paid” but in the end, who knows. The links are always related to the post’s topic so it could be just good linking. I know online newspapers have a big network of sites and interlinking them for legitimate purposes is something that is going to happen. You can read the original Google Groups posting here about it and see how it was all handled. Make not of the fact that it took a few months to get their PageRank back to normal levels.

5) GoCompare Insurance

GoCompare is a car insurance quote company and if you know anything about competitive markets, you’ll know that anything insurance is tough as nails. Go look at the top 10 ranking sites for the term car insurance and you’ll find paid links in at least 80% of the sites ranking there. The sad truth is, those big terms are all completely dominated by paid links. The difference? Most of them have a really good link profile in addition to the paid links. You’ll find diverse backlink profiles usually make it so that people get away with paid links for longer, if not forever.

GoCompare was buying a lot of links on a lot of crappy sites, which is still evident in their link profile to this day. I imagine those links are now just devalued and not doing much for their rankings. They’re not in the top 20 search results for the ‘car insurance’ keyword anymore so perhaps they got stuck in a link building rut since. If you folks are reading this, give us a shout because I have some great ideas for link bait in your niche!

6) Beat That Quote

This is the site that Google bought in March of 2011 and was quick to penalize for buying links. I’ll throw out the link bait card again because the site didn’t do too well for a lot of terms and this is a great way to get links if you’re Google. Looking at their Alexa ranking, it didn’t do them a whole lot of good in the long run. To me, this is the type of site that should have been hit by Panda pretty hard but I imagine they somehow made it past the filter.

Keep in mind my earlier mention about the insurance SERPs being some of the toughest out there. I’d put money on the fact that the majority of companies are still buying links to this day. When competition is that rough and tough, the paid links usually play a large part of the overall rankings.

7) GoHealthInsurance.com

Here we go again. Those insurance companies sure do love their paid links! I’ll continue to stick by my quotes on the insurance game being completely dominated by paid links and other naughty link schemes. There are few companies in this arena doing things legitimately and ranking hard for it. A newcomer into this industry better have some incredibly smart marketers working for them if they’re going to even stand a chance for a top 20 spot. Not only that, you’re going to be under heavy watch due to the competitive nature of those SERPs.

I found the Google Webmaster Help thread directly from the company trying to figure out what was going on with their rankings in Google. GoHealthInsurance.com had a 3rd party company buy links as part of their SEO strategy until Google took notice. They had the company email and remove all those links but were finding that the rankings weren’t coming back. Well no duh! You’re going to need some good quality link loving to get back up for those keywords. Keep in mind that it can also take a few months to come back after you’ve been filtered for a certain keyword or removed entirely.

8) GourmetGiftBaskets.com

From my affiliate marketing days I’m quite aware that the gift basket niche is a big one and a tough one to crack at that! While they have an amazing exact match domain as well as beer baskets, I have no idea why the paid links were necessary! How are beer baskets not link bait alone? (mmmmm beer) Back in 2008, right before the holidays, it was reported that GourmetGiftBaskets.com was dropped from the Google index. This is a nightmare of the worst kind for any company and the fact that it was right before the holidays is a killer. How killer? They reported a $4 million dollar loss in sales.

Eventually, things got back to normal, however, if anyone from the company is reading this, your partners page and articles section is something I’d be worried about Panda going after. By the looks of it, they may have already. Other than that, I still see a lot of sketchy links in their profile. Overall, their strategy has been focused on getting national news coverage. They also have tons of links from the biggest sites on the web and with an EMD like that you’re in for a win!

9) JC Penny

The JC Penny debacle was perhaps the most talked about penalty of the year. They hired a 3rd party company, which is okay, don’t get me wrong, but I would have thought they had a good in-house team. Like a lot of 3rd party low life SEO companies, they’ll buy links to quickly inflate the rankings for their client. The worst part? They won’t even tell them they’re doing it. We’ve even had to clean messes like this up for companies before. I have no idea if they knew or not, but they had no reason to buy such terrible links on unrelated blogs. Their budget could have paid for the best link bait, the best reviews and if they wanted to go for paid links, they could have been sneaky as a fox.

JC Penny does have one thing going for them – they’re one of the biggest retailers in the world. They were able to clear up their issues quite quickly and were back to ranking in no time, even for the gamed keywords. In addition, when you spend that much on Adwords, you must have some serious clout within the Google hive! Either way, it works as great link bait and JC Penny got all the links they’d need from the biggest sites in the world. Bravo folks!

10) Overstock.com

Overstock was the other contender for biggest brand banned in 2011 and it’s an interesting case to me. I’ve got links for clients on .edu’s offering discounts, but there was one difference in our tactic. We didn’t game anchor text and just got a natural site/brand name link and as a result, never felt any sort of a penalty. We didn’t expect to rank to all high heavens either, it was just another part of the link profile to add some diversity. To this day, those clients have not felt any ill effects from those links. BRB while I go knock on some wood!

The whole issue got blown out by the WSJ Online edition and thanks to them, Overstock got a truckload of awesome links for it. Their company has some of the best in-house SEO’s in the world, so they’re still going strong. However, a lot of the keywords they were targeting in that campaign still elude them to this day. Regardless, they’re still doing great in the SERPs and traffic looks to be rising up this year for them and they’ll no doubt continue to see that rise.

So, if you’ve learned anything from the big guys going down in Google’s books, it is “play by the rules”. If you haven’t been, ask for help and work to fix the problem. If you do need to buy links, and it will always be a part of a diverse link portfolio, do it very sneakily and make sure that you’re not gaming the SERPs. With any sort of luck, you’ll be back ranking for your old keywords in no time. That is, if you have enough clout.

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Seth Godin TED Talk On Tribes

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August 23  |  Brand Building  |   Ryan Clark

This Seth Godin talk he did for one of his TED talks is a real gem and if you somehow missed it, then here it is. I’m a huge fan of his and our slogan kind of hints at that. While most people associate us with building links, we’re trying to change that in a big way. It all starts with an idea, and ultimately how you spread that idea to others. Seth Godin is a man you should listen to intently so check out this video and then all his other talks you can find on Youtube.

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Banned Dutch Hyundai Commercial

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August 21  |  Viral Marketing  |   Ryan Clark

This recent Hyundai commercial for the Dutch market got itself banned. So what happens when your marketing efforts have this effect? Go to the Internet where you’ll be thanked for an amusing/interesting/racy commercial. If your banned commercial is good enough. you’re no doubt going to fee the viral effect. I can see this one being a little too much for the young ones, but overall it’s a well done commercial that highlights the cars most unique feature.

 

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Iltech’s GTR R35 Markets Itself

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August 18  |  Viral Marketing  |   Ryan Clark

As most of our followers will know I’m a huge motorsports fan, and I’m an even bigger Nissan GTR fan so writing about this was a joy! When it comes to attracting links, buzz and followers within your niche you have to do something unique right? Well in the tuner world the competition is fierce, so standing out is harder th an ever these days. The fine folks at Illtech Auto certainly have done a great job of making noise in just the right way…both on the web and with this monstrous beast of a machine.

So what’s a good lesson to learn from all this? Well them building this amazing car lead to them getting this video done which has nearly peaked to 1.6 million views! You couldn’t ask for better brand exposure, especially for this small tuning company. I took a look closer and this video hit a whole lot of forums and blogs, which in return generated a lot of natural delicious links. There’s not much more that I can write about except get inspired by this and know that one video done right can do you a lot of bloody good!

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Link Wheel Links Cause Possible Penalty?

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August 18  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

Can you get penalized for building a link wheel? Well that’s something that’s debated quite a bit these days and I’m on the side of them being a method you should most likely steer clear of. Why do I state that? Well it is clearly a link scheme defined by Google’s linking guidelines because they’re used to inflate your rankings. The other problem is that 99% of the link wheels created out there are being done with spun low quality content, and then blasted with Xrumer, Scrapebox and whatever other spam tool out there. I’m not one to judge at all here, for those doing it clearly know it works well and is making people money.

When it comes to building links the legit way for a business you plan on keeping high in the SERPs, then this isn’t a method you want to dabble with. I’ve written about the Pros & Cons of the Link Wheel before, but we’re certainly a company that won’t ever be offering this service any time soon. While I’ll agree link wheels form naturally in the wild through the magic of social media, the obvious ones will be easily sniped by Google.

I’ve constantly stated that you can find me helping out in Google’s Webmaster Help, and I’m running across more and more link wheel related issues on the boards. As you can see in the video above, SEO firms are offering this service to a more business oriented crowd, and this could potentially lead to disaster. I’d recommend at least offering a warning about these methods to clients before blindly leading them down that path.

So clearly link wheels work well, and I’ve personally seen a few that were done so professionally that I don’t think Google would ever have caught on. The site it was ranking for was within the finance niche and has been ranking top 5 for nearly two years now on nothing but a giant elaborate link wheel. While that’s all good and dandy, I’d still have a hard time sleeping at night, wondering if Google will have caught on and sent my site into it’s -50 black hole.

Now I’ve been in many verbal web arguments over whether link wheels are a spam link building tactic. Looking at Google’s TOS it is an obvious YES YES YES. I don’t care what else you have to say about it, you’re never going to be right in saying otherwise. I’ve said this before, but link schemes are considered a no-no, and by looking at the picture below, do you not see something that could be defined as a scheme?


Live Cases Of People Being Penalized?

So let’s get into the examples where people are talking about real world examples of sites getting in trouble, people talking about whether it’s spam or not and whatever else. The Google Crawling, Indexing and Ranking section of their webmaster help is full of those examples and I highly recommend you read through these to further ease your mind. With that being said, feel free to post up if you’ve had a problem or want to vent why you think they shouldn’t be considered a black hat tactic.

– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5d58a7d8d4202170&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7a00668e8f6aec39&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6de8a41394ea9df2&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4041e919ec2611ad&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=3e8893966e432139&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=75617ba48a9a6518&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=50788bc7fcbb9c8c&hl=en

These are just some of the posts that are popping up lately over there and I’d expect to be seeing more. I know I’m not the only one who’s been seeing different behaviour towards links right around the time of Panda. It makes sense as well because Google is having a really hard time locking down the link spam that takes place. It is still quite evident that links will rank you just fine still, even if you have down right crap content. While it may not last for more than 2 weeks, there are keywords out there that make enough money to make it worth building another site for the next two weeks.

I’m just trying to define some sort of line because a lot of businesses out there are using link services out there and have no idea what they’re getting. You may also have nothing but great results from a proper link wheel, but do you really want to risk waking up one day to a bunch of devalued links?

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Abercrombie & Fitch VS The Situation: PR Bait Genius

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August 17  |  Viral Marketing  |   Ryan Clark

I just love smart marketing/PR stunts, and Abercrombie & Fitch has got the world’s attention today with theirs. In a world where it’s hard to grab the attention, social buzz, links and viral crazyess their marketing team has managed to that so well. You know you’re doing well for your brand when you’re trending on Twitter! Luckily for Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, this could work out well for him as any press is good press.

“We are deeply concerned that Mr. Sorrentino’s association with our brand could cause significant damage to our image. We understand that the show is for entertainment purposes, but believe this association is contrary to the aspirational nature of our brand, and may be distressing to many of our fans. We have therefore offered a substantial payment to Michael ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino and the producers of MTV’s The Jersey Shore to have the character wear an alternate brand. We have also extended this offer to other members of the cast, and are urgently waiting a response.”

This is something to be studied by everyone in the marketing game from student to master because this is how it’s done these days. If you take a quick look on news sites, blogs and the search traffic/chatter you’ll see that they’re coming out big with all sorts of win. The amount of links alone that will be flying at A & F should well be worth it. While I don’t think The Situation will be wearing anymore of their clothing (not a big loss really), this is a good time for some other clothing company to jump out of the dark. So hear me now, if you want The Situation to rock your clothing label, you’d better start beating the doors down now. There’s a seriously good amount of marketing to be gained from this so heed my warning!

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